Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Page 2
Daylight ocean bathing was a punishable offence on Sydney’s beaches at the turn of the century, with Manly Council enforcing strict hours on when the public could enter the surf. The rule existed to police modesty rather than safety: women’s swimming costumes covering neck to knee were already considered scandalous in mixed company, while men swam nude in some spots without issue.
The council finally abandoned the restriction on this day in 1903, quietly ending decades of fining and shaming bathers for swimming under the sun. It was a small bureaucratic reversal that opened the way for the beach culture that would come to define the city.
Ten convicts, under armed marine escort, set out from Sydney Cove on this day in 1788, bound for a patch of ground at Rose Hill that would later grow into Parramatta. The fledgling colony was starving, its soil poor and its supply ships overdue, and this small, closely guarded party of prisoners carried the desperate hope that convict labour could turn the land self-sufficient before famine finished what the sea voyage had not.
There was no trial, no sentence, no scaffold in this story, only a gamble: that men transported for crimes in Britain could be made into the farmers who would keep an entire penal settlement alive. The ground they broke at Rose Hill became the first successful crops grown on the continent under British rule, and the settlement they built outgrew the colony that sent them there.
Ralph Entwistle was a transported labourer assigned to a farm near Bathurst when he and a fellow convict stopped to cool off in the Macquarie River after a long cart journey. Governor Ralph Darling’s touring party happened to pass by, and though Darling had not even seen the incident, the local magistrate had both men flogged for the affront. Within a year the humiliated Entwistle had turned bushranger, building a band that swelled to as many as 80 men, the largest convict uprising in New South Wales since 1804, known as the Ribbon Gang for the white streamers he wore in his hair.
The rebellion turned deadly when the gang descended on a farm seeking revenge on the magistrate who had ordered the floggings. The overseer, James Greenwood, refused to free the farm’s convict servants and bared his chest, daring the bushrangers to shoot, telling them they were not game enough. Entwistle and two others fired, killing him instantly.
Weeks of gun battles with troopers and soldiers followed before the gang was run down and captured. On 2 November 1830, ten of the bushrangers, including Entwistle, were publicly hanged at Bathurst, six for Greenwood’s murder and four for plundering farmhouses. Their bodies were left on display for a day as a warning before being buried in two mass graves of five.
Abercrombie Caves: Burrangalong Cavern, Rockbridge Creek, 1849 / oil painting by Conrad Martens
John Wayne Glover, who would become known as Sydney’s Granny Killer, attacked 85-year-old Margaret Pahud with a hammer in a laneway near her home in Sydney on this day in 1989, as she walked home from grocery shopping. A schoolgirl passing by found her body within minutes, at first mistaking it for a pile of dumped clothing on the ground.
Glover had taken more than $300 from Pahud’s purse. Within hours he was gambling it away at a local RSL club, a chilling indifference that would mark the string of killings still to come.
