Commended: Non-Fiction, Raymond Clarke
Raymond W Clarke is the author of material for the Australian Government archives, six novels and two non-fiction books. As a passionate writer of Australian history, his articles have been published in a variety of magazines, journals and newspapers. His historical novels Hannah and Out of Darkness are relevant to Australian colonial history and the arrival of the convict ships during the period 1788 to 1868. He tutors creative writing and lives in Brisbane, Australia.
The Bushranger's Lady
The life story of Mary Ann Ward, the wife of the notorious bushranger, Captain Thunderbolt, is one of legend and mystery and one of the great love stories of Australia’s turbulent early history.
Mary Ann Bugg came into the world at Gloucester, New South Wales on the 7th of May 1834, the daughter of convict James Bugg and Elizabeth, an Aboriginal woman of the Worimi clan. In 1839, in accordance with the then Government policy, Mary Ann, as a ‘half-caste’ child, is sent to the Orphan School in Parramatta. Here she receives the basic education of the day, becoming proficient in reading, writing, sewing, and cooking. Warm, friendly and strikingly attractive with long dark hair, brown skin and deep brown eyes, Mary Ann is a keen student, but her heart yearns for the land of her birth and her people in far off New England.
Released in 1846, she returns to Dungog to begin work as a domestic. Here she meets a convict overseer Edmund Baker and at the age of fourteen marries him and moves to a sheep station near Mudgee where fate changes her life forever. The owner, Mrs. Sarah Shepperd, is regularly visited by her brother, a tall, handsome, personable young man and an expert with horse handling and quick wit. Perhaps it is love at first sight or an attraction that grows with each visit but Mary Ann would undoubtedly have thought about this showy stockman as she lay in the bed of the man she married. Likely, she would retain a memory of him long after he rode away back into the bush and perhaps whisper his name . . . Frederick Ward . . . a name that, within a few years, would be replaced by that of Captain Thunderbolt, Bushranger.
She hears of him as the years go by. His criminal career begins in earnest with a ten year sentence to Cockatoo Island for stealing horses. While he is in jail, Mary Ann’s husband dies suddenly and destiny leads her down another path. Putting it all behind her, she leaves the sheep station and moves back to Dungog. On release from prison, it comes as no surprise that Ward searches for Mary Ann from town to town before finding her in Dungog. After many lost years, a partnership begins . . . a love affair that binds them together in a spirit of adventure, one that will rock the colony of New South Wales, infuriate the police and forever put them both into the history books.
In late 1860 they marry at Stroud, south of Gloucester, and settle down to honest work, Fred to his horse-breaking and Mary Ann to her domestic duties. A year later, a pregnant Mary Ann watches in anger as Fred is again taken by the police and charged with horse stealing. Fred is returned to Cockatoo Island to serve the remainder of his sentence plus an additional four years. One month later in October 1861, a daughter, Marina Emily Ward, is born at Stroud and after the baby is weaned, Mary Ann moves to Balmain in Sydney to be near her husband.
At night, she swims across the dark, shark-infested waters to the island carrying food and other items, including files to free his chains. There remains some belief that she established rapport with one of the guards. On the 11th of September 1863, she repeats the swim for a last time, returning with her triumphant husband and another prisoner. She hides them in the boiler room where she works while they wait for the outcry to die. In the dark of the night, Mary Ann and Fred Ward flee north to the land they know so well . . . New England. The die is cast. There is no turning back. For the next few years the exploits of Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady would frustrate the police and place a large reward on the head of Frederick Ward.
Let us re-examine Mary Ann Ward, the Captain’s Lady, as the fascinated newspaper editors are naming her. The year is 1864 and she is 30 years old. She has cropped her beautiful long, black hair to better fit under the cabbage tree hat, wears moleskin trousers, wellington boots, and a stockman’s shirt but, despite the roughness of the garb, remains a vivacious, alluring woman. An Aboriginal acquaintance of the Wards has described how Mary Ann rides astride a cob horse as she moves to and from Thunderbolt’s camps and how she often leads another horse or two and sometimes three. The saddle bags are loaded with clothes and food and, on occasions, she would carry a half-carcass of a newly-killed beast, that she has hamstrung using a butcher’s knife on a stick. Sometimes, she would bring her two children, cozily placed in baskets tied to the pack saddle. From this description can be appreciated Mary Ann’s supreme riding skills, her natural inherited knowledge of the bush and her determination to help, in every way, the man she loves.
