Black Bunny's Bushrangers (T) - John Caesar Oolong, New South Wales, Australia
By Just a cacher on 04-May-19. Waypoint GA10810

Bushranger Series - John Caesar

John Caesar.

John Caesar (1764 – 15 February 1796), known as Black Caesar, was the first Australian bushranger.[1][2] He was also the first black person with an African background to come to Australia. He was the first bushranger to have a reward offered for his capture.[1]

On 29 April 1789 he was caught stealing food. Two weeks later he escaped into the bush, taking food, an iron cooking pot, and a musket (gun) taken from a sea army officer (Marine) named Abraham Hand. He could not catch enough animals to eat, and he began to steal food from the settlement. On 26 May he stole food from a brick making gang at Brickfield Hill and was nearly caught. On June 6 he tried to steal food from Zachariah Clark, who was the assistant in charge of the new colony's food supplies. Caesar was caught by a convict named William Saltmarsh.

In 1795 Black Caesar ran away for the last time, and formed a gang of runaways. On 29 January 1796, a reward of five gallons of rum was offered by Governor John Hunter for his capture. Every day there were reports of missing things, but he was able to avoid being captured until 15 February. A man named Wimbow, who had been searching for days, found him in an area of thick bush called Liberty Plains and shot him. He died soon after.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caesar

Bushrangers.

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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