Free Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins by Robert Drewe Page B

reward going up to two thousand – and rising.
    Christ, the onslaught. All the city and country papers publishing summonses calling on us to surrender by November 12th. Printing details of the Act on handbills and papering them across the state. Nailing up
Wanted
posters for the Mob to pull straight down.
    And the law turning its attention on Pentridge prisoners who’d known us, making them certain promises. Bill Williamson believing we’d flee into New South Wales through the Buffalo River Valley, detouring to the town of Lurg to collect supplies. Mick Woodyard telling them Joe was certain to be a member of the Gang. Advising them to watch the route from the Wombat Ranges through to Bar-widgee, then to Barnawartha and Howlong, believing we’d cross the Murray at the Bungowannah punt. Not far wrong, Mick, just a bit late off the mark.
    Plaguing our friends and family. Arresting Wild Wright and his brother Tom for threatening language and locking them up, their lawyer pointing out that Tom is better known as Dummy Wright. Being deaf and dumb, he doesn’t use language threatening or otherwise.
    And all this time spying on my sisters. Shadowing them every time they leave the house. Laying strychnine baits for their dogs so the yapping wouldn’t give their spies away. So Maggie’s and Kate’s dogs wear muzzles day and night. And the girls start walking them on leashes, four or five muzzled dogs each, up and down outside the Benalla police station just to drive them crazy. Mad Nicolson even convinced Maggie sends us messages in her washing. The way she hangs clothes on the line must signal things. Right-side-up trousers means it’s safe, he thinks; upside-down trousers means troopers coming; the number of socks hanging up is the number of miles away.
    ‘Well, long johns with the back flap open must mean officers,’ Joe says.
    Maggie then enjoying hanging pants up sideways, shirts dangling by one arm, a line full of corsets.
    ‘Watch it you aren’t gaoled for hanging insulting washing,’ I tell her.
    L OVE TO drive them crazy. Love to amuse ourselves by tracking the search parties out tracking us. This is a cinch, the way they toss away their empty rum bottles and beef tins and snap twigs off trees to pick their teeth and leave pyramids of shit behind every second bush. A mystery to me why they don’t use the blacktrackers more. (All right by me!) The blacks are so good they make my blood run cold. It’s because they’re so good they don’t use them; they don’t want to be shown up. Funny people, police.
    Drives them crazy that we haven’t let the Hunt cramp our style. They call this being
flash
, and now the press has picked up the word. Meaning cockiness and not kowtowing to stuffy English expectations.
Flash
is attending the Whorouly races as usual, playing billiards with Wild Wright, going home to Joe’s for dinner – entering the house using Wall’s Gully – right under the noses of the watching police, and visiting Melbourne regularly to mingle with the horsey set and buy good guns. (Did get a fright, though, wandering around the Melbourne Exhibition, my pockets stuffed with apples, to see Higgins, the Beechworth magistrate, staring straight at me. Not as surprised as Higgins, however, seeing me and my apples jump into a cab and disappear into Bourke Street.)
    Flash
is me secretly marrying Steve’s sister and Joe’s sister and a housemaid in Deniliquin with the exotic name of Madela – or would be if I’d done it like the
Chronicle
, the
Advertiser
and the
Argus
said.
    Can’t see myself being that flash.

R ivers fall again, seasons turn, people suddenly start to crack a smile and wink a certain way and straighten up when they talk about you. Even a lot of our enemies changed their minds about us as soon as we robbed banks.
    Maybe they admired us for acting out their own wishes. Who doesn’t daydream of robbing a bank, of staging a neat, well-mannered crime?
    Like clockwork.
    Six weeks after