Captain Thunderbolt, as he is now named, roams far and wide from Bourke in the west, north to Tenterfield and south to their familiar area of Dungog, Armidale and Uralla, evading the police, bailing up coaches, inns and stealing horses but never shooting or injuring his victims. Mary Ann would have none of that. Her Aboriginal heritage rejects killing by the very firearms that decimated her ancestors. Thunderbolt is helped by the Kamilaroi and Worimi Aboriginal people and sympathetic settlers. Mary Ann follows him deep into the bush from camp to camp and saves him from capture on occasions by her deep knowledge of and sensitivity to life and movement in the bush.
In March 1865, she is taken by the police after warning Ward of their approach. While he escapes, she resists furiously, reputably tearing the shirt of one trooper to ribbons, taunting others for their cowardice and threatening them with ‘Fred’s revenge’. The police place her in custody at a nearby sheep station but Ward will have none of this. He returns the favour that she bestowed on him in 1863 at Cockatoo Island and rides in to rescue her and their children and once again they vanish into the safety of the bush.
In March 1866, Mary Ann is arrested at a hill above Stroud. She escapes using all her trickery but is eventually tracked to a remote camp near Nundle, arrested and charged with vagrancy. She stands in the dock, baby in her arms and head held high as the guilty verdict is delivered and is moved to the jail in East Maitland. She is released a few weeks later, after a public outcry from sympathetic settlers and officials, much to the frustration of the police.
The strain of her turbulent life is telling on Mary Ann. Under constant observation and harassment by the police and in all types of weather, she continues to follow Fred Ward from camp to camp, riding long distances, often racing her horse down the steep gullies and fleeing minutes before the arrival of the police. Her health deteriorating and sick with pneumonia, she leaves her children with friends to once again meet her husband at a camp on the Goulburn River, to the west of Muswellbrook. She is very ill. She knows it and so does he. In desperation and anguish, he leaves her lying on a blanket over a bed of leaves and rides to a nearby station homestead for assistance. The station owner uses a cart to bring a comatose Mary Ann down the rough two mile track from the mountain. She dies just as the sun comes up the following morning, a doctor and a police constable arriving mere minutes after her death. Frederick Ward rides away from the lonely hillside known as Bells Mountain and back into the bush. The date is the 12th of November 1867 and he has lost his soul mate.
Thunderbolt continued to roam the bush of New England dodging the police for a further three years before meeting a bloody end at Kentucky Creek, south of Uralla, on the 25th of May 1870. Fred Ward died in the murky waters of the creek from the bullets of Constable Alex Walker of the Uralla police. The author who visited the scene of the killing in Kentucky Creek found the site retaining a sense of mystery and an uncanny presence.
Mystery indeed still surrounds Thunderbolt’s death as it did with many aspects of his and his wife’s lives. There is a police report that ‘Fred Ward’ was sighted at the Glen Innes races three days after his reported death and was chased by police but evaded capture. Again, there is a claim that the body buried in Uralla Cemetery is that of his uncle Harry and that Ward himself fled the country by ship to San Francisco and later died in Canada. Differences of opinion concerning the validity or otherwise of Thunderbolt’s death, as shown in Constable Walkers’ report, still remain.
Nevertheless, the love story of Fred and Mary Ann Ward still touches the romantic heartstrings of Australians, more than a century and a half after the ending of their bush-ranging adventures. The stories that have emerged of the larger-than-life characters of Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady remain a colourful and near unbelievable segment of our historical past and a realistic portrayal of the hard, raw existence typical of those who lived in the Australian bush in the mid-19th century.
