MARY ANN BUGG
SHE DID IT FOR LOVE
It has often been said that behind every great man is a great woman. Sometimes there has also been a great woman behind a criminal. And there is no doubt that the woman behind the bushranger Fred Ward, known as Captain Thunderbolt, was brave and strong and that he wouldn’t have survived without her and her knowledge of the bush.
Mary Ann Bugg was born in New South Wales, the daughter of a former convict called James Bugg and an Aboriginal woman called Charlotte. Charlotte taught her daughter how to live in the bush. This knowledge helped Mary Ann and her husband survive when they were on the run.
When Mary Ann was ten, she was sent away to boarding school, where she learned to read and write and other things that young ladies were expected to know. By the time she was fourteen, Mary Ann had married her first husband, a shepherd called Edmund Baker. Mary Ann and Edmund went to live in a place called Mudgee, where they worked on a property owned by a lady called Mrs Garbutt.
Mrs Garbutt’s son, James, had no problem about stealing other people’s cattle and horses. His partner in crime was a cattle thief called Frederick Ward, the future Captain Thunderbolt. In 1856, the two men were caught receiving stolen horses and sentenced to ten years in Cockatoo Island prison. They ended up only serving four years before they were released. While they were in prison, Mary Ann’s husband, Edmund Baker, died. When James and Frederick returned, Mary Ann was a widow with a young child. She had no reason to stay on the Garbutts’ cattle station, so she left with Frederick.
Unfortunately, Frederick just couldn’t stop stealing and in October 1861, he was back on Cockatoo Island for stealing horses, while Mary Ann gave birth to their first child, a little girl called Marina.
Mary Ann wasn’t going to let her husband stay in prison any longer than she could help. She had to wait until she had finished breast feeding her daughter, but then she left both children with someone who could look after them for a while. Mary Ann got a job as a housemaid in Balmain, which was near Cockatoo Island. She was careful to use a false name, calling herself Louisa Mason.
The story goes that she swam to Cockatoo Island with a file, so that Frederick could use it to cut off his chains. Is it true? We don’t know, but it’s a good story. Regardless, Fred did escape in September 1863, and they moved to the Hunter Valley, where Fred’s life as a bushranger began. Oh, and the children went with them. In fact, the couple had another one. Captain Thunderbolt never really had a gang. Sometimes, he would take on a partner for a while, but mostly acted on his own.
Mary Ann had two useful skills. She could find food and shelter in the bush and she had been educated in a girls’ school. That meant she could go into town to find out what the police were doing, or get supplies. Nobody suspected this attractive, ladylike woman.
She was arrested a number of times, though, for small crimes, and once served three months before being released. After this, she stayed out of trouble for the sake of her children.
We don’t know exactly what happened to Mary Ann. She probably died of pneumonia, after returning to her husband for a while. One night in 1869, Fred approached a woman called Mrs Bradford and asked her to look after a dying woman. Mrs Bradford took her in, but Mary Ann died that same night. The name the newspapers gave the dead woman was Louisa Mason, Mary Ann’s fake name from Balmain.
Whatever did happen, she had lived the life she wanted to live, with the man she loved.
DID YOU KNOW…?
Australia’s first architect was a convict. In 1814, Francis Greenaway was transported to Australia for fourteen years for forgery. He didn’t have to work on any chain gangs, though. Governor Macquarie let him set up a business and he was pardoned in 1818, after he’d designed the Macquarie Lighthouse. Greenaway designed a lot of Sydney’s most important buildings, which are still around today. Unfortunately, after Macquarie left in 1822, Greenaway was sacked from his job, due to government spending cutbacks. He refused to leave his government house, and lived there till he died in 1837.