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DIGITIZED BY PETER KILLACKEY
This restless mate of Brady's was the terror alike of settlers and aborigines. In a work now preparing by the writer upon the "Black War of Van Diemen's Land," the name of Dunne appears in bloody association with the story of the wild man's wrongs. The year 1826 was the
period of this monster's cruelties. He was not always cruel.
One time, entering a hut near the junction of the Ouse and Shannon, where three men were sitting, he directed one to tie the other two, and then prepare him tea and fry some chops. After despatching his meal, he loaded the man with 50 Ibs. of flour, 20 Ibs. of sugar, and other necessaries, and took his departure. On another occasion he stole a fine dog belonging to Mr. Thompson, Magistrate of New Norfolk. Going up to that gentleman's sheep station, he bailed up the men, killed one of the sheep, threw the dog a leg, and then told the hut-keeper to deliver this message to his master :--"I have stolen his dog and fed him with his own mutton."
There is one horrible deed attributed to this man, but which is, by some, charged to the account of Carrots, another Bushranger. Anxious to get hold of a rather good looking gin of the natives, he encountered some obstacle from the husband. The musket removed the impediment. The poor woman wept bitterly at the death of her husband, and refused to go away from the mutilated body. The brutal Bushranger cut off the man's head, drilled a hole through it, and suspended it by a string around the neck of the outraged wife. Drawing his knife, he drove her onward at its point to his bush retreat--the den, indeed, of a tiger.
Once closely pursued by constables on the Macquarie Plains, between New Norfolk and Hamilton, Dunne attempted concealment in a haystack, but was discovered and taken to Hobart Town. He appeared on the scaffold in a singular costume,--a long white muslin robe, with a huge black cross marked thereon, before and behind; his cap was of a similar character. He walked with the rosary in his hands. The assumption of a devotional demeanour, the theatrical striking of his breast in mock humility, and his well intoned ejaculations of "Lord, deliver us," greatly moved the ignorant crowd of fellow felons before him. His admirers presented him with an elegant cedar coffin, and the remains of this much respected individual were followed to the grave by one hundred sympathisers. In such esteem were the bold acts of this villain regarded, and such were the demonstrations of approval in the early days of Van Diemen's Land.
In that epoch, when the bond and free were equal in numbers, the vast majority of the latter had only recently emerged from the state of bondage, and had still all the sympathies of the prisoner class. The scaffold of the Old Bailey, or the cart of Tyburn, has been greeted with
cheers by a vast multitude of the most civilized and Christian nations of the world, when some hero of the highway appeared with nods for his palls and smiles for his girls, and his guinea and bright buttons for Jack Ketch.
We need not be surprised, then, at the favourable opinion cherished for the condemned bushranger by his fellow-felons. The bushranger was, in general, looked upon as a sort of a martyr to convictism. It was he who bad experienced the shame, the lash, the brutal taunt, from which they had suffered. It was he who rose against the tyranny of their prison despot, and the dread consequences of their criminal law. It was he who was the bold Robin Hood of their morning songs, and it was he who was now the unfortunate victim of legal oppression, the captured of the chase.
Without denying the atrocities of his career, they would discover many extenuations for his crimes. His reckless daring would be the noblest chivalry; and the jovial freedom of his manners, the frankest generosity. His immoral jests would be treasured for posterity, and the eclat of his life and death would stimulate the worthy ambition of sympathising souls. The very gallows had a charm ; and the language of Byron's Corsair aptly describes the last sentiment.
" Let him who crawls enamour'd of decay,
Cling to bis couch, and sicken years away,
Heave hia thick breath, and shake his palsied head!
Ours--the fresh turf, and not the feverish bed.
While grasp by grasp he falters forth his soul,
Ours with one pang--one bound--escapes control."
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