The legend of The Ragged Thirteen

Hollywood has given us the Fantastic Four, the Magnificent Seven, the Hateful Eight and Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen – all of them fanciful inventions. But more than 150 years ago the gold rush to the Kimberley gave rise to a band of men known as the Ragged Thirteen, and they were as real as it gets.

(Adapted from the Daily Mercury, Mackay, Qld., 20th December, 1938)

The most elusive of all legends in the north is that of the Ragged Thirteen, whose fame extended over the Northern Territory and Queensland and the West. Their story has taken me seven years to verify (writes Ernestine Hill in the Sydney Morning Herald). Thanks to the good offices and the good memory of a Territory historian who knew the leader well, I can now dispel the mists of mystery and romance in the clear light of truth. It was in 1856 that the Kimberley rush set in. Ballarat and Bendigo were cities built on subterranean halls of gold, and the tattered battalions that found them were out round the continent looking for another. They were to find it – Kalgoorlie in the west – but it was 10,000 miles and 40 years to rainbow’s end.

Many a reef of wealth and many a wildcat had called them northward, when a cry of triumph came from a citadel of the blacks in the far north west. Hall and Slattery, two lone prospectors, panning out on the Elvira River, had washed 200 ounces in a week. Not a spectacular find, but, strangely enough, it started a raging epidemic of gold fever. (Ed. On Christmas Day, 1885, Charlie Hall found a huge 870-gram (28-troy-ounce) gold nugget at a site that would eventually be named after him – Hall’s Creek). A motley crowd of some 15,000 crusaders set out from all over Australia, from New Zealand, and California and the Yukon. Three thousand miles across the desert, 6,000 miles round the coast, they rode, and sailed, and pushed their hand-carts, facing death every mile of the way by hunger, by thirst, by spears. Some of them were years on the trail. Too many found “a goldmine in the sky”.

They arrived at last – those who did arrive – at Fata Morgana in the ranges, and there was nothing else but ranges there. The Hall’s Creek goldfield was worked out in less than three months. The first on the field, it seemed, in their broken cradles, had stripped the land bare of its yellow treasure. Knights-errant or highwaymen – you will hear them described as either or both in the north – the Ragged Thirteen were only 13 of thousands, who met in a chance fellowship, shared the road where there was no road, and finally drifted away from each other. Some of the 13 had travelled to Hall’s Creek from Queensland; some had come from South Australia and the Centre. The two groups came together at Abraham’s Billabong on the Roper River. Men from all the eastern States, an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman, a runaway sailor, a “cocky” farmer, and an old convict – they were the usual band of “mates” that rides in any day to any goldfield, camps on the creek, and fades away forgotten. They could not know that their memory would live in history, but posterity is ever capricious, and chooses its own immortals.

To haggle about the true identity of men such as Will Scarlett, Little John, and Tom the Tinker is to nibble away the bay-leaves of romance, but there is still unending controversy in the top half of Australia regarding the personnel of this heroic band of scallywags. I myself have met at least three dozen men who claimed to have ridden with the Ragged Thirteen but in actual fact, all are dead, and here is the list, as supplied by the leader himself. He was Tom Nugent, later the founder of Banka Banka station, 40 miles above Tennant Creek on the Great North Road, that soon, in its turn, will be a little town. The others were Hughie Campbell, who had left his sailing ship at Port Augusta, and set his course due north across the sand; “Sandy Myrtle” McDonald, from Farina, South Australia, forsaking the gold of fleeces for the gold of earth; “Wonoka Jack” Brown, and George Brown, his brother, of Hawker; Jack Dalley, a farmer of Terowie; “New England Jack” Woods; “Larrikin Bill” Smith, one of Major Colles’s “orphans” from his settlement on the Norman River, North Queensland; Jim Carmody, a New Zealander, brother-in-law of Black Jack Reid, the “Maori Smuggler” of Borroloola; Bob Anderson, founder of Tobermorey station, on the Queensland border; Jimmy Woodford; Jim Fitzgerald, and, last and least, Tommy the Rag.

From Renner Springs, on the Overland Telegraph line, they travelled north together. Just at this time the cattlemen were stocking up that spare million square miles “on the outside” of civilisation, and the 13 certainly brought bad luck to them. Cattlemen are immune to gold fever. A reef, ounces rich, in their own horse paddock, excites little more than derision, and then, as now, they resented the rabble passing. Shepherds watched their flocks by night when “the Kimberley crowd” came along. It was “Bluey” Buchanan, the grand old pioneer of Wave Hill, who camped with them at Frew’s Ponds, tallied them up and told them they were the devil’s number. It was a cattleman named Cashman, looking for them with wrath in his eye, near the “blind tiger” sly grog at Katherine, who gave them their name. When asked which 13 he was looking for, the only name Cashman could remember was Tommy the Rag and so the devil’s dozen became the Ragged Thirteen. (Ed. Or that is at least one version of how they got their name. There are several and any one of them could be correct).

