Carl Williams was 29 and already dealing drugs when Jason Moran shot him in the stomach on this day at Gladstone Park, in Melbourne, over an $80,000 debt tied to a failed amphetamine batch. Jason and his brother Mark Moran were both present. Williams survived.
He did not forget it. The shooting became the spark for a bloody tit-for-tat campaign that grew into the Melbourne gangland war, a decade of killings across the city’s underworld that would eventually claim both Moran brothers among dozens of others, and send Williams himself to prison before his own murder behind bars.
Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.
At about one o’clock on the morning of 27 September 1869, Sheriff “Wild Bill” Hickok and his deputy responded to a disturbance at John Bitter’s Beer Saloon in Hays City, Kansas. A cowboy named Samuel Strawhun and several drunken companions were reportedly damaging the saloon. During the confrontation, Strawhun made remarks against Hickok, who shot him through the head, killing him.
Hickok maintained that he had been trying to restore order. Despite conflicting witness accounts, a jury at the coroner’s inquest ruled the shooting justifiable. Strawhun was the second man Hickok had killed during his first month as sheriff.
On 1 September 1830, the notorious Irish-born bushranger Jack Donahue, known as one of the Wild Colonial Boys, was shot dead during a confrontation between his gang and mounted police near Bringelly, New South Wales. A party of eight closed to within a hundred yards of Donahue and friends undetected. When the bushrangers spotted them, Donahue pulled off his hat and defied the officers: ‘Come on, you cowardly rascals, we are ready, if there’s a dozen of you.’ After a standoff of nearly half an hour, shots were exchanged. A carbine ball and pistol ball fired by a mounted trooper struck Donahue in the left temple and neck, killing him instantly.
An inquest was held the following day at the Fox and Hounds Bar in Sydney, with his death being ruled justifiable homicide.
Donahue had been one of the most wanted men in the colony for five years as the figurehead of the Wild Colonial Boys. His death ended one of the most romanticised outlaw careers in early Australian history.
Drawing of the body of bushranger Jack Donahoe, c.1830. Attributed to Thomas Mitchell. Lithograph. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Public domain.
Police raided a public house at Cook’s Vale Creek, New South Wales, on 29 August 1863, where bushranger Fred Lowry emerged armed with two revolvers and exchanged gunfire with Senior-Sergeant Stephenson. Lowry, a gaunt six-foot man born in Windsor around 1836 to former convicts, had built a career of horse theft, mail-coach robbery, and prison escape, briefly riding with the Gardiner-Hall gang before forming his own bushranger outfit. Shot in the throat during the exchange, Lowry was captured along with accomplice Larry Cummins, who was found in bed with a loaded revolver. Stolen banknotes from the Mudgee mail were recovered at the scene. Lowry died from his wound the following day. His purported last words, ‘Tell ’em I died game’, cemented his place as the archetypal Australian bushranger.
