Black Bunny's Bushrangers (T) - The Clarke Brothers Braidwood. Braidwood, New South Wales, Australia
By Just a cacher on 15-Oct-17. Waypoint GA10804

Bushranger Series - The Clarke Brothers.

The Clarke Brothers.

Thomas and John Clarke were made famous for a string of robberies in the mid 1800s. They began stealing from small targets like lone travellers and farmers, before moving onto bigger targets like trains and coaches transporting gold and silver.

The beginning of the end came when they were implicated in the murder of 5 police officers, who were tied to a tree and shot dead.

Just weeks later, the rest of their gang perished in the outback, so that only the brothers remained. This lowered their chances of survival if the police caught up to them. The police soon did, and the Clarke brothers were forced to surrender after a shoot-out.

They were hanged to death soon after.

http://eskify.com/10-deadly-australian-outlaws-bushrangers/

Brothers Thomas (c. 1840 – 25 June 1867) and John Clarke (c. 1846 – 25 June 1867) were Australian bushrangers from the Braidwood district of New South Wales. They committed a series of high-profile robberies and murders which led to the embedding of the Felons' Apprehension Act (1866), a law that introduced the concept of outlawry in the colony and authorised citizens to kill bushrangers on sight.

Active in the southern goldfields from 1865 until their capture, Thomas and John were joined for a time by their brother James and several other relations.

They were responsible for a reported 71 robberies and hold-ups, as well as the deaths of five policemen—four of them bounty hunters looking to bring them in.

The Clarkes also murdered one of their own gang members and a man they wrongly assumed was a police tracker, and shot several other victims. They were captured during a shoot-out in April 1867 and hanged two months later at Sydney's Darlinghurst Gaol. Their execution ended organised gang bushranging in New South Wales.

Some modern-day writers have described the Clarkes as the most bloodthirsty bushrangers of all, and according to one journalist, "Their crimes were so shocking that they never made their way into bushranger folklore — people just wanted to forget about them." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke_brothers

Over 2,000 bushrangers are estimated to have roamed the Australian countryside, beginning with the convict bolters and drawing to a close after Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan.

Bushrangers were originally escaped convicts who had the survival skills necessary to use the Australian bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term "bushranger" had evolved to refer to those who abandoned social rights and privileges to take up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base.

Bushranging thrived during the gold rush years of the 1850s and 1860s when the likes of Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner and John Gilbert led notorious gangs in the country districts of New South Wales. These Wild Colonial Boys typically robbed small-town banks and coach services.

In other infamous cases, such as that of Dan Morgan, the Clarke brothers, and Australia's best-known bushranger, Ned Kelly, numerous policemen were murdered.

The number of bushrangers declined due to better policing and improvements in rail transport and communication technology, such as telegraphy. Kelly's capture and execution in 1880 effectively represented the end of the bushranging era.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushranger

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