Ben Hall pt 5

As Ben Hall entered 1865, the last year of his life, he was no longer merely the bold robber of the Lachlan roads, but the central figure in a crisis that had forced the colonial government toward extraordinary law. The shooting of Sergeant Parry at Jugiong, followed by the gang’s continued robberies through Goulburn, Binda, Collector, and the southern districts, convinced police and politicians that ordinary warrants were no longer enough. Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn moved through the country as armed fugitives, sheltered by friends, warned by sympathisers, and feared by those who might otherwise have helped the law. In response, the government framed the Felons Apprehension Act, a measure intended to strip such men of the protections normally owed to accused persons and to make harbouring them a punishable offence. For Hall, it marked the closing of every avenue except flight, surrender, or death. By the autumn of 1865, with a price on his head and the machinery of outlawry gathering around him, he had become a man hunted not only by police patrols, but by the full force of the colonial state. 

The above dramatic painting of Ben Hall's death provides a graphic illustration of the last moments of Hall's life. Inspector Davidson and troopers portrayed in police uniform are inaccurate. The police wore civilian attire and removed both coats and boots to move more freely on a frigid May morning. Moreover, there is some evidence to support the hypothesis that Hall was shot dead in his bush bed and not as depicted above. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!

 

 Ben Hall

The Road to Infamy

After Parry’s death at Jugiong, Ben Hall, Johnny Gilbert, and John Dunn entered the last and most reckless phase of their bushranging lives. The killing had raised the stakes beyond ordinary robbery. They were now men marked by murder, yet they continued to ride through the southern districts with a confidence that humiliated police and frightened whole communities into submission. The mails, stations, inns, and roads remained vulnerable. Travellers were bailed up, coaches stopped, public-houses entered, and those who resisted risked bullets or ruin.

By Boxing Day 1864, the gang had carried this armed theatre to Binda. That evening they rode to Edward Morriss’s Flagstaff Store. Morriss was a dangerous man to leave free: a former policeman, active, known locally, and precisely the sort who might organise a capture if given the chance. At the store were Ellen Monks and Christina McKinnon, apparently buying crinolines from Mrs Morriss. Then came a knock at the door. Morriss opened it and found Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn before him, revolvers drawn. He was ordered to bail up.

Hall was at ease. He greeted Miss McKinnon and Miss Monks by name, acknowledged himself to be Ben Hall, and searched the premises for money. The gang then compelled Morriss and his wife to accompany them to the Flag Hotel, where John Hall, the publican, was holding a Boxing Day ball. Mrs Morriss was made to change her dress before leaving. The party then called at Hadfield’s nearby house and brought him too, so that by the time the bushrangers entered the hotel they had not only prisoners but an audience.

Inside the Flag Hotel the Christmas gathering became a hostage ball. The doors were locked, the keys taken, and the company bailed up. Yet the bushrangers did not stop the dance. They ordered the fiddler to continue, drank with the company, treated those present, and joined in the amusement. Hall was seen with Christina McKinnon in a romantic embrace; Gilbert was frolicing with Ellen Monks. Around them the people of Binda danced under compulsion, outwardly continuing the holiday while armed men controlled every door.

Morriss, however, was not content to submit. Seeing the bushrangers drinking, he quietly proposed a rush, agreeing to take Hall himself. The plan failed before it began. Whether betrayed or merely suspected, it was detected. Hall and Gilbert turned on him, and Morriss escaped through a window while shots were fired after him. He ran for the bushrangers’ horses, failed to secure them, and hid in the scrub between the hotel and his store.

Hall’s mood turned from revelry to vengeance. The bushrangers declared that Morriss’s store would burn. Mrs Morriss begged them to spare it, but the plea failed. From his hiding place Morriss saw the gang and the women moving back toward the store. He later swore that Hall said he would make the place pay for it, and that Christina McKinnon and Ellen Monks encouraged him, while Margaret Monks asked that Mrs Morriss’s clothes be saved. Soon candles showed inside the store, boxes were broken open, and the smell of kerosene drifted through the night. Then the building caught. Morriss watched his property burn from the scrub.

The Binda affair was therefore more than a robbery. It was domination, spectacle, and revenge. Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn had taken a village Christmas function hostage, danced with the captives, flaunted their relationships with local women, and destroyed the property of the one man who tried to resist them. In the months that followed, the law would answer with increasing severity. The Felons Apprehension Act would be framed to put such men outside ordinary legal protection. Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn had made themselves symbols of colonial disorder; by 1865, the government meant to make examples of them.

Authors Note: Ellen Monks and Christina McKinnon were said to have encouraged the fire, with words to the effect of “It serves him right” and “Do it, Ben.” Margaret Monks, by contrast, was not shown to have supported the burning. Indeed, the evidence attributed to her was of a different character: concern that Mrs Morriss’s clothing should be saved.This difference is important because later tradition has tended to flatten the women of Binda into a single romantic legend. Ellen Monks and Christina McKinnon were linked in witness testimony with Gilbert and Hall. Margaret Monks was present, but the surviving evidence does not place her in a comparable intimacy with John Dunn. The notion that Margaret was Dunn’s sweetheart, or that their supposed attachment produced a child, belongs to the realm of bushranging folklore rather than demonstrated fact.

The records of Margaret Monks’s later life point in another direction. Research into her family history indicates that she was in a long-term relationship with Coleman, not Dunn, and that the child John, registered at Trunkey Creek in March 1866, was not evidence of a secret union with the young outlaw. The timing alone makes the Dunn theory highly improbable. For Dunn to have fathered that child, contact would have needed to occur around May or early June 1865. By then Dunn was wounded, hunted, and in flight after Gilbert’s death near Binalong. He was moving through country under extreme pressure, seeking shelter where he could, and avoiding detection under the shadow of outlawry. Margaret Monks, meanwhile, was not shown to have been part of his flight, nor is there credible evidence that she joined or assisted him during that desperate period.

