Moondyne Joe: The Bushranger No Australian Prison Could Hold

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Joseph Bolitho Johns was born in the 1820s, probably in Cornwall, the son of a blacksmith who died young. Smallpox scarred his face and poverty sent him into the mines as a boy. In 1848 he was caught with three loaves of bread, a piece of bacon, and some cheese, argued with the court instead of bowing to it, and received ten years of penal servitude. After Pentonville, Dartmoor, and the prison hulks, he was shipped to Western Australia aboard the Pyrenees, arriving at Fremantle in 1853 with a ticket of leave.

This episode follows his turn from conditional freedom in the Avon Valley, where he trapped stray livestock for reward money, to a string of escapes that embarrassed the colony. A horse branding charge in 1861 and a ten-year sentence in 1865 for killing a steer, a crime he denied for life, set him against the system for good. Fremantle Prison answered with a cell lined with jarrah sleepers and a thousand nails, and Governor John Hampton mockingly promised forgiveness if he ever got out of it.

• After breaking out of the Toodyay lockup he stole back the horse held as evidence, took the magistrate's new saddle, and cut his brand from the hide so he could not be charged with horse theft.
• Aboriginal tracker Tommy Windich ran him down in the bush, and a later plan to trek overland to South Australia ended nearly 300 kilometers northeast of Perth.
• Set to break limestone in the prison yard, he let the rubble pile hide him from the guard and used the sledgehammer on the wall, slipping out in March 1867.
• He stayed free for nearly two years, then was caught in February 1869 in the cellar at Houghton Winery, where the owner had just invited a party of police in for a drink.
• Governor Frederick Weld honored Hampton's promise in May 1871. Johns died in the Fremantle asylum on August 13, 1900, and his tombstone carries the Welsh word for freedom.