Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly (3 page)

JOHN GILES PRICE

EVIL COMMANDANT OF NORFOLK SLAND

T
oday, Norfolk Island is a beautiful place with only a small population. To keep the island clean and unspoiled, the number of tourists is restricted.

In 1846, nobody wanted to go there. It was a prison for Australia’s toughest convicts, the ones no other prison could break. The idea was that Norfolk Island would break them. It was in that year that Norfolk Island penal colony got the perfect Commandant.

John Giles Price looked like a kindly vicar. He was the sort of man you could imagine having a cup of tea at the church bazaar, chatting with old ladies about their gardens.

However, if you were a convict, you would find out very quickly that you were wrong. Horribly wrong. John Price was a sadist, a person who enjoyed giving pain. He loved his job because it gave him huge power over others. It was said that even his wife and five children were terrified of him.

Flogging was a normal punishment in penal colonies. Sometimes those who did the flogging were convicts themselves. But John Price made sure that his floggers had training. He wanted to make sure that being whipped wasn’t just something you had to put up with. You had to be terrified that it might happen to you. Convicts who had been beaten couldn’t clean their wounds. Flies and maggots crawled all over them. And you could be flogged for anything. Talking back to a guard. Complaining. Helping a friend. Anything. Commandant Price wasn’t fussy.

There were other punishments, of course. In one case, Price punished two men by putting extra time on their sentences. Their crime? One of them had shared food with the other. Prisoners were chained, beaten and gagged. One man who was in the hospital was chained to the floor for weeks because he had climbed to the window for fresh air.

In 1853, after several years of enjoying himself on Norfolk Island, John Price retired to a farm in Tasmania. If he’d stayed there, he might have lived to a ripe old age. But soon afterwards, he was offered a job as Inspector-General of prisons in Victoria and simply couldn’t resist it. He accepted.

In 1857, he was at the prison hulks in Williamstown, Victoria. The hulks were ships used as cells. Prisoners went from there to work at the quarries nearby, but the cells were also useful to chain up convicts. You couldn’t sit or stand properly in them and you might also be gagged. If you had a gag in your mouth, of course, you couldn’t eat, which didn’t stop the guards from throwing in bread and then taking it away, commenting that you obviously weren’t hungry. When one convict protested about this to Price, the commandant ordered that the punishment should continue.

Finally, the convicts couldn’t take it any more. They knew they would die for what they were going to do, but it seemed worth the price. One afternoon, when he was out in the quarries, the men attacked, trying to drag him to a tent made of bits of dismantled ship. There they had prepared a noose with which to hang him.

John Price was a strong man. He managed to break away from them and run. However, there were a hundred men around that quarry. As he tried to avoid the different gangs, someone managed to hit him with a heavy stone, knocking him over. After that, he was finished. The convicts hit him with anything they had in their hands at the time – hammers, stones, crowbars. There wasn’t much left of him by the time they were finished, but he survived for another day before finally dying.

That was the end of John Giles Price. He had showed that you don’t have to be on the wrong side of the law to be evil. Still, his memory lives on as the villain in Marcus Clarke’s convict novel,
For The Term Of His Natural Life.

DID YOU KNOW…?

Having a security system in your home isn’t always much help, as some Melbourne gangsters found. When Alphonse Gangitano was murdered at home in 1998, the tape on his security camera was simply stolen. Charlie Hegyalji didn’t have a tape in his camera at all. His home’s front sensor light was broken on the night he was killed on his own doormat. The tall trees he had planted to make sure the police couldn’t watch him made great cover for the killer.

LOLA MONTEZ

L
ola Montez wasn’t born in Australia. She didn’t live here. But her tour of Australia in 1855-1856 made her a part of Australian legend.

Lola was born in Limerick, Ireland. Her real name was Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert. Lola Montez made a better stage name. She was very beautiful, with black hair and flashing blue eyes, and a lot of men found her irresistible, even though she had a scary temper.

By the time she arrived in Australia, she had been married several times and her boyfriends had included the composer Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria (in what is now Germany). If she were alive today, she would be in all the gossip magazines, going out with Hollywood stars and millionaires.

Lola was a dancer. Not just any kind of dancer. You wouldn’t see her in
Swan Lake
or
Sleeping Beauty.
Lola had created her very own dance, known as the Spider Dance. In it, she wore a gauze dress with spiders on it and the dance involved her trying to shake them off. Let’s just say it didn’t leave much to the imagination.

In 1855, the gold rush was on in Victoria, in Bendigo and Ballarat. Gold miners would like the Spider Dance, she decided. It had worked in California, which also had a gold rush going on. She raised money, hired some actors and took her company to Sydney.

