Captain Thunderbolt – History or Myth?

The history of Australian bushranger Frederick Ward who became known as Captain Thunderbolt is surrounded by folk lore and myth. But in her Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady, writer and historian Carol Baxter has uncovered the truth about the Thunderbolt story – and opened up a battle with the holders of the tale as told by hearsay and myth. Carol Baxter is an adjunct lecturer at the University of New England and a Fellow of the Society of Australian genealogists. At The Sydney Institute, on Tuesday 27 March 2012, Carol Baxter joined fellow researcher and historian David Roberts, a senior lecturer at the University of New England, to discuss the story of Bushranger Captain Thunderbolt and its myths.

CAPTAIN THUNDERBOLT – HISTORY OR MYTH?

CAROL BAXTER

It is with great pleasure indeed that David Roberts and I give our talk tonight as you will understand when you hear its substance. You see, we stand before you with knife wounds in our backs. Admittedly, you wouldn’t be able to see them, but we can feel them. We have been attacked because we had the temerity to stand up and declare that those who had “owned” the Thunderbolt story for the last couple of decades, those who had been propagating a particular set of “facts” about Thunderbolt’s life and death, were wrong.

I had been strongly advised to tow the party line when these people discovered that I was writing my book Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady: the true story of bushrangers Frederick Ward and Mary Ann Bugg. Naturally, I used the actual historical evidence. In the aftermath of its publication, when the evidence – the “message” – could not be destroyed, the target became the messenger.

David was also subjected to these attacks after he became involved. David is not only Senior Lecturer in Australian History at the University of New England (in the heart of Thunderbolt territory), he is also the editor of the Journal of Australian Colonial History. He asked me to write a review of the book Thunderbolt: Scourge of the Ranges (Phoenix Press, 2009) which presents their version of the Thunderbolt story. When he read the review and mentioned that there were many more avenues that could be explored, particularly with regard to the local political resonances, I suggested that we co-write an article. Exposing an Exposé: Fact versus Fiction in the Resurrection of Captain Thunderbolt has just been published in the international Journal of Australian Studies.

But why would the story of a bushranger who died 140 years ago generate such an extraordinary response? And what can this response tell us about human nature and society today? That is the subject of the talk David and I are giving tonight.

Three years ago. I gave a Sydney Institute talk about my previous book Breaking the Bank, the story of Australia’s largest ever bank robbery. I first ventured into Thunderbolt territory when I mentioned to my publisher that there was Hollywood film interest in Breaking the Bank (which is still grumbling along). During the conversation, my publisher asked me about my future plans and suggested that I find a strong female character for my next book. I mentioned “female bushranger” – if there was one – and she liked the idea so I Googled the words. I immediately discovered the woman who would take over my life for the next three years: Mary Ann Bugg – feisty, beautiful, intelligent, educated, and part-Aboriginal. She was also the lover of the most successful bushranger in Australian history, Frederick Wordsworth Ward aka Captain Thunderbolt. It was the perfect story.

As it turned out, I had discovered more than just an old bushranging story. It proved to be living history. There are claims of murder, a police and government cover-up, a conspiracy of silence that has lasted for 140 years. Parliament has become involved and the resulting media reports have been published across the country and as far away as England.

But before covering that part of the story, let me tell you about the bushrangers themselves. The facts regarding their lives are simple and unequivocal.  Fred was born in the Windsor district in 1835, the youngest of eleven children born to convict Michael Ward and his wife Sophia. At an early age, he began working as a drover with his older brothers. He soon proved capable and reliable. At the age of 11, he was employed as the only guard and guide to a trap-driving city clerk, his pregnant wife, one-year-old son and nursemaid, and a schoolboy companion. His job was to escort them from Morpeth to Armidale, a 240 mile journey along the Great North Road, a road that still suffered bushranger incursions. Significantly, Fred revealed a fascination with bushrangers at that young age. He took the schoolboy to Doughboy Hollow and showed him bullet-holes from a recent shoot-out between the police and bushranger Edward “Jewboy” Davis.

So how did this capable lad become a bushranger himself? In 1856 one of Fred’s relations enticed him to join a horse-stealing gang.  They were caught, convicted, and sent to Cockatoo Island for ten years. Fred behaved well and was released on a ticket-of-leave – the colonial version of a parole pass. He went to Mudgee where he met Mary Ann Bugg, a woman more interested in pursuing her passions than abiding by the normal social morés.

Mary Ann was born in 1834, the first of eight children born to a convict overseer employed by the Australian Agricultural Company and an Aboriginal mother. Her parents’ relationship was not the usual exploitative frontier relationship. The couple were devoted to each other. Mary Ann’s mother saved her father’s life by shooting at a band of Aboriginal men who were intent on killing him. Her parents ultimately married – when they could find a clergyman willing to do so – and had eight children. They paid for Mary Ann to be sent to Sydney for schooling and, upon her return five years later, Mary Ann’s mother taught her the ways of the bush. Mary Ann was one of a kind in colonial Australia, a part-Aboriginal woman who had received both a “white” and a “black” education, a chameleon who could survive in both worlds. She was the ideal companion for a man who would later be forced to survive as a bushranger.

