Black Snake Read Free Page A

doing hard labour. He worked in government quarries cutting blocks of bluestone with a hammer and chisel. Then he joined work gangs and helped build sea walls around Port Phillip Bay. Six months were taken off Ned’s sentence for good behaviour. He was 19 when he was released.
    Home Free
    He arrived home in February 1874 to find his world had changed. One of his sisters was dead; another was married. His brother Jim was serving a five-year jail sentence for cattle stealing. His mother was about to remarry, and he had a new baby half-sister.
    Fresh from two-and-a-half years in prison, Ned was determined never to go back there again. He got a job in a timber mill. He wanted to get his revenge on Wild Wright who had been the cause of his imprisonment, but he didn’t want to get into trouble again. A public brawl could have easily ended up with him being arrested, so instead Ned agreed to fight Wild in an organised boxing match. Wild was an experienced fighter, but the years of hard work in prison and months of tree felling since his release meant that Ned was a strong young man. He had the satisfaction of beating Wild Wright.
    He spent the next three years working hard, earning an honest living. He had jobs driving bullock teams, breaking horses and shearing, but most of the work he did was felling trees for a sawmill. He was a trusted worker and became an overseer, yet the period of honest toil didn’t last. Ned later claimed that he had been driven to crime by what we would today call police persecution and harassment. He said that whenever a horse or a cow went missing in the district, the police would accuse him or another member of his family.
    Wholesale and Retail
    By the beginning of 1877, Ned had given up tree felling and bullock driving. He had passed up the chance of continuing to work for his sawmill bosses. Instead, he had taken up what he called “wholesale and retail horse and cattle dealing”. This was Ned’s idea of a joke. He really meant horse and cattle theft.
    He was joined in this venture by his brother Dan; his step-father, George King; some of his cousins and two friends called Aaron Sherritt and Joe Byrne.
    This gang of thieves was no ragtag band. The operation was well organised. The gang found an old hut, deep in the Wombat Ranges. They fixed up the hut and cleared many acres around it. They built fences. They took the stolen stock up to this remote spot where they could corral them away from the prying eyes of settlers, squatters and policemen.
    Tricks of the Trade
    “I was blamed for stealing this bull from James Whitty… I was blamed for stealing a mob of calves from Whitty and Farrell which I knew nothing about. I began to think they wanted me to give them something to talk about. Therefore I started wholesale and retail horse and cattle dealing.”
    Ned’s reason for turning to horse theft, Jerilderie Letter
    Stealing the stock was easy enough. The tricky thing was to sell the animals again without the buyer realising they were stolen. One way to do this was to change the brand. Every stock owner had his own brand—a symbol, such as initials, that was burnt into the hide of the animal. This way, if an animal got lost or stolen, the owner could prove it was his. The gang devised ways of changing brands, for instance by turning an H into an HP joined together. As a fresh brand would have looked suspicious, they found ways of making new brands look old. One technique they used was to pull out the animal’s hairs with tweezers in the shape of the new brand, then prick the bare skin with a needle that had been dipped in iodine. This made the skin burn and the mark it left looked like an old brand.
    The gang stole stock in Victoria and then took the animals over the Murray River, swimming them across at deserted places instead of using busy bridges. They then sold the animals openly in saleyards in New South Wales, far from their owners and reports of their theft.
    Sometimes one of the gang