Heritage 0609_Capt Moonlight.pdf - Australian Heritage Magazine

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Simpson, arrived to find a note on his desk: “Captain Moonlite has stuck me up and robbed the bank!” The local police immediately investigated the bank, where they found Bruun still bound and gagged. After listening to his story and considering it absurd, the police promptly arrested both Bruun and Simpson for complicity in the robbery. Scott brazenly offered circumstantial evidence against the innocent men, then fled Egerton, claiming that he had to leave on urgent religious business. By the time Bruun and Simpson were committed for trial, Scott was living in style in Sydney under an assumed name and with a young woman in an expensive hotel. Towards the end of 1870, the proceeds of the robbery began to run out. Announcing that he was going to make his fortune in the Pacific Islands as a trader, Scott purchased the yacht Why-not, paying partly in cash and the rest with a cheque for £150. When the cheque bounced, a water police steamlaunch pursued Scott as he tried to flee to Fiji, finally catching the Why-not near the Heads. Brought to trial for false pretences and theft of the yacht, Scott received a 12-months sentence to be served at Maitland Gaol. He was able to serve some of his time in Parramatta Lunatic Asylum by feigning madness. In the absence of Scott’s ‘evidence’, the schoolmaster and the bank manager had been acquitted. A gold ingot that Scott had sold to a Sydney bank was identified as part of the loot from the Mount Egerton robbery and, as soon as he stepped from prison in April 1872, he was arrested again, and taken by escort to the newly built Ballarat Gaol. Scott did not stay in goal for long. He and his cellmate, Dermody, overpowered a warder and left him tied, gagged and locked in the cell by his own keys. The pair then released four more prisoners who helped them make a rope from their blankets, which they used to Arrival of the Wagga Police at Wantabadgery Station. State Library of Victoria, b50735. Andrew George Scott, alias Captain Moonlite, leader of the captured bushrangers. State library of Victoria: IAN28/11/79/180. scale the 25-foot prison walls. Despite being fired at by warders, all six escaped into the night. Four of the men were soon recaptured, but Scott and Dermody were able to remain at large for some time. After unsuccessfully trying to rob a bank on his own, Scott was finally captured, near starving, in an abandoned miner’s slab hut in a gully near Bendigo. At his trial, presided over by Judge Redmond Barry, Scott spectacularly conducted most of his own defence. Despite this, in July 1872, he was sentenced to ten years in Pentridge for bank robbery, including one year in irons for the gaol break. He gained some remission for good conduct, and was released in March 1879. For a while Scott tried to make a living in Melbourne as an open-air public speaker on various subjects including prison conditions. As he had shown in his trial, he was an eloquent, compelling speaker and skilled at entertaining a large crowd. Earnings from such enterprise were, however, meagre. At about 3 pm on 15 November 1879, Captain Moonlite reappeared, this time with the ‘Moonliters’, a gang of five bushrangers: James Nesbit, Thomas Rogan, Graham Bennett, Augustus Wernicke and Thomas Williams, all of whom were in their late teens or early twenties. The gang held up Alexander MacDonald’s prosperous Wantabadgery Station, about 40 km from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The bewildered station workmen were rounded up and placed under armed guard in the dining room of 78 Australian Heritage
MacDonald’s large homestead. One of the captured men was then forced to unlock the station’s well-equipped store from which the robbers plundered a large quantity of clothing and equipment. While the Moonliters were packing these goods onto stolen horses, the owner, Alexander MacDonald, the station manager, Baynes and two unsuspecting visitors separately rode up to the homestead. All were captured and joined the other prisoners in the dining room. The terrified women of the station were then ordered to cook dinner. After a considerable meal, grog was brought up from the store and served around. Moonlite and his gang stayed the night at the station, taking turns to keep guard. During the morning Moonlite rode off, taking MacDonald as hostage. He held up a local hotel, Paterson’s Australian Arms, and took the whole Paterson family captive. They, along with seven more men he caught on the way back to Wantabadgery Station were packed into the already cramped dining room. Moonlite then left the prisoners in the hands of his gang, mounted a horse and patrolled the vicinity of the homestead. He captured yet another man from an adjoining station who, having heard the news of the hold-up, was armed and on his way to fight the bushrangers. He was immediately subjected to a prolonged mock trial, with Moonlite presiding as judge. After the conclusion of the ‘trial’ on Sunday morning, the women of the house were made to serve another plentiful hot meal for the bushrangers. After more alcohol was served, MacDonald was able to make good his escape by horseback, although he was fired at by the drunken bushrangers. He rode to Wagga Wagga, and informed the police of the hold-up. MacDonald returned to Wantabadgery at 4 am the next morning with four constables. After an unsuccessful shoot-out with the bushrangers, they regrouped and, reinforced by two more constables and five mounted troopers, the police surrounded the homestead. In the growing confusion, the captives managed to escape from the dining room in small groups and joined a growing crowd of spectators on a nearby ridge to watch the spectacle. By the time the gunfight between the police and the Moonliters began in earnest there were some 300 watchers on the ridge but none of them attempted to help the police while the battle raged. The police closed in on the outlaws and, after a furious gunfight, Moonlite and his gang were forced to surrender. Nesbit was fatally wounded, Wernicke died a few days later and Bennett was shot in the arm but recovered. One of the constables, Bowen, was shot in the neck and died a short time later turning the outlaws’ crimes into a capital offence. After an inquest on the deaths of the two bushrangers and an examination before the Gundagai Bench, the surviving bushrangers, Scott, Rogan, Williams and Bennett, were sent to Sydney by train to face capital charges at the Central Criminal Court. ‘The Moonliters’: William Bennett, his arm in a sling from the gunfight; Thomas Rogan; Andrew George Scott, alias Captain Moonlite; James Nesbit; and Thomas Williams. Augustus Wernicke, who was shot and later died, is not painted. National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an2292683. Scott met Nesbit while in Pentridge Prison and they became close friends. Scott was grief stricken by Nesbit’s death, writing from prison: “when he died my heart was crushed. I never found a better friend or a truer man. My fondest hope is to be with him in Eternity and that I may share his grave.” For 115 years they were separated, but in 1995 Scott’s remains were exhumed from a Sydney cemetery and re-interred near the unmarked graves of Nesbit and Werkicke at Gundagai cemetery. Australian Heritage 79
Page 1: Alias Captain Moonlite By the 1860s

Heritage 0609_Capt Moonlight.pdf - Australian Heritage Magazine

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