Mary Ann soon fell pregnant and Fred took her back to her father’s farm at Dungog. He was late returning to Mudgee for his quarterly muster and his ticket-of-leave was accordingly revoked. He was returned to Cockatoo Island to serve out the remaining six years of his sentence plus an additional three years for riding into town on a stolen horse.

With no possibility of a reward for good behaviour, Fred took his future into his own hands. He escaped from Cockatoo Island and began life as a bushranger under the moniker Captain Thunderbolt. For the following six-and-a-half years he bushranged from the Hunter Valley as far north as southern Queensland and as far west as Bourke, sometimes alone, sometimes with young “apprentices”, sometimes as part of a gang.

In May 1870, after a dramatic chase, he was shot by a young trooper near Uralla. His legend lives on in the town of Uralla, where he is commemorated by a museum and a large statue of a man on a horse. The story of the lives and adventures of this fascinating couple is told in my book Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady.

So what is it about this relatively straight-forward story that would cause people to want to knife David and I in the back?

When I research true stories, I use secondary-source publications – books, articles, websites – as stepping stones back to the original records; that is, birth, marriage and death certificates, court and gaol records, newspapers, official correspondence and so on. To my surprise, I discovered that the secondary-source publications contained conflicting accounts regarding nearly every important event in Fred and Mary Ann’s lives.

I had long known that historical accounts can be riddled with errors. Many writers inaccurately assume that their predecessors have exhaustively researched the subject of interest so repeat their predecessors’ information instead of going back to the original records. Unfortunately, their predecessors’ have often made the same inaccurate assumption. An error made in one early publication can soon spread so widely that it becomes almost impossible to eradicate. An example is found in the nickname attributed to Mary Ann in every publication that mentions her: “Yellow Long” or “Yellilong”. This was actually the nickname of a different woman entirely – the “other woman”, as I discuss in my book. The error was originally made by a Thunderbolt writer in the early 1900s and has been repeated so frequently that there is now little chance of disentwining Mary Ann from “Yellow Long”.

When I examined the original records relating to Thunderbolt and Mary Ann, it was easy enough to distinguish fact from error. When I compared the evidence in these sources with the “facts” published in secondary sources, it soon became clear that one particular Thunderbolt writer, a family historian, was propagating most of the errors. In his writings, pretty much everything about Fred Ward and Mary Ann was wrong: their births and parentage, marriages and deaths, and everything in-between.

I have worked in the genealogy industry for nearly 30 years so I aware that most family historians are untrained amateurs. Some have a flair for analytical research. Others are so poorly skilled that they make a complete botch of their family history research – and for some reason those people always seem determined to publish their output on the internet, in particular on Ancestry.com! But I have never encountered anything so extraordinarily inaccurate as the output of this particular researcher. He couldn’t have done a worse job if he had actually tried. To make matters worse, his errors were spreading like a virus into other publications, including an academic thesis on Mary Ann Bugg.

The culmination came in 2009 with the publication of Thunderbolt: Scourge of the Ranges, a work of historical fiction which documented all of these errors and more besides. The authors claimed that Fred Ward was not the bushranger shot near Uralla in 1870 but another disreputable relative who was pretending to be Thunderbolt. They claimed that the police were so intent upon assassinating the popular bushranger that the ruthless Constable Walker murdered this other man in cold blood. Having jumped the gun by announcing the death of Thunderbolt to the “top brass” in Sydney, the Armidale authorities, with the backing of their superiors in Sydney, engaged in a conspiratorial cover-up. Meanwhile Fred was spotted by the police at the Glen Innes races three days after his “death” but the troopers’ report was buried. Soon afterwards, he escaped to America and eventually died in Canada in the early 1900s.

As these sensational claims were published in a work of fiction, they could be dismissed as fanciful – except that the authors declared in the press that their book was based on historical evidence and that they could prove their claims to be true. They invited readers to make an appointment to examine their research. David did so. What did he find? Nothing. Despite their claims, their files contained no substantiating documentation whatsoever.

Meanwhile, the authors declared that they required Parliament’s assistance to procure the release of the documents that would substantiate their claims, the documents that had been hidden away for 140 years as part of ‘the shabbiest official cover-up in our sad, inauspicious history’. In particular, they wanted the police report about the sighting of Fred Ward at the Glen Innes races.

The authors approached their local politicians and gained the interest and support of The National Party’s Richard Colless, then the Deputy Opposition Whip, and the Nationals Leader, Andrew Stoner. They decided to use Standing Order 53, a permanent rule of procedure enabling the demand for documents from the NSW Governor in relation to the administration of justice. Colless stated in the press that he had grown up with stories that cast doubt on the official version of Thunderbolt’s death, that he felt it to be “a matter of history and correcting the record” and that he would be “surprised if it doesn’t turn up something interesting”. Stoner similarly thought it in the “best interests of our democracy and good governance to break through the wall of silence”. Asked for his comment, the Labour Police Minister, Michael Daley, wryly noted that the Police Integrity Commissioner might find it difficult to question the investigating officers.

