WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN STORY
THE BUSHRANGER'S PRIEST
By Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C.
This article looks back to a little known part of our Australian history: Fr Tim McCarthy's work to rehabilitate bushrangers and to restore them to society.
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Tim McCarthy began and ended his brief fifty years of life in County Cork. In the meanwhile, he was to carry out a most curious ministry as a priest-intermediary between Police and bushrangers on the other side of the world.
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Born in 1829, Tim was first attracted to the law profession, then, seeing the error of his ways, entered Carlow College and was ordained priest in 1852. He was intended to go out to India, but instead was recruited for the Australian mission and arrived in Sydney in February 1853.
Father Tim's first charge Armidale, but an somewhat different of today. His parish was an area that nowadays comprises two whole dioceses, Armidale and Lismore; it extended north to the Queensland border and eastward to the sea. As a zealous twenty-four year old and a good horseman, Father Tim made a good impression, and the New England region was sad to see him go when, in 1862, he was transferred to Carcoar, near Bathurst.
Why Carcoar? The chances are that the transfer was for once not a matter of dull ecclesiastical administration, but rather of dealings in high political places. Let us not forget the central role played by Father Smyth in the Eureka Stockade incident eight years earlier; let us not forget that Bishop Goold had travelled up to Ballarat in his own coach on the eve of that insurrection. The colonial authorities were by no means unaware that insurgents, whether rebels or bushrangers, often included in their number a goodly proportion who were Irish and/or Catholic, and the good graces of the priest were often sought in restoring law and order.
When Father Tim was transferred to Carcoar, there was raging the problem of the Bushrangers of the Weddin Mountains, a range of scrubby hills bordering Young, Grenfell, Cowra and Carcoar; the bushrangers ventured as far afield even as Bathurst, Goulburn, Gundagai and Junee.
The pioneer of the Weddin Mountain men had been Frank 'Darkie' Gardiner, a vicious bushranger who had set out to make his fortune by supplying meat to the gold diggings at Lambing Flat, near Young, then had become less particular whose cattle he butchered for a profit. From this point, the road downward had been uninterrupted. By 1863, Gardiner was gone from the area, but there remained behind many, mostly very young, whom he had enticed to a life of easy crime. They included Johnny Dunn, Johnny Gilbert, Johnny Vane, O'Meally, Burke and others. Saddest of all was their most notorious member, Ben Hall, driven to bushranging through injustice.
"His method was to go out and meet the bushrangers, show them he was no mere decoy or informer and try to bring them to some sense of reconciliation with Society. His first coup was to induce the bushranger Foley to disclose where he had hidden the £2,7OO he had stolen from the Mudgee Mail Coach."
Many of the bushrangers, many of their settler-victims and many of the police were of Irish extraction. It was but natural that an Irish priest be recruited who might conciliate the bushrangers or even bring them in. Such a recruit was Father Tim.
Tim was only too willing to comply. His method was to get out and meet the bushrangers, show them he was no mere decoy or informer, and try to bring them to some sense of reconciliation with society. His first coup was to induce the bushranger Foley to disclose where he had hidden the £2,7OO he had stolen from the Mudgee mail coach; Foley handed it over to Father Tim, who duly gave it back to the Joint Stock Bank.
Soon afterwards, Father Tim scored again. By the middle of 1863, Johnny Vane had been a bushranger for all of three months, but already there was a reward of £1,000 on his head. He had killed nobody, but he had robbed in company with Hall, Gilbert and O'Meally. He was all of twenty years of age ...
Father Tim made a special effort to contact Vane. Eventually, aided by the young outlaw's mother, he contacted the bushranger. Vane surrendered, and the two rode back to Bathurst through the night. The whole matter was handled discreetly. Stolen goods were quietly returned to their owners; Vane was tried in Bathurst and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment - a far cry from the usual death penalty. In the event, he served six years and was then released. There was a public outcry at the curtailed sentence; did Father Tim know anything about it? After his release, Vane worked as a stonemason on St. Mary's Cathedral; he died in Cowra in 1906.
Father Tim's greatest gamble was unfortunately a might-have-been affair. He negotiated, as he thought, a meeting between Archbishop Polding and Ben Hall in the middle of December 1863, and it just might have come off. Polding, now approaching seventy, spent some days in the Weddin Mountains, but to no avail. Forewarned of the archbishop's arrival, the local police had taken the usual ham-handed, ham-footed action and frightened the bushranging clientele clean away.
In February 1864, Tim was transferred to Sydney, then soon afterwards back to Bathurst. Tim's version of the transfer was published in the Sydney Morning Herald of 22 May 1864:
'When, some months ago, I left Sydney to induce Hall to abandon his iniquitous pursuits, my intentions were not unknown to the government. The mission of mine was not altogether fruitless. Hall promised me to deliver himself up within a month'.
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Meanwhile, at Carcoar Father Denis McGuinn, Tim's successor, had in like fashion brought in the bushrangers Jimmy Dunleave and Jimmy Burke, only to face a torrent of abuse from the magisterial bench that priests had no business meddling in the law. At the height of the furore (and with it the question of the role of the confessional) the news was dramatically telegraphed from Forbes that Ben Hall had been shot. Hall had used the intervening year to try and arrange the transfer of some honestly acquired property to his young son. Father Tim summed up the situation:
'Whatever may be said of the justness of the retribution which terminated his career, it cannot be alleged by those who knew anything of him that he had not a disposition to make himself right with society'.
A week later, Johnny Gilbert was betrayed and shot at Binalong. Johnny Dunn escaped and was later captured. He was hanged on 19 March 1866, and Father Tim attended his last moments. The days of the Weddin Mountain boys were over.
Over the next twelve years, Father Tim carried on an uneventful ministry in Sydney, partly at St. Benedict's, partly at St. Mary's, where he was appointed administrator. By 1878 however, it was clear that he was no longer his old self, and that the breakdown was as much in the mental as in the physical sphere. He retired to 'Hawthorne' in Glebe Point Road. His last wish was to return home. He himself was penniless, but a colony-wide appeal more than brought in the price of a sea-fare back to Ireland. Two steamers escorted his mail-boat down Sydney Harbour.
In Ireland, he picked up wonderfully, and letters he sent to Sydney in 1879 showed that he had greatly recovered his former zeal and joie-de-vivre. He planned to return to Australia with the new bishop of Armidale, but at the last minute, his plans were curtailed. His ailment was diagnosed as a liver disease, and within a week it had carried him off.
The requiem was held in St. Finbarr's, on the far side of the river in south Cork. It was in this very church, some ninety years before, there had been baptized a tiny baby named John Joseph Therry, who was to become the pioneer priest of Australia.
From "ANNALS AUSTRALASIA" August 1985. For more articles, go to the top line and click Media and Publications, then Magazines and click Annals and the website with articles.
