‘After discovery of gold in 1851, a number of bad characters took to the bush who were satisfied to rob without offering violence, unless they were resisted. This class of highway robber soon found sympathisers, for there was something romantic about boldly sticking up coaches and gold escorts, and fighting the police.’
In the mid-nineteenth century Queensland, as in the rest of Australia, bush-ranging was rife. Many of the bushrangers across the Australian colonies were of Irish or Irish-Australian background. Frank Gardiner (aka Frank Christie) a son of an Irish-Aboriginal servant girl and a Scottish immigrant was no exception.
After being released on a ticket-of-leave in 1858, Gardiner took to bushranging. He gained notoriety for gentlemanly behaviour, gifts to the poor and ‘humane’ bushranging. Numerous sympathisers among the small settlers made it very difficult for the police to apprehend Gardiner. In 1864 he was arrested in Apis Creek near Rockhampton, where he had been living with his girlfriend Kitty Brown for some years. Gardiner was tried in Sydney and sentenced to thirty-years but was pardoned after serving ten.
In July, 1874 Gardiner was released conditionally from prison and left for San Francisco, California. Following his release, accounts of his whereabouts begin to vary. In 1887, Newcastle Morning Herald reported that for years Gardiner kept a saloon or a bar in Pacific-street, San Francisco, but he soon enough again took to the roads, and was ‘sticking up’ emigrant trains in the West though nothing authentic was known.
A year later, a Melbourne paper reported on a Californian periodical (1888), which ran a story that prior his arrest in 1864, Gardiner fathered a child with a young English girl, who died during his imprisonment. Having made suitable provisions for his daughter, he left for America and set up a saloon on Kearney-street, near Broadway, San Francisco ‘being the resort of seafaring men, especially those plying between that port and the colonies.’
The Brisbane Courier wrote that during all the time that Gardiner remained in San Francisco his conduct was good, ‘and the police never once had to complain of him or his saloon.’
Other accounts (1879) state he posted a letter to a person in Burrangong saying that he has married ‘a wealthy American widow, and has comfortably located himself in Nevada.’
The story of a near legendary humane bushranger Gardiner lived on well into the twentieth century in many a newspaper.
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This information has been supplied by the Queensland Police Museum from the best resources available at the time of writing.
The Police Museum is open 9am to 4pm Monday to Thursday and 10am to 3pm on the last Sunday of the month (Feb-Nov) and is located on the Ground Floor of Police Headquarters at 200 Roma Street, Brisbane. Contact: E: museum@police.qld.gov.au
“Frank Gardiner, an Australian Dick Turpin” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.5 Australia Licence. Permissions may be available beyond the scope of this licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/legalcode