FRANK GARDINER
AND THE EUGOWRA GOLD ROBBERY
In the 1860s, there was a gold rush in New South Wales, at Lambing Flat and Blackridge, near Forbes. Enough gold was being mined at Forbes to make it worth sending the treasure to Bathurst by coach every week. The coaches were escorted by armed guards, of course, but having a regular gold coach did make things easier for bushrangers.
The bushranger who decided to have a go at stealing the gold, in June 1862, was Frank Gardiner (real name Francis Christie), who had gathered a gang of seven for the purpose.
Did the heist work? Well, yes – and no.
The gang members weren’t professionals. They were cattlemen who did some robbery on the side. One of them, Ben Hall, would later become a full-time bushranger with his own gang. He would become even more famous than Gardiner.
Gardiner was a professional. On 15 June 1862, he and his gang held up some passing bullock drivers. He’d chosen a good spot, a gully called Eugowra Rocks, where the gold coach had to slow down, because the gully was steep and there were huge rocks to avoid.
Gardiner made sure that it was even harder for the coach. He parked the bullock drays across the road. One farmer had his young son, George Burgess, with him. George remembered the hold-up many years later, when he was the last survivor. The bullock drivers were not mistreated, though some were made to lie across the road. The rest were hidden and blindfolded.
As the stagecoach driver, Jack Fagan, was abusing the bullock drivers for getting in his way, Gardiner’s gang leapt out, shooting and yelling, ‘Bail up!’ The horses reared. The coach tipped over on its side.
Nobody was paying Fagan and the four troopers with him to get killed, so they very sensibly ran off into the bush, towards Eugowra homestead.
The gang took money and gold from the coach. They released their prisoners and shared some drink from the coach. The delighted child, George Burgess, was given a pound – enough money, he wrote later, to make himself sick on lollies for two weeks!
It was the largest gold robbery in Australia’s history. There was about $2 million worth of gold in today’s money.
Unfortunately for Gardiner’s gang, Jack Fagan and the troopers hadn’t been wasting their time when they ran. They told the owner of Eugowra homestead, Hanbury Clements, what had happened. Clements rode off to Forbes to tell the police.
Constables, with the help of an Aboriginal tracker, managed to follow the bushrangers towards Gardiner’s camp in Wheogo. The camp had a good view of the area, so the bushrangers could see who was coming.
They escaped, but really couldn’t take all that gold on one horse, which was tired. Most of the gold had to be left behind. Gardiner and Ben Hall managed to hang on to their share of the treasure, but everyone else had to make do with the money.
Gardiner got as far as Queensland with his partner, Kitty. There, they lived at Apis Creek near Rockhampton, running a store till 1864, when a tip-off sent the police after him. He was arrested and sentenced to 32 years at hard labour, but he was lucky. His sisters appealed successfully and after only ten years in prison, Frank Gardiner was released.
There was only one condition: he had to leave Australia for good. As far as we know, he is the only Australian ever to be exiled.
Gardiner wasn’t going to argue with a chance to be free. He went to Hong Kong for a while, then, in 1874, on to America. There, in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast area, he settled down to life as a saloon keeper. He called his saloon the Twilight Star. He probably had children there – two of his American sons may have visited Australia in 1911.
We don’t know for sure what happened to Gardiner himself, for in 1906 there was a destructive earthquake in San Francisco, which wiped out a lot of information about the later part of his life. But he probably died of pneumonia in 1904.
What happened to the gold? Did he spend it before he left Australia? Did he hide it? Did it come in handy in California?
We may never know.
DID YOU KNOW…?
If you were a woman in England in the early 1800s, you had to be very careful not to commit any crime. The population of the convict settlement in Australia was six men for every woman. In order to get some male/female balance and keep the men from going crazy, the British government changed laws to make it easier to transport women than men.