Lola got some good newspaper reviews in Sydney for her show,
Lola Montez in Bavaria,
but it was time to move on down south to Melbourne and then the goldfields, where all those rich miners were working. Lola decided to get rid of some of her company, which didn’t make them happy. In fact, they sued her for damages. Someone from the sheriff’s office in Sydney boarded her ship to demand the money she owed the sacked actors.

Lola went to her cabin and, soon after, sent out a message to say that she had taken off all her clothes, but the sheriff was welcome to come in if he liked. Of course, he didn’t. Having got away with not paying, Lola continued on her way.

In Melbourne, Lola performed at the Theatre Royal, where her reviews weren’t as good as in Sydney. She put up with the disappointment, even though the police banned her from doing a second performance. In Ballarat, however, she was furious with comments made by Henry Seekamp, editor of the
Ballarat Times
. She decided not to put up with this.

Lola caught up with him in the United States Hotel, where he was having an after-work drink, and beat him with a horsewhip. Seekamp fought back, but Lola won the fight and he had to run away. There’s a saying that no publicity is bad publicity and this particular story, once it got around, gave Lola very good publicity. Tickets to her shows sold out and she was right about the miners. They threw gold nuggets on stage.

The show was just as successful in Bendigo and Lola also visited the goldfields themselves, where the miners adored her. They admired her courage and her willingness to go down into the deepest mine shafts.

Lola was probably glad she had visited Australia, because after she left, her life went downhill. She had had a wonderful tour, even with those people who had been shocked by her act and complained. After all, Lola was used to shocking people. She enjoyed it!

She only lived for five years after her visit to Australia, finally dying of syphilis in New York. Before that, she had found religion. It would be interesting to know how she felt about the Spider Dance by then.

DID YOU KNOW…?

In 1803, convict Joseph Samuels was condemned to hang for murder. Three times, the rope being used to hang him broke or unravelled, so he was allowed to live. It wasn’t much help to him, though – soon afterwards, he drowned while trying to escape in a boat.

BRIDGET HURFORD

B
ridget Hurford was a violent woman who terrified her husband, John, but when she decided he had to go, she made sure someone else killed him. This was a big mistake.

John Hurford, a farmer in the new colony of Western Australia, had made his fortune and when he decided, in his sixties, to settle down, he proposed to Bridget Larkin, a widow about half his age.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Bridget had six children to support and in those days a woman couldn’t simply put her children in day care and get a job. In 1851, the couple married and settled at Fishleigh Farm, near the coastal town of Busselton.

The marriage didn’t work. Before the first year was out, neighbours were seeing them fight. Bridget even knocked out some of her husband’s teeth. In early 1855, John Hurford told his neighbour, John Green, that Bridget had thrown him out and he needed somewhere to stay till he could move into a new home he had bought. Mr Green let him share a room with George Jones, one of the farm workers.

But in March, Mr Green had to ask John to move out due to lack of space. He had to move back to the farm. George had heard Bridget threaten to kill John a number of times. In fact, she had threatened to kill George as well. For John’s safety, George agreed to share a room with him at the farm.

One day,John came home with a bad cold. Bridget pretended to feel sorry for him and sent him to bed with a hot drink. She told George that her husband felt so sick that he wanted to sleep by himself that night. After this, she made sure that her family and servants were either asleep or out of the house.

Then she found her boyfriend, a farmhand called Enoch Dodd, and ordered him to kill her husband. Enoch was frightened to do this, but he was even more afraid of Bridget. She gave him plenty of alcohol, to make him braver, and finally he went into the room where John Hurford lay asleep and strangled him.

Bridget told John Green and George Jones that she had found her husband dead. When George and another farmhand were preparing the body for burial the next day, they noticed a red mark on his neck. A policeman was called in.

A Dr Bryan examined the body, but didn’t think the mark meant anything. He declared that John had died of natural causes. Someone found a will that put Bridget in charge of her husband’s estate, although he had told George he would never leave her anything.

Bridget might have got away with the crime, but Enoch Dodd was nervous. He drank too much one night and talked. He told everything to a man called Philip Dixon, who also worked for Bridget. Enoch needed someone to tell his troubles to and Dixon seemed to be the right person because he was the one who had produced the fake will and wouldn’t dare tell anyone.

Sooner or later all this talk was going to get out and it did. Bridget, Enoch and Philip were arrested and tried in October 1855. The whole sorry story came out. The so-called Dr Bryan, who had said John died of natural causes, turned out not to be a doctor at all. He didn’t even know what you did with a stethoscope, the instrument doctors use to listen to a patient’s heartbeat.

Philip Dixon was sentenced to life imprisonment in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Enoch and Bridget were sentenced to death. Bridget believed she wouldn’t be executed because she was a woman.

Bridget Hurford found out how wrong she was on 15 October. She became the first woman in Western Australia to be hanged.