The full details of this Parliamentary demand are discussed in Exposing an Exposé. Time constraints allow me to examine only a few points. First, let’s look at the identification of the dead body. The Scourge authors claim that Constable Walker announced that he had shot Thunderbolt and that the news was sent to the authorities in Sydney before the body had been officially identified, hence the need for a cover-up. In fact, the historical record shows that Constable Walker did not attach a name to the dead bushranger until after the magisterial inquiry into the bushranger’s death.

Moreover, no announcement regarding the bushranger’s identity was made until after the body was officially identified. This was easy enough to determine because the initial press reports published in newspapers across the country were listed under the heading Telegram, were almost identical in wording, and noted the date and time the telegram was sent. As for the identification itself, the dead bushranger was determined to be Fred Ward based not only on the testimonies of witnesses who knew him but by comparing the bushranger’s physical features with those listed on Fred Ward’s Reward Notice after his escape from Cockatoo Island. Two policemen and the autopsy doctor testified under oath in a court of law that these features “tallied exactly”: height 5’8¼”, fair complexion, brown curly hair, grey or hazel-grey eyes, a small mole on the back of the right arm a little above the wrist, and two warts on the back of the middle finger of the left hand.

What do the Scourge authors say? They all lied!

What about their claim that Fred was spotted on his horse Combo at the Glen Innes races on 28 May 1870, three days after his alleged death, and that a hidden police report to that effect exists. This document was the one most crucial to proving their conspiracy theory, according to the Scourge authors, “the single document most capable of unravelling the whole plot against Thunderbolt”. While Fred might indeed have been seen at the Glen Innes races and a police report produced at that time, this could not have been on 28 May 1870 as they claim. The Glen Innes races were an annual event held at the end of March not May. It seems likely that the person who claims to have seen the document misread March (or its abbreviation Mar) as May – if such a document even exists. Although alleged to have been found in the materials held by State Records, it has not turned up despite an exhaustive search by staff and other Thunderbolt researchers like myself.

As for their claim that Fred Ward escaped to America as shown by his entry in the 1870 Census: the genealogy juggernaut, Ancestry.com, provides access to these returns. David, I, and other researchers have searched them and they include no entry for Fred Ward or anyone who could have been the erstwhile bushranger. The same goes for the Ontario death register indexes.

Despite the fact that the historical record provides no support for their conspiracy claims and in fact proves unequivocally that the bushranger shot in 1870 was indeed Fred Ward, the Legislative Council agreed to the demand under Standing Order 53 on 18 March 2010. The NSW Governor was ordered to release the documents. However the Lieutenant-Governor, Jim Spigelman, on the advice of the Executive Council, rejected the request on the grounds that the documents pre-date Federation and therefore could have no bearing on the current government of NSW. He also stated that colonial records were freely available at State Records and that it was inappropriate for Members of the Legislative Council to use Parliament’s constitutional powers to undertake this research for them. It was a just rebuke.

What did the Scourge authors say? That the cover-up continues and now reaches as high as the office of the current NSW Governor, the Honourable Marie Bashir.

The Lieutenant-Governor was correct. Most of the documents demanded by the Scourge authors have been on public access at State Records for decades. I had examined them prior to this Parliamentary demand. Other Thunderbolt writers had examined them as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

As it turned out, State Records had already begun gathering the material together and continued to do so on the grounds that Thunderbolt was an important historical figure so it would be worthwhile making this material more readily accessible. What did the Scourge authors say when the material they had demanded was produced and showed that the dead bushranger was Fred Ward? That the documents were forged, amended, written under duress, and so on, and that the cover-up continues.

The Scourge authors have positioned themselves in such a way that they can declare that both the evidence and the lack of evidence proves their claims. If documents showing that the dead bushranger was Fred Ward are produced, then the documents must have been falsified, which is evidence of a cover-up. If documents showing that the dead bushranger was not Fred Ward are not produced, then these have obviously been hidden away as part of the cover-up. Unfortunately the Lieutenant-Governor found himself an unwitting player in their little game. By refusing Parliament’s demand for the release of the documents, he provided them with grounds for declaring that we live in the type of regime that allows the wishes of our elected government to be overridden, the type of regime that would institute and maintain such a cover-up.

To break this absurd cycle, we need to turn the spotlight away from Thunderbolt and focus it on the conspiracy theorists themselves. That’s where David comes in.

The history of Australian bushranger Frederick Ward who became known as Captain Thunderbolt is surrounded by folk lore and myth. But in her Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady, writer and historian Carol Baxter has uncovered the truth about the Thunderbolt story – and opened up a battle with the holders of the tale as told by hearsay and myth. Carol Baxter is an adjunct lecturer at the University of New England and a Fellow of the Society of Australian genealogists. At The Sydney Institute, on Tuesday 27 March 2012, Carol Baxter joined fellow researcher and historian David Roberts, a senior lecturer at the University of New England, to discuss the story of Bushranger Captain Thunderbolt and its myths.