The romantic Dunn-Margaret story therefore appears to be a later invention, encouraged perhaps by the dramatic setting of Binda, the presence of the Monks sisters, and the tendency of bushranger legend to supply love affairs where the documents supply only suspicion, proximity, and gossip. Margaret’s later life further weakens the claim. She had a family with Coleman, bore further children, and eventually married him. Her life after Binda was not the hidden aftermath of a bushranger romance, but the more ordinary, traceable course of a woman whose name had been briefly caught in a notorious colonial scandal.

The women at Binda should therefore be treated separately. Christina McKinnon and Ellen Monks were remembered because witnesses placed them in flirtatious association with Hall and Gilbert and because they were later charged over the burning of Morriss’s store. Margaret Monks was present, arrested, and suspected, but then discharged. To attach her romantically to John Dunn is to impose a legend upon a record that does not support it. Binda was scandal enough without inventing a further romance. The evidence shows a hostage dance, two women openly familiar with Hall and Gilbert, a store burned in revenge, and a third woman whose later life points away from Dunn entirely. 

The new year opened with no slackening in the career of Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn. If the burning of Morriss’s store at Binda had shown their capacity for spectacle and revenge, the first weeks of 1865 showed something equally dangerous: range. They were no longer confined to the old Lachlan ground, nor even to the familiar refuge country about Wheogo and the Weddin Mountains. They now rode across the southern districts with a speed and assurance that made every inn, store, station, mail coach, and racehorse vulnerable.

Their foray began near Tuena, where they visited W. Ford’s inn and took about £10 in cash. Three Chinese men were also robbed of a further £15 or £20. It was a small affair beside Binda, but it marked the continuation of the same pattern: sudden arrival, armed command, rapid plunder, and disappearance before pursuit could form.

From there they moved to the Lost River, near Wheeo, where James Christie, a farmer and small storekeeper, became their next victim. Christie’s store was stripped not merely of money but of goods. The bushrangers took a miscellaneous assortment and loaded the property onto a pack-horse, leaving Christie with a loss estimated at about £40. The incident shows the practical nature of much of their bushranging. Money was welcome, but supplies were just as valuable. A gang living by movement needed food, clothing, equipment, ammunition, and pack animals; country stores became unwilling depots for men who had placed themselves beyond ordinary trade.

By Saturday they were at John Warne’s place at Crookwell. There the object was horseflesh. They took three horses, including the racehorse Young Waverley, well known on the Goulburn course. Two of Warne’s horses, including Young Waverley, were recovered the same day, but the reason for their release soon became clear. Leaving Warne’s, the gang appear to have pushed on toward Willoughby’s, about ten miles distant, where they secured two better prizes: the racehorses Jerrawong and Peacock, recently run at Marulan and being kept for the Goulburn anniversary races. The taking of these animals was not incidental theft. Good horses were the life of bushranging. They meant flight, endurance, prestige, and survival. Hall’s gang understood blood stock as well as any racing man in the district, and their seizure of horses intended for the anniversary races was both practical and insolent.

The next day brought a sharper encounter. On the Breadalbane Plains, between Lodge’s and Hilton’s public-houses, the Yass to Goulburn mail was travelling with several passengers: Mr Castles, a schoolmaster from near Sydney; an unnamed youth; two policemen, Cade and McCarthy; and a lunatic in their custody. Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn rode out from the bush and fired upon the coach from a distance of perhaps one hundred to one hundred and fifty yards, spread apart from one another across the ground. One ball passed close to the driver and Castles, while another was said to have struck the coach curtain, though the report doubted whether the hole had truly been made in that way.

The two policemen did not submit. Cade and McCarthy ordered the coachman to pull up, dismounted, took aim with their carbines, and returned fire. Cade believed he may have struck either Gilbert or Gilbert’s horse, though any injury was slight. Gilbert fired again, this time with a rifle. After some apparent signalling among themselves, the bushrangers wheeled away, returned briefly to a similar distance, then finally rode off. The coach resumed its journey, the police walking beside it until the horses were changed and the party reached more open ground. Despite the interruption, the mail reached Goulburn at its usual hour.

The encounter was important because it showed the altered atmosphere after Parry’s death. The gang were willing to fire on a coach carrying police, and the police were willing to answer. This was no longer simple highway robbery conducted under the old ritual of “bail up” and search. It was armed contest on the public road. The report praised Cade and McCarthy for their conduct and observed that, had they been armed with the newer revolving rifles rather than ordinary carbines, they might have shot the bushrangers outright. Such remarks show how closely the public now connected police equipment, government failure, and the gang’s continued survival.

That same day Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn called at Bean’s inn, three miles from Gunning. They ransacked the place, though the report did not yet know what had been carried away. A traveller named Richard Fenton was robbed of £2, and his horse and saddle were taken possession of; only after earnest pleading was he allowed to keep them. Dunn’s own horse was said to be knocked up, which explains the pressure for fresh mounts. Even at this stage, amid bravado and gunfire, the gang remained subject to the hard mechanics of distance, fatigue, and horse management.

Thus the opening of 1865 found Hall, Gilbert, and Dunn ranging through the Goulburn side of the country with renewed boldness. They robbed inns, plundered a rural store, seized racehorses, fired upon the Yass mail, tested police escorts, and took or spared horses according to necessity. Their crimes were becoming more frequent, more mobile, and more openly defiant. The government and police could see the pattern plainly enough: these were not isolated robberies, but a campaign of mounted predation across southern New South Wales. The answer, when it came, would be extraordinary law. Before autumn was over, the colony would move toward outlawry.