Escape from Bunbury by Frank Clune
ABC Weekly Vol. 2 No. 14 6 April 1940
“Twenty-seven years ago, I worked around Bunbury, Western Australia, in jarrah sawmills, and later got a job as a handyman in Mrs Cassidy's hotel at Collie, forty miles inland. Mrs Cassidy was the daughter of Erin, and many a saga she spun about the Irish rebels of the Fenian insurrection, who were transported to Australia in the 'sixties.
As she embroidered the narrative in her melodious brogue, I realised that, in the in the sou'-west corner of Western Australia, I was treading on ground hallowed in Irish political history.
It was then that I heard, for the first time, the tale of John Boyle O'Reilly, the Irishman who made Bunbury world-famous.
Born in 1844, near Drogheda, in Louth County, Ireland, Boyle was the son of a schoolmaster. Aged 11, he was a printer's apprentice, and four years later he crossed to England, and became a newspaper cadet.
But the lure of slinging a gun was greater than the lure of slinging ink, so the young Drogheda man enlisted in the British Army. He returned to Ireland as a trooper in the 10th Hussars, and was garrisoned in Dublin Castle.
As ever, the Irish Republicans, a thorn in England's side, were stirring up disaffection among the British soldiery, and soon young Trooper O'Reilly was imbued with national enthusiasm. Like many of his comrades in the Hussars, he wore the red coat of Britain on his back, but the green flag of Erin in his heart.
Sentenced for Sedition
An informer named Talbot was planted in the midst of the conspirators, and, on February 12, 1866, Trooper O'Reilly, with others, was placed under arrest, charged with sedition. He was sentenced to death, but the firing squad was not for him, and, aged 22, he was condemned to twenty years' imprisonment.
With other freedom-seekers, he was deported to England and started to serve his sentence in dread Dartmoor, the strong granitic post of horror, erected on the bleak plateau in Devonshire, surrounded with tors and morasses, patrolled by bloodhounds.
About this time the transportation of convicts to the Eastern Colonies was stopped, and Western Australia became the dump for Britain's throw-outs. This boosted the population, and Western Australia has never looked back since.
Dartmoor to Bunbury
Imperial Convict No. 9843, John Boyle O'Reilly, arrived at Fremantle on January 10, 1868, by the ship, Hougomont.
In the jarrah forests, the convicts were not very strictly supervised, as they had no hope of escape, hemmed in by the shark-infested ocean on one side, and by the pathless wilderness on the other.
Nevertheless, O'Reilly planned and plotted, but there was no one to whom he could confide his plans—except one man—Father Patrick McCabe, a visiting priest.
To the Father one day, Boyle O'Reilly announced his intention of escaping. "That would be an excellent way to commit suicide." commented the priest. "Well, I'd rather commit suicide than live as a felon!" said the man from Drogheda defiantly. "Don't do anything about it," counselled the Reverend adviser. "Just bide your time, and the opportunity will come to you someday."
With this cryptic remark, O'Reilly had to be content, as months went by and he heard no more of Father McCabe.
Then, one December day, while walking through the bush at Bunbury, Convict No. 9843 heard a loud "cooee," among the jarrah trees.
Mysterious Maguire
An axeman approached and said, "My name is Maguire. I am a friend of Father McCabe, and I have come to tell you that arrangements are made for your escape in an American whaling ship, which will call at this coast in two months from now. Then you'll be a free man as sure as my name is Maguire."
The hot days of an Austral summer dragged by, and O'Reilly impatiently awaited the day of his liberation. It came on February 18, 1869, one year and eight days after his arrival in the Colony.
Helped by his outside friends, the Fenian donned a pair of civilian boots to put black trackers off the scent, and went at midnight to a rendezvous among the jarrah trees where he whistled St. Patrick's Day, and found Maguire and another man awaiting him, with three saddled horses.
In silence, they mounted, then galloped many miles along a bridle track leading to the sea-coast.
Leaving the horses here, the three men walked through dry swamps and then waded knee-deep through mud-flats to a place where a man in a dinghy was waiting for them.
