The Story of the Australian Bush-Rangers - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXIX. The Kelly Gang; Horse-stealing, a Great Industry of the District; Faking the Brands; Assault on Constable Fitrpatrick; The Bush Telegraphs; Murder of Sergeant Kennedy and Constables Scanlan and Lonergan; Sticking up of the Faithfull Cseek Staticr' Robbery of the National Bank at Euroa; A Big Haul. In the early years of Australian settlement bushranging was one of the normal conditions in the colonies, and therefore attracted little notice. Even the exploits of such heroes of the roads as Mike Howe, Brady, the Jewboy, and Jackey Jackey are very briefly related in. the Press, and, with the exception of the first-named, about whom Mr. James Bonwick has written a romance, very little has been heard of them since the age in which they lived. In the next epoch the doings of the bushrangers were dwarfed in the public estimation by the sensational reports of the gold finds, and although in consequence of the growth of population and the great increase in the number of newspapers their actions received a wider publicity than those of their predecessors the accounts of them are still meagre. The sensational inauguration of the next era by the Gardiner gang--the sticking up and robbing of the Government Gold Escort--attracted wider notice to the bushrangers of that epoch, and some notice of them appears even in the English Press. But the notoriety of even the most celebrated of the bushrangers of that epoch was nothing as compared with that of the Kelly gang, about whom more columns of newspaper matter have been printed than of all the bushrangers together in the earlier epochs. Several histories of the Kelly gang have also been published, the best known, perhaps, being those of Mr. Superintendent Hare, who was for a time in charge of the police who we...