Bushranger

Larry Cummins was 20 when a Goulburn jury convicted him of armed robbery and he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour, the first in irons. His accomplice in the hold-up, both men with blackened faces, had been his 18-year-old brother. And the charge everyone was talking about had already been dropped: the murder of that same brother.

Weeks earlier, police had found the younger Cummins hiding in the loft of his mother’s hut. He fired twice at the constables before surrendering, and they saddled one of the family’s own horses to take him to the lockup. Eight miles along the track a single shot rang out from the bush. It struck the prisoner behind the ear; he “gave one groan” and died. The constables never saw the gunman, only heard a horse galloping away. The shot was assumed to have been meant for the constable, and the man behind it to be Larry, trying to set his brother free. There was not enough evidence to try him for it.

Three years later Cummins escaped from Berrima Gaol by crawling through 120 yards of sewer, only to be recaptured within months. Released in 1876, he lived out his days in Victoria under another name, as a drover and whipmaker, and died in 1909.

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