Frank Gardiner – horse thief, butcher, bushranger, innkeeper, and possibly card cheat
Around 1862, shanties began to appear along the road between Rockhampton, Clermont and Peak Downs. Part of this route was opened up by Oscar de Satge, a Frenchman instru mental in the establishment of Queensland in the early days.
De Satge was riding to Rockhampton one day when he spotted a new tent on the banks of Apis Creek. Timber was stacked beside what looked like the beginnings of a new shanty. A big friendly man appeared who greeted de Satge. His name, he said, was James Christie and he offered de Satge a cup of tea. This was accepted and de Satge met Christie’s wife. As he was leaving, his eye rested on the most wonderful brown stallion, which he immediately offered to buy. “I wouldn’t sell him for all the gold in Australia,” was Christie’s reply.
The Christies worked hard with their shanty. They sold liquor and later on added some accommodation as many travellers came and went along the road. In time everyone came to like the genial James Christie, who proved an obliging businessman. Often diggers would leave their gold with him for safe keeping on their way in to Rockhampton. Even the corrupt John Thomas Griffin, the Gold Commissioner who was later hung for murdering two troopers and stealing the money they were escorting, left a total of 470oz of gold with him for several days. Christie was also known to give rations to hardup diggers and swaggies who called, knowing they were not likely to be able to repay him.
In March 1864 a party of three diggers made camp near the Christie’s hotel and got into conversation with Christie and his wife. Shortly afterwards, Lieutentant Brown with a party of native mounted police arrived from the Yaamba Barracks on what appeared to be a routine patrol, just as they often did along what was the gold trail to Peak Downs. However, the three diggers turned out to be detectives and one of them had recognised Christie’s fine brown stallion. He knew immediately that the genial host of the Apis Creek Shanty was none other than Frank Gardiner (born Francis Christie in Scotland in 1830) and that his “wife” was actually his mistress, Kate Brown. There was a reward of £1,000 on Frank Gardiner’s head and after a struggle, an arrest was made and he was taken away in irons on the coastal steamer Queensland to stand trial in Sydney. One of the people who identified Frank Gardiner as the shanty keeper at Apis Creek was Oscar de Satge.
Frank Gardiner was at the forefront of bushranging during the golden age in Australia. He was regardedby many as the ‘Prince of High Tobymen’. ‘Darky’ Gardiner was born at Boro Creek, near Goulburn in 1830, the son of a free Scottish migrant and a halfIrish, halfAboriginal girl called Clarke. The surname Gardiner was taken from an employer.
The epithet ‘Darky’ was given him on account of his sallow complexion. He was still a teenager when he had his first brush with the law – he and two friends crossed into Victoria and stole 32 horses. The best of these were entered in “races” against the police but the owner of the horses caught up with them before they sold them and Gardiner, for his part in the business, was sentenced to five years in Pentridge Gaol, although he escaped within a few weeks. Returning to Goulburn in 1854, he stole more horses and this time found himself at Cockatoo Island prison in Sydney Harbour.
Upon his release he became a butcher at Lambing Flat but butchering didn’t bring in as much as bushranging and he became the people’s nightmare who dwelt between Lambing Flat – now Young – Yass and Gundagai.
John Piesley, who was later hanged, often rode with him and it was claimed that it was Piesley who rescued him when Gardiner was arrested after shooting Sergeant John Middleton in the jaw, and Trooper Hosie in the arm. Piesley later claimed he had paid £50 to Trooper Hosie to release Gardiner. After Piesley, Gardiner moved on to the Weddin Mountains, south of Forbes where he formed a gang which included Johnny Gilbert, a Canadian gunman.
It was in 1862 that Gardiner pulled the robbery which was to make him famous in Australian history. He knew that each week a coach, guarded by police, left Forbes from Sydney. Its cargo was gold from the diggings, also banknotes. Sometimes the amount exceeded £30,000. Calling on his friends, Gilbert, Dan Charters, Alex Fordyce, Johnny O’Meally, Johnny Bow of Penrith, Harry Mans, and a cattleman who was embittered with the authorities, Ben Hall, he made his plans. They were to lie in wait at Eugowra Rocks for the coach on the 15th of June, 1862, and when it appeared they would bail it up and steal its contents.
As it appeared, Gardiner and his gang with their faces blackened, dashed out and fired upon the coach with muskets and pistols. Sergeant Condell was felled with a musket ball in his ribs and Constable Moran was wounded in the groin. The driver, John Fegan, had the uncomfortable feeling of a bullet passing through his hat while Constable Rafferty wisely dropped his rifle. Meanwhile, in the chaos, the horses had bolted with the coach which hit a boulder and turned over. Following them, Gardiner loaded the first two horses with gold and banknotes and took them to his hideout at Wheogo. The plunder was then divided evenly amongst his accomplices using a set of butcher’s scales to weigh it. The banknotes were also shared out.
All would have gone well had not the Inspector of Police, Sir Frederick Pottinger, begun to track them. Pottinger was a British baronet, the black sheep of an aristocratic English family who gambled away his family’s fortune at the racecourse, and most of the time he was regarded scornfully by members of the force, but on this particular occasion his luck was in. He was just heading back to his headquarters with two constables when he met Johnny Gilbert in company with his brother Charley and Harry Mans, who was leading a packhorse. Gilbert took off, riding the 70 miles in 11 hours on his stolen thoroughbred, to inform the rest of the gang who were at O’Meally’s shanty in the Weddin Mountains. The gang rode back, and holding up Pottinger and his men, rescued Charley Gilbert and Harry Mans. Pottinger ran away – an act which many called cowardly. He then brought in so many suspects that people sneered at him that he’d arrested everyone except Frank Gardiner! He actually did almost arrest Gardiner when he learned that Gardiner visited Kate Brown, his mistress, every night at her cottage near Wheogo. Pottinger lay in wait with eight troopers and when Gardiner appeared, they opened fire at a range of little more than five yards. Remarkably, they missed, and the next day Gardiner was gone.
It wasn’t until Gardner was spotted at Apis Creek in Queensland that he was heard of again. In the meantime, Sir Frederick Pottinger, on the 5th of March, 1865, at Wascoe’s Inn in the Blue Mountains on his way to Sydney, accidentally shot himself in the upper abdomen while boarding a moving coach. He recovered enough to be moved to the Victoria Club in Sydney where he died four days later at the age of 34.
Frank Gardner and Kate might have lived on contentedly at Apis Creek had not Kate written to her sister Bridget, who had eloped with a farmer called Taylor. Taylor got drunk and talked, hinting at something interesting to be discovered at Apis Creek.
In 1864 Gardiner was tried for wounding Sergeant Middleton with intent to kill, but was acquitted by the jury. At a second trial in July he was found guilty on two noncapital charges, one of which was armed robbery, and Chief Justice Sir Alfred Stephen gave him a cumulative sentence of 32 years hard labour to be served in irons for the first two. In 1872 ,William Bede Dalley, who had defended Gardiner, organized petitions to the governor to use his prerogative of mercy. Sir Hercules Robinson decided that Gardiner had been harshly sentenced and in 1874 released him subject to his exile.
On the 27th of July, 1874, Gardiner embarked for Hong Kong and by February 1875 was in San Francisco where he ran the Twilight Star Saloon. The press continued to note his activities, including his supposed death in Colorado about 1903 allegedly as a result of gun duel following a poker game. But just how and when Gardiner died is open to conjecture.
While Gardiner had been incarcerated, Kate Brown, his mistress, had gone to New Zealand to get away from “the ridicule of respectable citizens” and it is believed she eventually committed suicide there.