The Bushrangers Of Bushrangers Bay By Ilma Hackett - Balnarring and District Historical Society
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ushrangers Bay is a spectacularly beautiful section of coastline between Flinders and Cape Schanck. A small isolated beach backed by high dunes lies between towering headlands. A creek winds through the dunes about midway along the bay while a smaller creek drops to the sea near the western end. A rock shelf stretches at the base of the cliffs. It can be reached either by walking along the cliff top from Cape Schanck or by means of a narrow path that cuts across paddocks before dropping down to the sands.
The name, romantic-sounding in this modern era, hints at a dark history. The story is one steeped in violence and bloodshed. It was at this spot, during Colonial times, that two convicts on the run from Van Diemen’s Land stepped ashore. The whale boat that put into the bay on the night of 19 September, 1853 carried four men. Two were unwilling sailors from the schooner Sophia; the other two were convicts, Henry Bradley and Patrick O’Connor, who had hi-jacked the schooner near Circular Head on the north west of Van Diemen’s Land and forced the captain to take them to the Australian mainland. Once ashore O’Connor and Bradley led the police on a chase that would end the following month with their hanging in the [Old] Melbourne Gaol. Who were Bradley and O’Connor? The two men were lifers. They were both about the same age – in their 20s. In 1853 both were assigned to two different landholders
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in the Circular Head area of northern Van Diemen’s Land before they carried out their planned escape. Henry (Harry) Bradley, a native of Blackburn, Lancashire arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1846. He had been sentenced in Liverpool and transported for ten years for ‘housebreaking and stealing wearing apparel.’ He was then twenty years old, a short man of fair complexion with longish, curly, brown hair. His face was thin, his nose had unusually wide-nostrils and he was clean-shaven. A number of tattoos adorned both arms including one below his left elbow that read “in Remembrance of my Mother”. One story is that he had been orphaned when still a lad and had survived by joining a gang of pickpockets which lead to him spending time in prison. His convict record shows he had been “an imperfect” shoe-maker, i.e. an apprentice, a trade he had learnt when in custody on the Isle of Wight. He was able to both read and write “a little”. The first part of his probation period in Van Diemen’s Land was spent with a work gang at Newton Farm but he repeatedly offended, his sentence being extended each time until he was finally given a life sentence for assault and robbery. Bradley was sent to Port Arthur towards the end of 1847. His misconduct there (a long list including disobedience, obscene language, assaulting a fellow prisoner, absconding) saw him being transferred to Norfolk Island where he spent almost three years. Even there his record was hardly exemplary. In 1853 he was returned to the Prisoner Barracks at Launceston then assigned to civilian, George Kay in the Circular