Finding the truth in the shades of grey
Amateur historian and tour guide Craig Lawler reckons the real gold to be found in the Central West is in our past.
Come all of you Lachlan men and a sorrowful tale I'll tell,
Concerning of a bushranger who to misfortune fell.
His name it was Ben Hall, and a man of high renown,
Who was taken from his homestead and like a dog shot down.”
So rings the opening bars of the Australian folk ballad The Streets of Forbes, the popular song telling of the death one of Australia’s most well-known bushrangers.
This is the version of the story that most Australians might know, but like anything else when you dig a little deeper, things become less black and white, a lot more complicated and certainly a lot more interesting.
“I feel I've got to correct the record,” says Craig Lawler, standing in Canowindra’s main street, the location of many exploits attributed to the bushranger gang of Frank Gardiner, Johnny Gilbert, Ben Hall and accomplices.
Craig, a natural storyteller with an incredibly detailed knowledge of Australian colonial history, is the founder and operator of Blind Freddy’s Bushranger Tours.
A journalist, teacher and former rock band roadie, Craig left Sydney for the small Central West village of Gooloogong in 2006 where he became fascinated with the history on his doorstep.
“I started researching about these stories and realised they were an absolute goldmine of great Australian colonial history,” says Craig.
“Our ‘Wild West’ in Australia is here in the Central West of NSW. And these stories are rich! They are fantastic stories, interesting characters, interesting times — the country transitioned from a penal colony to a society it is an interesting time and Canowindra is right in the thick of it.”
After devouring books on the topic such as Frank Clune’s Wild Colonial Boys, Craig started more detailed research, made possible thanks to the National Library of Australia’s vast, publicly available resource: the Trove Newspaper Archive.
“With the newspaper archives so easily available and word-searchable and date searchable and the ease of access, it means I'm able to test all these stories,” says Craig, who quickly found that the popular depictions of Ben Hall don’t always fit with the historical record.
“Some of the stories make sense and some of them don't make sense, but the deification of Ben is a cultural phenomenon rather than a historic one,” says Craig.
“He is a powerful cultural figure and I see the power of these things… and I'm of that political stripe myself, I like rebellious figures, but for me to tell these stories properly I have to bring it back to first principles, so to speak, and look at what actually happened at the time through as many primary resources as I can…
“People are very keen to ascribe all the romantic heroic aspects of the bushrangers of the period to Ben Hall when it's not really his mantle to take. Ben is part of the gang, he's there and his story is interesting and I don't mean to demean him, but in order to tell the story truthfully I have to point out he is not the leader of the gang, he is not always heroic, he is not always a nice guy, he's not always a tempering influence on the rest of the gang and he never killed anyone because he's a s--t shot!”
Too often Australian history is presented in a cartoonish, two-dimensional way, says Craig, when the real story is invariably more nuanced and more interesting.
And with a figure like Ben Hall looming so large in our cultural consciousness it means other characters in the story get less attention than they deserve, such as Frank Gardiner, Johnny Gilbert and the oft-maligned Sir Fredrick Pottinger — the disgraced baronet who doggedly pursued Gardiner and Hall’s gang without success.
“The shades of grey are far more interesting to me and I think it does these people a disservice on the whole to not give everyone a fair shake,” says Craig, whose affection for some the characters in his stories comes through in the telling.
“Within these stories Pottinger is a rouge, Gardiner is a rouge, Ben Hall is a Rogue, Gilbert is a rogue — they are all villainous! There are no heroes in these stories really, that's why I find them interesting characters… Gardiner and Pottinger are my favourite characters, because their lives are the most interesting. They provide me with the fodder to tell stories and that's what I'm doing — I'm a storyteller. I just like to know what happened and convey that to people with a sense of entertainment, but also accuracy.”
Craig established Blind Freddy’s Bushranger Historical Tours eight years ago, and today offers short walking tours in Canowindra to full-day explorations of the major bushranger sites in the district.
He’s also about to release his own historical podcast under the Blind Freddy brand.
“I think we don't make as much as we perhaps should about our colonial history in NSW and certainly in this part of the world,” says Craig.
“I'm glad I do what I do. I really love it as you can probably tell. And I think it’s good to be able to tell these stories in the places where they happened — not many people do that and it is a unique experience. You come on these tours and go to the actual places where the actual events happened… and you get to hear someone bang on at you about what actually happened!”