WHY did legends build around bushrangers in the colonial times?
Many were violent in their approach to their victims or to coin a phrase of the time, “rough in both appearance and manner”.
Was it the ‘us and them’ syndrome. The ‘us’ being the struggling settlers who were often faced with having barely enough food to put on the table to feed their children; the ‘them’ being the squatters and military hierarchy or governing officers sent out from England who appeared to want for nothing?
The deeds of our bushranger, our Wild Scotsman who may have at one time ‘sheltered at Walloon’, garnered romance not just because of his deeds against the ‘them’ and his sometime gifts to the poor but due to his striking appearance, his cultured voice and his ofttimes rather whimsical speeches while he robbed his victims.
James Alpin MacPherson was well dressed, well-educated and by all reports, tall and handsome.
His physique had been toned by helping his father on the big station run beside the Brisbane River when he was home from school, from his work as a builder and stonemason’s apprentice when he finished his schooling and most particularly as a stockman on the big western station runs before he took up bushranging as a career.
His career as a bushranger may have shaped some “glorious legends” but it was not of long standing.
To pick up our story from last week, the Brisbane Telegraph’s special correspondent described MacPherson’s return to Queensland in 1865 in a story published in 1952.
“It appears that after the sticking-up of Canowindra township in New South Wales, and the attempted hold-up of the bank at Carcoar, the Wild Scotsman, who was using an alias, rode north on a stolen racehorse and crossed the border into Queensland.”
The special correspondent also noted the popularity of the dashing bushranger.
“Among the shepherds, hutkeepers, station hands and draymen, of whom a sizable percentage were convicts, he had many sympathisers; and was a source of pride in the frontier district of Nanango.
“Typical of his acts was when he called at an outstation of Tarong, the district’s pioneer pastoral holding, and found the shepherd’s hut occupied only by the shepherd’s wife and a trio of emaciated looking children.”
To paraphrase the paragraphs that followed: “Instead of robbing them, he tried to give the shepherd’s wife a bag of silver but the terrified woman refused as she guessed it was the proceeds of a hold-up.”
The Wild Scotsman was already known in Queensland from the time he held up his former boss.
While the book written by Simon Miller in 1895, states the hold-up happened near Bowen it was probably the only landmark settlement in that area at the time – but today we would describe MacPherson’s boss as having a pub on the Haughton River, north of Ayr.
In 1909, a Mr O’Shaughnessy from Fortitude Valley wrote to the Brisbane Daily Mail to recount the subsequent events.
“I knew MacPherson in Brisbane before he became a highwayman,” Mr O’Shaughnessy wrote.
“He was a quiet sort of fellow, and did not appear to me as though he would do harm to anybody. It certainly surprised me to hear that he was on the ‘road’.
“The last time I met him was when he was being brought from Maryborough to Brisbane after being tried and sentenced to imprisonment for bushranging.
“He told me that he had been first arrested for interfering with a shanty-keeper on the Haughton River, but made good his escape from custody at Mackay while enroute from Bowen in the boat Diamantina, which used to run between Bowen and Rockhampton.
“By some means or other he contrived to get the constable in charge of him drunk, with the assistance of the crew of the boat, and then filed his leg-irons off.
“Before leaving the boat he took the constable’s sash and overcoat from him and hung the leg-irons on a mangrove tree near the boat, and also stuck the file in the tree. “Shortly after getting ashore he stole a horse and making a bridle out of the constable’s sash and using the overcoat as a saddle, he set out on the main road to Peak Downs.
“When he got to the Rocky Waterholes outside of Mackay he fell in with the owners of the horse he was riding – Messrs William and Silva Fraser, the only survivors of the Fraser family massacred by the [aboriginals] on the Dawson River.
“They were travelling with teams to Mackay. One of them said to MacPherson: “That is my horse you’ve got.” He replied: “I didn’t know whose it was. I got away from the police and I took the first horse I saw.”
“They said he could not have the horse, but if he wanted money he could have £5, which he refused.
“He handed over the horse, and went off on foot until he arrived at Port Mackay Range, where he met a gang of navvies who were making a road.”
Again to paraphrase the rest of O’Shaughnessy’s reminiscences of the time he met the Wild Scotsman: The navvies fed him and engineered his escape from the police who were following him and MacPherson walked on – he met men fencing at Nebo Creek and told them he had escaped from the police – they too fed him and while he was at their camp, took a gun and some ammunition.
Eventually, he arrived at an outstation of the Bottle Creek run north of Bundaberg, where he made off with the horse and pack horse belonging to the overseer.
When the overseer called out, Macpherson shouted back at him: “If anybody asks about them, tell them the Wild Scotchman took them.”
That was the first time he was heard of as the “Wild Scotchman.”
Continued Next Week
