TEN
Ten
Damian slowed near a two-storey, red brick and lime mortar building and pulled into a side street before reversing his bike into a park. The historical society had restored the old flour mill and turned it into a museum which showcased not only the art and culture of the area but also the local history of the gold rush era. A whole floor was dedicated to Gentleman Jack McNally.
He’d been itching to see inside ever since arriving, keen to immerse himself further in the history. He wasn’t expecting to discover anything mind-blowing about McNally—after all, he’d been researching the bushranger and the era for years—but he was a lover of museums. He had an appointment with the library the next day to go through microfiche and look through their impressive local archives, which he hoped might throw up something unexpected to give him a new line of enquiry to follow in the Lady Catherine Compton cold case. But today, he was more of a tourist, here to enjoy a display of the small town’s most infamous son, Gentleman Jack.
The invitation to be a keynote speaker and open the festival had been unexpected, to say the least. He knew he wasn’t the first choice, which only mildly stung. The committee had originally approached celebrity historian Mike Gearsley, who Damian had known for years. They had both been lecturers and often went to the same conferences, as well as sharing shelf space in bookshops with their various publications, though that was where the similarities ended. Mike had become somewhat famous in the last few years, getting his own TV series and developing a massive social media platform. He was a nice enough bloke, genuinely suited to presenting and being in the public eye with his eccentric, over-the-top enthusiasm—kind of like the Steve Irwin of history. He’d had to turn the offer down because of a schedule clash, but he’d asked his agent to contact Damian and see if he’d be interested.
While Damian wasn’t at all keen to take his career in front of the camera, the opportunity to visit the place he was currently writing a book about had been too tempting to turn down.
A bell rang as Damian pushed open the heavy, timber front door of the museum. The shuffle of feet from a room behind a front counter sounded moments before an older woman came into view, wiping crumbs from the corner of her mouth. ‘Oh, hello. You caught me finishing my morning tea.’ As she continued dusting herself off, he noticed she wore a badge with Marge scrawled across it.
‘Sorry about that,’ Damian said.
The woman waved a hand dismissively. ‘I’ve got all day to fill in here. Between you and me, this is my second morning tea of the day.’ She winked at him with a conspiratorial chuckle. ‘What are they going to do? Fire me?’
Damian grinned back. Volunteers were worth their weight in gold, and he suspected Marge knew it. After he paid his admittance fee, and Marge finished telling him what the museum had on offer, he set off around the first floor to view the paintings, hung on the wall in chronological sequence, depicting the lead-up to the last shootout between Jack, his brothers and the police, where the gang was killed near an isolated dry creek bed aptly named Little Water Creek.
Damian had already planned to visit the location, which was marked as a heritage site, even though he understood that it was only a paddock with an eroded, dry creek bed.
He wandered through to a room of artefacts that had been found underneath the current building when they’d been restoring it—old leather shoes, buttons and coins that had fallen down between floorboards. To many others, it was stuff that might seem rather mundane, but to Damian, it was fascinating. Little pieces of the past that had quite literally slipped through the cracks of time.
He took his time exploring, soaking up the smells and sounds of the old building. Over one hundred and sixty years of industry was soaked into the floorboards and walls. The sound of his boots echoed on the dark timber floorboards as he walked through to the main exhibition.
Many poems and stories had been written about Jack McNally over the years. The museum had a number of the more popular ones on the walls, along with first edition books and newspapers in glass cabinets. Jack himself was known to have written a few—historians had managed to uncover some he’d published in newspapers under fictitious names, but they were rare.
In the centre of the room was the highlight of the collection: a glass-topped coffin-like exhibit with a lifelike replica of the body of Jack McNally as he’d appeared when he was put on show after his capture and death at the age of twenty-five. It was rather melodramatic, and more than a little bit eerie, especially in this dark, cold room. Damian felt goosebumps break out along his arms. Even though it was just a dummy made up to look like Jack, there was something unsettling about the fact the man had died not far from this very spot, in the early hours of the morning after the shootout, in the rooms of the local doctor.
Next to the glass-topped cabinet was a rickety old timber table with large stains still visible along its centre. This had been used in the courthouse to hold Jack’s dead body while on display to the public.
There was an excerpt from a book on a sign:
Macabre as it sounds, Jack McNally was the equivalent of a celebrity, and the public had a fascination with anything and everything bushranger related. It was also something the authorities wanted to publicise—the death of a wanted criminal. The man who for so many years had eluded and often humiliated them had finally been brought to justice.
