Great Australian Scams, Cons and Rorts by Jim Haynes

Author:Jim Haynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

Of all the rorts and acts of bush skulduggery in our colonial past, the sheer audacity of Harry Readford’s theft of 1000 head of cattle probably takes the prize for daring and originality, not to mention skill and bushmanship! He and two companions (maybe four; we don’t really know) took the cattle from North Queensland 1500 kilometres down the Channel Country and through outback desert where no stock had ever been before, and delivered them into the colony of South Australia—where Harry knew their brands would be unknown.

It was a feat comparable to the greatest overland cattle treks in our history and the skill and audacity it demonstrated led to one of the most obvious and infamous miscarriages of justice in Queensland history. (And there have been plenty of those!)

The greatest rort involved in the whole episode was not the reckless cattle stealing and remarkable journey. It was the mind-boggling effrontery with which jury foreman James Nimmo gave a straight-faced ‘not guilty’ decision which meant that an obviously guilty-as-sin Harry Readford walked free from the Roma Courthouse.

Henry Arthur ‘Harry’ Readford was born in December 1841 near Mudgee, the youngest of the eleven surviving children of an Irish convict and his Australian-born wife. He was a strong massively built bushman, 1.9 metres tall. Harry worked at various jobs in the bush and on the Hawkesbury River, and by the late 1860s he had headed north and was living on a small cattle property in central north Queensland, where he was involved in a carrier business with three other men, carting goods from the railhead at Tambo to the large cattle property Bowen Downs.

It seems the venture was a success for Readford and his friends, William Forrester, William Rooke (or Brooke) and George Dowdney. Harry also supplemented his income by working as a stockman for Forrester, who owned a station called Balaclave between Readford’s property and Bowen Downs, and by stealing cattle in partnership with local property owner John McKenzie and a man named James McPherson, who worked for McKenzie.

Apparently, the epic cattle heist and cattle drive through the Channel Country to another colony was dreamed up by Readford after talking to Dowdney and Rooke, who had travelled through that part of the country from South Australia previously. Harry and the others had been stealing cattle successfully for a while and had almost been caught a few times. So Harry suggested a big ‘one-off’ job that would make them rich.

Cattle duffing had increased dramatically in the 1860s in Queensland due to higher cattle prices and the issuing of grazing licences over huge areas of good grazing land to large companies whose principals lived in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne or the UK.

Many locals, especially those struggling to make a living with smaller holdings, felt aggrieved by the government policy of allowing absentee ownership of land. They also resented the wasteful grazing practices and the poor way that overseers ran these huge properties. They thought locals and ‘Australians’ should own and profit from the natural resources of the country.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.