A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: LAW AND ORDER ON THE DIGGINGS, 1865-1869

Thefts and murders were common on the goldfields of the West Coast. Only a minority of those crimes were ever picked up by police and law courts. Thieves roamed freely from field to field. Five highwaymen, for example, their faces masked, made away with an astonishing £4000 after holding up a bank on the road between No Town and Twelve Mile. A draper was robbed of gold, notes and cheques worth £1400 by masked men with a shotgun one day near Totara Flat.[i] And a ‘sticking-up case’ caused ‘a sensation’ in 1866 when three masked highwaymen committed robbery under arms at Blackball.[ii]
     The robbery began one afternoon when Henry Hammett, owner of the store on the flat, heard his dog bark and looked out a door. The next thing he saw was ‘a double-barrelled gun presented to his head.’ Two other men, one with a single-barrelled gun and the other a revolver, stood further back. The masked men ransacked the store. Hammett and two customers in the building at the time of the crime were tied up with flax. Only one of the three robbers was brought to court. Robert Stone, found guilty of robbery under arms, was sentenced to six years’ penal servitude.[iii]
     The two most well known highwaymen in the district were murderers as well as thieves. One was an Irishman, Thomas Noon alias Kelly. The other was an Englishman, Richard Hill alias Burgess. Joseph Sullivan, another Englishman and a fellow highwayman, wrote that the Burgess gang murdered men wholesale.
     ‘It appears that the number of victims,’ noted a shocked editor, ‘is nearer thirty than twenty.’[iv]
     Others in the neighbourhood seem to have been murdered by other gangs. A man whose dead body was found by travellers one day in 1869 ‘on one of the beaches near the Blackball Creek’ led a newspaper to say there was ‘something fearfully suggestive’ in the large number of ‘accidental deaths’ in the district.[v]
     Diggers dealt with crime on the goldfields by taking justice into their own hands, in a democratic way. The first diggers to get to a field would hold a meeting to talk over and vote on an agreed code of ‘digger law.’ Although unwritten, these laws were very effective in bringing wrongdoers to book. The system was one of acknowledged understandings. Claim jumping, for example, was most often dealt with on the spot. A big gathering would be called when a crime was more serious. The diggers would choose a judge and jury. We know of no such event in Blackball but one famous digger trial took place in 1867 at nearby Moonlight. A man was caught robbing a hotelkeeper of her cashbook. The miners chose a judge and jury. After ‘a fair trial’ the man was found guilty and driven off the field subject only to ‘a little personal chastisement.’[vi]


[i] Latham, D J, The Golden Reefs, Christchurch 1984, p. 192.
[ii] Evening Post, 28 May 1866.
[iii] Grey River Argus, 26 July 1866.
[iv] West Coast Times, 13 July 1866.
[v] Grey River Argus, 9 October 1869.
[vi] West Coast Times, 20 August 1867.