Joe Governor had been on the run for fifteen weeks when New South Wales declared him and his brother Jimmy outlaws under the Felons Apprehension Act, a law that stripped them of the right to surrender and made it lawful for any armed settler to shoot them dead. The brothers had been linked to a string of killings that winter, nine people dead across the colony, before the manhunt swept north toward Singleton.
At dawn on this day in 1900, brothers Joe and George Wilkinson found Joe asleep on their own property near Singleton and called on him to surrender. He woke, ran, and the men exchanged fire until he fell dead into a waterhole, the chase finally over after months of pursuit.
The coronial inquest that followed did more than clear the Wilkinsons of blame: it congratulated them, with the coroner thanking them for “ridding the country of so dangerous a brute” while the crowd outside broke into cheers. A rumour swept the town that Joe’s head had been removed and preserved for identification; it was false, officials denied it emphatically, but the story continued to circulate.