Above: Banka Banka homestead, 1900

But they already had a bad name. At Abraham’s Billabongs, where there was a shack and a fresh meat depot, they had found a beast on the gallows, tried to buy, beg, or borrow a porterhouse steak or two, and when they were refused, made off with the lot. After that, many a bullock on the hoof was fair game, and good eating in a hungry land, regardless of the brand. Men must live, and when they were challenged, they fought the case with fists – “Your best man to our best man, and if we lose, we pay.” Such was the law in the Territory then, and for a long time after.

From Katherine the ragged little regiment turned west for the border and the Ord – past Springvale, to which Alfred Giles had just brought up cattle and sheep 2,000 miles overland for Dr. Brown; past Chinaman’s billabongs; a glory of red lilies; across Vampire Creek and the King River, men and horses swimming a deep and perilous crossing; and the Sardine lagoons and the Flora Falls, where the blacks were “bad” indeed. No doubt they earned a rib roast when they got it. Two hundred miles from the last white outpost, they, at length, rode in to the first slab hut of Victoria River Downs, today the largest cattle run in the world. The manager, Lindsay Crawford, was out with the cattle and only the storekeeper, Lockhart, was at home. Tom Nugent rode up to the station and introduced himself as a potential squatter, looking at the country – which was, of course, technically true.

While Tom played cribbage with the storekeeper, the other 12 took a few slabs out of the side of the store, helped themselves to 6cwt of horseshoes, and made by moonlight for the Jasper Gorge, where the blacks were even worse. That was the only really black mark against them. Horseshoes were worth a king’s ransom, but the robbers were well away. At the Ord River they killed two or three bullocks, and smoked and salted them in the salt pan. So they came to Hall’s Creek, and did penance for their sins in “two years’ hard digging” for no wages, with never a glint of gold. After that they disbanded.

Some of them drifted down with the discoverers of the great goldfields of the West, and some of them drifted back to Queensland’s fields. Larrikin Jack Smith was one of the first in the golden hills of New Guinea; Jim Carmody was drowned in the Katherine River while fishing; New England Jack set out with a borrowed plant of horses and was never heard of again; while a fall from a horse cut short Bob Anderson’s life. Hughie Campbell developed a disease in which he could not perspire – a fatality in that country – and picked up yet another ship for Singapore and England. Jack Dalley became a leading townsman of Cloncurry and when eager, young reporters came for his reminiscences as a member of the Ragged Thirteen, he threatened them with a rifle; Sandy Myrtle ran a pub on the Arltunga goldfield in South Australia and too much of the good life that followed saw him grow fatter by the minute and his life shorter by the day. Tom Nugent, the captain, drove the first wagon from the Barkly Tablelands to Borroloola, opened the road to what was to be a port of the Gulf – and some day may be. His passenger on that occasion was a young naval officer, “bagging it”, as the bushmen say, for education and recreation. When they arrived at Borroloola, there was a letter awaiting that young naval officer, from the Admiralty, appointing him to command. He was later Admiral Creswell. Tom Nugent, as linesman for the telegraph, found a good little pocket of country between Tennant and Powell’s Creek, took up the title deeds from the Warramunga tribe, bought a mob of Herefords – and Banka Banka was on the map to stay. Today the travellers go by at the rate of 40 a day, but nothing passed for months on end in Tom Nugent’s time. When he died, he left the property to three Sydney nephews, who inherited an outpost among the wild blacks. The last of these nephews, Mr Paddy Ambrose, one of the best-known and best- hearted of station-owners of the Centre, has seen a pageant of progress in the past 10 years, on the Great North road from Adelaide to Darwin – but his quaint old homestead, and even the blacks about it, still cherish happy memories of Tom Nugent and the Ragged Thirteen.

THE LAST OF THE RAGGED THIRTEEN

The Forbes Advocate 9th August, 1929

The feats of cattle thieves of the west, with their half dozen or so head of cattle pale into significance with the thefts of one rustler, who has just died on a Northern Territory cattle station, aged 91. According to his own account, he had “lifted” 8,000 head in 10 years! He was a member of the “Ragged Thirteen” a collection of the biggest cattle thieves who ever levied tribute on the stations of Central Australia. Leaving Clermont in the early 80s this band raided every station on route to the Kimberley goldfields, in Western Australia. On the way they sold hundreds of head of station cattle and horses and then established themselves near Anthony’s Lagoon, where they bred from the stolen beasts, and sold the progeny, while the majority of the band took a big draft to the Kimberley goldfields and sold them. Near Anthony’s Lagoon, a main route to the gold fields, and 500 miles from the nearest police station, the gang set up a pub and butcher’s shop, and fairly raked in the coin from travellers, who were plentiful in those days. All the stock slaughtered were stolen from surrounding holdings, and when the squatters started to complain the gang offered to sell out for £1,000. The squatters refused, and sent word to police headquarters. Mounted troopers started out from Cloncurry, but the gang heard of their advent, burnt down the sly grog pub and the butcher’s shop and continued their operations elsewhere. Later, this particular gangster was given a stiff leg for the rest of his days, through being speared in a blacks’ camp during a squabble. Unable to ride, be had to give up cattle-duffing, and settle down for the last 35 years on an outstation in the Territory. He was the last survivor of the Ragged Thirteen.