This is the latest article in a series written by Nicole Jenkins, on behalf of the Deniliquin Historical Society. Each will cover stories from our town’s history, and those born in our town who have interesting stories of their own. Today’s article is on Captain Francis Melville.
Francis Melville was likely born Francis McNeiss McNiel McCallum in Paisley, Scotland in 1821 or 1822.
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His father was said to be a clergyman of the Presbyterian Church.
Some believed he came from aristocratic blood, but proof is either lacking or the evidence weak. He reputedly studied at Edinburgh College.
In the Perth Court of Justiciary on October 3, 1836, he admitted to having served 22 months all up in gaol for thievery, starting his criminal career at the age of 12.
At 15 he was sentenced to seven years' transportation for housebreaking - another account is that he stole potatoes, or a potato pie, from a countryman’s cart.
Even then he was using aliases such as Edward Melville or Mulvell.
As Edward Mulvell he was sent to Hobart Town on the ‘Minerva’.
He arrived on September 29, 1838, and in the October was placed at Port Arthur in the Point Puer institution for juvenile convicts.
Point Puer was a landmark in British history as the first juvenile prison.
Prior to this, all convicts, regardless of age, were kept together and in the same conditions.
Given that under British law a child as young as eight years-old was able to be tried as an adult, this resulted in many children being brutalised alongside hardened criminals and adult offenders.
Point Puer provided an environment for wayward youths to learn skills and a trade, with emphasis on trades such as shoemaking, timber work, masonry, gardening and construction.
Melville served 18 months at Point Puer, where he was assigned to the timber yards in Hobart.
On September 20, 1840, he was absent from work and displayed insolence towards his guards, receiving 20 lashes.
Later that year his insolence got him another 36 lashes and seven days in solitary.
In 1839-48 he came before the police magistrate 25 times.
On February 22, 1841, he got an additional two years on his sentence.
He first took to the bush in July 1841, taking two older prisoners with him, and lasted out there 5-6 weeks.
They committed burglary and were armed, so were quickly apprehended and charged for bushranging.
They were initially sentenced to death, but Melville was respited and the sentence was amended to transportation for life.
He was sent to Port Arthur for five years and received 36 lashes.
He was recommended for a year's probation in 1846, but he absconded from his service on a farm near Launceston and lived with the Aboriginals for a year.
After recapture he was given nine months' hard labour in chains. He absconded again in January and August 1850.
By the end of 1851, Melville had finally made good his escape by stowing away on the brig ‘Melbourne’.
He was now a scarred and bitter 27 year-old, and he made his way to the mainland and assumed the name Edward Melville.
He reached Victoria about October 1851 and posed as a gentleman.
He tried mining in the goldfields, however by December 1851 he had turned bushranger, using the name Captain Francis Melville.
He claimed leadership of the Mount Macedon gang that waylaid travellers in the Black Forest.
Captain Melville gained a reputation as a man not to be trifled with.
Late in 1851, the gang spent a drunken week in Deniliquin.
There was noone to curb their debauchery, after the local Chief Constable went on ‘urgent business’ to Moama after Melville threatened to ‘cut his ... ears of’.
An old inebriate, ‘Old Jack’, joined in the drinking to the point of becoming belligerent.
One of the gang doused him in turpentine, thinking it was water.
Another, not knowing this, poked a candle in his face and the old man was soon alight.
It’s said Melville, when found dead in his cell in Melbourne Gaol, had scrawled on the wall: ‘I am Captain Melville, but I did not murder Old Jack’.
Melville and his gang proceeded over the river to the Wanderer Hotel (now the site of the Deniliquin North School).
Mr Button, a Devonshire man who knew how to wrestle, challenged one of Melville’s men and won.
Just as Melville’s man aimed a revolver to Mr Button’s head, a stranger pulled up to the hotel.
He had travelled some distance and had a weary horse, and had a considerable amount of money on his person.
Mr Button had a quiet word in his ear. The stranger sat down calmy for the evening meal, and then announced he was going to bed early.
He feigned sleep and could hear the gang tip toeing outside his room.
He crawled out the window, got on his horse, and laid on the whip.
Melville’s gang rushed out, but they were too late.
Captain Melville then instructed his gang to collect all refreshments they felt necessary and led away into the night.
In 1852, he held up Alfred Joyce at Norwood Station and watched for travellers along the western track from the central goldfields across the Wimmera.
There are claims that police almost trapped him near Mount Arapiles, where he had a cave.
During shearing at Wonwondah, he ordered and paid in lordly fashion for having his lost horse found and breakfast prepared.
Charles Carter and his sons, travelling with drays on Fiery Creek Plains, encountered Melville and two companions “with hard-set faces like hawks ready to pounce on their quarry”.
The bushrangers found the Carters' weapons too risky and rode off. They later held up teamsters at Rokewood.
In early November, Melville trailed a digger to Maryvale Station where he robbed him and captured the manager.
Early in December, Melville moved into the Western District.
He rode to the station of a squatter named McKinnon as the sun was setting and let himself in.
He summoned the maid then asked to see the man of the house.
When McKinnon responded, Melville stated that he had heard the man’s daughters were accomplished musicians and requested an impromptu performance.
McKinnon protested that the girls were dressed up ready to go to a ball that evening, and refused to summon the girls.
Melville levelled his pistol at McKinnon, who quickly reconsidered his answer.
The girls were brought down and compelled to play piano with Melville singing along.
However, word had reached the local constabulary and by dawn a party of troopers was on the doorstep.
Melville, quick as a hare, made a hasty exit via a window.