It is difficult not to feel admiration for Mary Ann Ward. Perhaps the spirit of this young Aboriginal woman who followed, supported, and ultimately gave up her life for the man she loved survives in the bush of New England, where together they rode, loved and laughed. It would be fitting to believe so.
Appreciation:
Mary Ann Bugg came into the world at Gloucester, New South Wales on the 7th of May 1834, the daughter of convict James Bugg and Elizabeth, an Aboriginal woman of the Worimi clan. In 1839, in accordance with the then Government policy, Mary Ann, as a ‘half-caste’ child, is sent to the Orphan School in Parramatta. Here she receives the basic education of the day, becoming proficient in reading, writing, sewing, and cooking. Warm, friendly and strikingly attractive with long dark hair, brown skin and deep brown eyes, Mary Ann is a keen student, but her heart yearns for the land of her birth and her people in far off New England.
Released in 1846, she returns to Dungog to begin work as a domestic. Here she meets a convict overseer Edmund Baker and at the age of fourteen marries him and moves to a sheep station near Mudgee where fate changes her life forever. The owner, Mrs. Sarah Shepperd, is regularly visited by her brother, a tall, handsome, personable young man and an expert with horse handling and quick wit. Perhaps it is love at first sight or an attraction that grows with each visit but Mary Ann would undoubtedly have thought about this showy stockman as she lay in the bed of the man she married. Likely, she would retain a memory of him long after he rode away back into the bush and perhaps whisper his name . . . Frederick Ward . . . a name that, within a few years, would be replaced by that of Captain Thunderbolt, Bushranger.
She hears of him as the years go by. His criminal career begins in earnest with a ten year sentence to Cockatoo Island for stealing horses. While he is in jail, Mary Ann’s husband dies suddenly and destiny leads her down another path. Putting it all behind her, she leaves the sheep station and moves back to Dungog. On release from prison, it comes as no surprise that Ward searches for Mary Ann from town to town before finding her in Dungog. After many lost years, a partnership begins . . . a love affair that binds them together in a spirit of adventure, one that will rock the colony of New South Wales, infuriate the police and forever put them both into the history books.
In late 1860 they marry at Stroud, south of Gloucester, and settle down to honest work, Fred to his horse-breaking and Mary Ann to her domestic duties. A year later, a pregnant Mary Ann watches in anger as Fred is again taken by the police and charged with horse stealing. Fred is returned to Cockatoo Island to serve the remainder of his sentence plus an additional four years. One month later in October 1861, a daughter, Marina Emily Ward, is born at Stroud and after the baby is weaned, Mary Ann moves to Balmain in Sydney to be near her husband.
At night, she swims across the dark, shark-infested waters to the island carrying food and other items, including files to free his chains. There remains some belief that she established rapport with one of the guards. On the 11th of September 1863, she repeats the swim for a last time, returning with her triumphant husband and another prisoner. She hides them in the boiler room where she works while they wait for the outcry to die. In the dark of the night, Mary Ann and Fred Ward flee north to the land they know so well . . . New England. The die is cast. There is no turning back. For the next few years the exploits of Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady would frustrate the police and place a large reward on the head of Frederick Ward.
Let us re-examine Mary Ann Ward, the Captain’s Lady, as the fascinated newspaper editors are naming her. The year is 1864 and she is 30 years old. She has cropped her beautiful long, black hair to better fit under the cabbage tree hat, wears moleskin trousers, wellington boots, and a stockman’s shirt but, despite the roughness of the garb, remains a vivacious, alluring woman. An Aboriginal acquaintance of the Wards has described how Mary Ann rides astride a cob horse as she moves to and from Thunderbolt’s camps and how she often leads another horse or two and sometimes three. The saddle bags are loaded with clothes and food and, on occasions, she would carry a half-carcass of a newly-killed beast, that she has hamstrung using a butcher’s knife on a stick. Sometimes, she would bring her two children, cozily placed in baskets tied to the pack saddle. From this description can be appreciated Mary Ann’s supreme riding skills, her natural inherited knowledge of the bush and her determination to help, in every way, the man she loves.