Uninvited guest
O'Reilly entered the boat with his three rescuers, and the four men desperately rowed across Geographe Bay, for forty miles, towards Cape Naturaliste, to get in the track of the whaling ship rounding the point. After several disappointments, when sailing vessels passed them without pausing, the escapees returned to land, almost perishing of thirst.
Now, to their surprise, they were joined onshore by Martin Bowman, -a ticket-of-leave man, one of the worst characters in the Colony, who had heard of the intended escape, and added himself to the party, announcing that, if not accommodated, he would "split."
There was nothing else for it, so Bowman joined the party watching on the headland for a long-expected Yankee sail.
They did not have long to wait, as the American barque, "Gazelle," commanded by Captain Gifford of New Bedford, soon hove in sight.
Frantically the fugitives and the Maguires rowed offshore, and to their immense relief, saw the "Gazelle" heave to.
Wrecked by whale
The "Gazelle" was a Massachusetts whaler and had several Irishmen in her crew and descendants of convicts who had been dumped in America.
Thug Bowman was stowed in the fo'csle, but O'Reilly was made a guest of honour in the officers' quarters.
Then the "Gazelle" got on with her business and bounded o'er the waves of the Indian Ocean in pursuit of leviathans.
"Thar she blows!" bawled the lookout as a spouting marine monster was sighted off the north-west Australian coast. The whaleboats were lowered, and escapee O'Reilly took his place with the oarsmen.
The whale was harpooned. It snorted, sounded, and, re-emerging in a fury, flicked its gargantuan tail and smashed the boat. The Irish patriot also snorted and sounded —and when he was going down for the third time, was seized by the hair and dragged aboard the "Gazelle" —unconscious with froth running from his nostrils and mouth.
"Sure, you were born to be hanged, not drowned," said Captain Gifford, five hours later, when O'Reilly's eyelids flickered as his pulse fluttered and revived.
When the "Gazelle" dropped anchor at Port Mathurin. in the small British coral girt isle of Rodriguez, near Mauritius, for freshwater, the Governor of the island came aboard, announcing that he was looking for two desperate escaped convicts from Western Australia, named O'Reilly and Bowman. He requested a ship's muster.
From the descriptions, Thug Bowman was recognised and nabbed —but O'Reilly passed the muster without recognition.
The Informer
But he was not yet out of the wood—or Rodriguez either —because it was a "cert" that Bowman the Thug would inform on his fellow escapee in the hope of mitigating his own punishment.
That night a tragedy occurred on board the "Gazelle," when late at night, there was a loud splash, followed by the cry, "Man Overboard!"
"Poor fellow", said the Skipper. "He swore that he would never be taken alive, and that he would commit suicide to avoid recapture, And now he's done it!"
In the morning, the ship's flag was flying at half-mast, when the Governor, with a strong police escort, came aboard the "Gazelle", bringing the informer, Bowman, to identify O'Reilly in another lineup.
Long faces greeted the Governor as the Captain sadly told him of O'Reilly's suicide.
Out on the bounding Main, the Mate went below to the bilges, and there, greatly to his "surprise," he found O'Reilly.
After seven months aboard the whaler, O'Reilly was transferred to the American barque, "Sapphire," off the Cape of Good Hope. He was supplied by Skipper Gifford with twenty guineas and also with the papers of a seaman named John Soule, who had deserted from the "Gazelle."
Literary Fame
Safe in the United States. O'Reilly settled in Boston and won literary fame as a poet and patriot. Upon him fell the honour of writing the Centennial Ode on "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers," and soon, he became a leading light in the city of culture, Boston.
But he did not forget Bunbury, and his fellow-Fenians cutting jarrah blocks in Western Australia.
In 1876, he organised a rescue party for them, and six of them were salvaged by an American vessel in the same way as he had been snatched from the jaws of felony.
He died in Massachusetts in 1890, aged 46 years, and a statue was unveiled to him in Drogheda in 1903.”
The original article can be seen on Trove here: Link