On December 18, 1852, Melville, in company with a mate named William Roberts, performed a stick up Aitcheson’s sheep station near Wardy Yallock.
After rounding up the 16 staff and imprisoning them in the barn, Melville bailed up Wilson, the overseer, and Aitcheson and added them to the prisoners.
After Melville cut a length of rope into pieces, they proceeded to call the men out one by one and tie them up to the fences outside.
When Wilson asked what they wanted, Melville replied, “Gold and horses, and we are going to get them”.
With the men secured, the bushrangers went to the homestead.
Melville told the women not to fear them, as they would “not interfere with women more than necessary”.
He then ordered them into a room and instructed them to prepare food, which was taken with two bottles of brandy to the men.
Melville and Roberts indulged in a meal then ransacked the house, taking any valuables they could grab.
After this, the pair stole two of Aitcheson’s finest horses and gear.
As they were leaving, they informed the prisoners that Mrs Aitcheson would be down to untie them once the coast was clear.
The next day at Bruce's Creek, the bushrangers robbed Thomas Warren and William Madden of £37, but gave them £10 for travelling expenses.
On the 24th, they held up two bush workers at Fyansford.
In Geelong they put up at Christy's Inn in Corio St, dined and visited a brothel.
Melville's boasting and a £100 reward for his capture induced a woman to warn the police.
Alerted, Melville smashed a window and climbed into the street.
He knocked down a policeman, ran toward the Ballarat Rd but was met by Henry Guy on a fine horse.
As he tossed Guy from the saddle, the horse escaped. Guy grappled with him until two policemen arrived.
Roberts had already been arrested and the bushrangers spent Christmas in South Geelong Gaol, Melville under the alias of Thomas Smith.
Captain Foster Fyans committed them on January 3, 1853 for trial before Judge Redmond Barry on February 3.
On charges of highway robbery, horse stealing and assault and robbery, Melville was sentenced to a total of 32 years' hard labour.
Imprisoned in the hulk ‘President’, Melville attempted to bite off a sergeant's nose on June 4.
He was beaten by the warders' 'neddies' and given 20 days' solitary.
On January 20, 1854 he was assigned another month of solitary for “inciting the prisoners to mutiny”.
By the middle of that year, John Price had him transferred to the hulk ‘Success’ and allowed him to work ashore in the Point Gellibrand quarry.
Melville behaved and was allowed to spend three days a week translating the Bible into the Aboriginal language.
But in fact he was planning with a former ship's captain, Billy Stevens, to seize a cutter and sail to Gippsland. Their eight accomplices included Harry Power.
They captured the tow boat, took Constable Owens as hostage and rowed down Hobson's Bay with Melville yelling “Goodbye, at last, to Victoria”.
As the water police and guard boats closed in, Stevens smashed Owens' skull and leapt into the sea to his death.
When captured, Melville is credited with saying “I would sooner die than suffer what I have been subjected to in these hulks in the past four years”.
A Citizens' Committee engaged Dr Mackay to plead the convicts' case, but Melville conducted his own defence before Judge Robert Molesworth on November 19, 1855.
He was charged as Thomas Smith, alias Frank McCallum, alias Captain Melville, and in cross-examination upset police claims that he had murdered Owens.
But Molesworth ruled that all were guilty when a man died while attempting to escape custody.
Melville argued that he had been charged as Thomas Smith - a name he had never used - and was sentenced to work on the roads not imprisoned in a hulk, that a warrant for custody in a hulk did not extend to a quarry and that treatment in the hulks was degrading.
He and two other conspirators were sentenced to death, but the case was referred to the Full Court.
For the trials, the Citizens' Committee briefed RD Ireland, who called the three condemned men as witnesses and secured acquittal of the six.
On December 4, the Full Court concluded that the Crown had not produced a warrant for Melville's transfer from the ‘President’ to the ‘Success’, and thus failed to prove that he had tried to escape from legal custody. The death sentence was respited.
The Melville case made legal history. In 1964, Sir John Barry asserted that it was 'good law'.
Melville was transferred to Old Melbourne gaol where he had “outbursts of fury” and warders were warned not to excite him.
In late July 1857, he attacked Mr Wintle, the governor of the gaol, with a sharpened spoon and causing a deep cut behind his ear.
At dawn on August 12, 1857, a warder found him strangled by a large red-spotted blue scarf, two yards in length, twisted very tightly around his neck – the first turn being made as a slip knot.
The consensus is that he committed suicide, although there is a theory that he was murdered.
There was note written by Melville:
“I am to suffer nothing. My name is not T. Smith, not McCullum. I intend to defeat their purpose and to die in my bed with a smile on my own hand, and this by my keeneys to defeat their most secret intentions, and these steps were taken to give me an opportunity of doing so, as it is in my power to prove that I am not the man I am taken for – F. Melville.”
In 1903, in Mr J F Hogan’s reminiscences of the gold rush days, he told how he made the acquaintance of the notorious bushranger Captain Melville.
In the 1850s he was the terror of the country between Geelong and Ballarat, and plundered a many lucky digger.
His hidden treasure, believed to be many thousands of pounds, has never been discovered.
Melville boasted in the Melbourne Gaol that it was so securely planted that nobody would find it for a hundred years.
Mount Anakie, 20 miles north-west of Geelong, and Mount Doran which is further north – two of his lookouts and hiding places – have repeatedly been searched in vain.
Melville created a legend of the cultured gentleman of good address and scholarship turned highwayman, considerate to those whom he robbed, courteous and charming to women, and a nineteenth-century Robin Hood.
Yet he was a swaggerer courageous behind a brace of pistols and a skilful confident man destroyed by the penal system and his unbalanced character.