Damian looked down at the glass cabinet and tried to imagine what it would have been like for the townspeople on that day, back then. To the wealthy, Jack was undoubtedly a threat, often stealing livestock and holding up travellers. For the everyday person, though—especially the many expatriates of Ireland and Scotland for whom the wounds the English had inflicted were still raw—men like McNally and his gang were heroes. The fact the authorities had put his body on display and were touting their victory far and wide would likely have been met with extreme distress and sorrow. He’d been one of theirs—the underdog fighting the system and refusing to allow the old feudal ways their ancestors had been forced to live under to continue here. To Damian, Jack was just a man, barely older than a boy and forced to grow up outside the rules of polite society. From small child to adulthood, his life had been a fight to survive. He wasn’t simply a man who robbed people and killed police, he was the product of a different time—a harder, crueller time, impossible to understand through today’s social lens. If he was a monster, then the world he lived in had turned him into one.
Damian moved through to the next area, dedicated to the town’s gold-mining past which had once played an integral role in opening up this part of the country and bringing settlers further west. There was an impressive display of artefacts from the many Chinese immigrants who followed the gold trail.
Along the wall were a number of black-and-white photographs depicting the Compton gold mine when it was in its most productive era. A group of men stood in front of a crude-looking cave-like hole amid large rocks and rubble, the sleeves of their shirts rolled up, dirt-caked faces serious.
A portrait of Alexander Compton hung nearby. Damian had seen the photograph before, with everything in it screaming of wealth and privilege, from the way he dressed to the shape of his perfectly straight nose, despite the fact he was building his empire in the rough bushland of New South Wales. He stared at the camera with an aloof expression. Some might even say arrogant, but Damian saw a steel-like quality in his eye—a determination. From his research, Damian knew he’d been a shrewd businessman, relentless in chasing his dream to establish his fortune in a new country. He knew of his desire to prove himself to his father and family, having been destined to a life of second-best by fault of birth. He thought about the man’s diaries, which gave a far more interesting depth to the stony-faced man in the portrait, and on the words he himself had already drafted about the man’s life:
Unlike other men of his privileged station in life, Alexander Compton had no qualms about getting his hands dirty, quite literally heading into the mine alongside his men to assess and inspect. He wrote about his daily life and the people he had contact with. He seemed to have a great respect for his advisers—the men he’d employed to oversee the mining—who had the experience he’d lacked in the beginning. Some of these men he’d met in the gold fields, where he’d gone to try his luck and make enough money to start his own business. He also wrote about the other driving force behind his desire to make something of himself: Lady Catherine Shoebridge, his childhood sweetheart. The two had grown up together in neighbouring families, but from a very young age it had been decided that Catherine, the only child of Lord Winston Shoebridge, would one day marry Alexander’s older brother, Henry, to unite the two families. Alexander had asked her father for Catherine’s hand in marriage only to be rejected. He was the second son and would not inherit any titles or land and therefore not what Shoebridge wanted for his only daughter. Heartbroken, Alexander vowed he would make his fortune and claim her hand in marriage, heading to Australia with the sole purpose of becoming wealthier than his brother.
Within seven years, Alexander had achieved his goal—and returned to England to claim his bride.
In preparation for bringing Catherine to Australia, Alexander had undertaken the construction of Frolesworthy Hall, the grandest homestead in the entire New England area at the time. It had nine bedrooms, a grand ballroom, numerous receiving rooms, servants’ quarters and a sweeping staircase the likes of which had never been seen before in the bush community of Banalla or surrounding areas.
Damian stopped in front of a large framed photograph of the homestead, taken only months after it had been completed. It truly was magnificent.
From the diary entries, Damian knew the photo had been taken for an article in a prestigious newspaper that Alexander had commissioned to feature the house and write a story on his meteoric rise and wealth. Maybe it had been an attempt to further solidify the fact he’d made his own wealth and was successful without the backing of his family or their vast fortune. This seemed to be a consistent theme in many of the entries Alexander wrote—an almost burning obsession to rub his triumph in the face of Winston Shoebridge and everyone else who’d ever written him off as nothing more than the spare to the heir.
This was also Alexander’s downfall, Damian mused. When his mine hit a larger-than-expected payload, it was reported far and wide. It came after a particularly tumultuous period, where Frolesworthy was being built and his workers at the gold mine had gone on strike. A newspaper article at the time had reported Alexander had sent a consignment of gold to Sydney and was returning with bags of cash intended for wages and payment of builders. Jack and his men were alerted to the fact a coachload of cash was due to arrive in Banalla—easy pickings, if you knew a certain place to ambush it. Which, it turned out, Jack did.
As Damian stood before the photo of the house now, he couldn’t help but feel a sadness for the ambitious man. After all the years of blood, sweat and tears, tragedy would strike only a few short months after this photo was taken. Alexander Compton’s entire empire would come crashing down, and the woman he’d built it for would never be seen again.