Captain Thunderbolt, as he is now named, roams far and wide from Bourke in the west, north to Tenterfield and south to their familiar area of Dungog, Armidale and Uralla, evading the police, bailing up coaches, inns and stealing horses but never shooting or injuring his victims. Mary Ann would have none of that. Her Aboriginal heritage rejects killing by the very firearms that decimated her ancestors. Thunderbolt is helped by the Kamilaroi and Worimi Aboriginal people and sympathetic settlers. Mary Ann follows him deep into the bush from camp to camp and saves him from capture on occasions by her deep knowledge of and sensitivity to life and movement in the bush.
In March 1865, she is taken by the police after warning Ward of their approach. While he escapes, she resists furiously, reputably tearing the shirt of one trooper to ribbons, taunting others for their cowardice and threatening them with ‘Fred’s revenge’. The police place her in custody at a nearby sheep station but Ward will have none of this. He returns the favour that she bestowed on him in 1863 at Cockatoo Island and rides in to rescue her and their children and once again they vanish into the safety of the bush.
In March 1866, Mary Ann is arrested at a hill above Stroud. She escapes using all her trickery but is eventually tracked to a remote camp near Nundle, arrested and charged with vagrancy. She stands in the dock, baby in her arms and head held high as the guilty verdict is delivered and is moved to the jail in East Maitland. She is released a few weeks later, after a public outcry from sympathetic settlers and officials, much to the frustration of the police.
The strain of her turbulent life is telling on Mary Ann. Under constant observation and harassment by the police and in all types of weather, she continues to follow Fred Ward from camp to camp, riding long distances, often racing her horse down the steep gullies and fleeing minutes before the arrival of the police. Her health deteriorating and sick with pneumonia, she leaves her children with friends to once again meet her husband at a camp on the Goulburn River, to the west of Muswellbrook. She is very ill. She knows it and so does he. In desperation and anguish, he leaves her lying on a blanket over a bed of leaves and rides to a nearby station homestead for assistance. The station owner uses a cart to bring a comatose Mary Ann down the rough two mile track from the mountain. She dies just as the sun comes up the following morning, a doctor and a police constable arriving mere minutes after her death. Frederick Ward rides away from the lonely hillside known as Bells Mountain and back into the bush. The date is the 12th of November 1867 and he has lost his soul mate.
Thunderbolt continued to roam the bush of New England dodging the police for a further three years before meeting a bloody end at Kentucky Creek, south of Uralla, on the 25th of May 1870. Fred Ward died in the murky waters of the creek from the bullets of Constable Alex Walker of the Uralla police. The author who visited the scene of the killing in Kentucky Creek found the site retaining a sense of mystery and an uncanny presence.
Mystery indeed still surrounds Thunderbolt’s death as it did with many aspects of his and his wife’s lives. There is a police report that ‘Fred Ward’ was sighted at the Glen Innes races three days after his reported death and was chased by police but evaded capture. Again, there is a claim that the body buried in Uralla Cemetery is that of his uncle Harry and that Ward himself fled the country by ship to San Francisco and later died in Canada. Differences of opinion concerning the validity or otherwise of Thunderbolt’s death, as shown in Constable Walkers’ report, still remain.
Nevertheless, the love story of Fred and Mary Ann Ward still touches the romantic heartstrings of Australians, more than a century and a half after the ending of their bush-ranging adventures. The stories that have emerged of the larger-than-life characters of Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady remain a colourful and near unbelievable segment of our historical past and a realistic portrayal of the hard, raw existence typical of those who lived in the Australian bush in the mid-19th century.
It is difficult not to feel admiration for Mary Ann Ward. Perhaps the spirit of this young Aboriginal woman who followed, supported, and ultimately gave up her life for the man she loved survives in the bush of New England, where together they rode, loved and laughed. It would be fitting to believe so.
Appreciation:
- Uralla ─ McCrossins’s Mill Museum and the Information Centre.
- Armidale ─ the Archives of the Heritage Centre,
- University of New England.
