Garry Linnell - Moonlite: The Tragic Love Story of Captain Moonlite and the Bloody End of the Bushrangers

A gay bushranger with a love of poetry and guns.
A grotesque hangman with a passion for flowers and gardening.
A broken young man desperate for love and respect.

These men two of them lovers are about to bring the era of Australias outlaws to a torrid and bloody climax.

Moonlite is the true and epic story of Andrew George Scott, an Irish-born preacher who becomes, along with Ned Kelly, one of the nations most notorious and celebrated criminals.

Charismatic, intelligent and prone to bursts of madness, Scott captivates churchgoers with his fiery sermons before dubbing himself Captain Moonlite , brazenly holding up a bank and staging one of the countrys most audacious jailbreaks.

After falling in love with fellow prisoner James Nesbitt, Scott finds himself unable to shrug off his criminal past. Pursued by the police, he stages a dramatic siege and prepares for a final showdown with the law and a macabre executioner without a nose.

Meticulously researched and told at a cracking pace, Moonlite is set amid the violent and sexually repressed era of Australia in the second half of the 19th century. With a cast of remarkable characters, it reveals the extraordinary lives of our bushrangers and the desperation of a young nation eager to remove the stains of its convict past.

But most of all, Moonlite is a tragic love story.

For these are the dying days of the bushrangers and Captain Moonlite is about to make his last stand.

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

The evening of 19 January 1880

Come now. On this mild summers night let us gaze upon two men who have known what it is to love and be loved, to hold and be held, and who now have only death for companionship.

In his small cottage near the city, with its arch of hanging grapevines out front and lush vegetable garden out back, Robert Rice Howard takes out his clay pipe, lights it and begins to pace the floor.

Plumes of tobacco smoke fill the room with clouds of spice and sweetness. That old familiar feeling has returned. His stomach is churning. His mouth is dry. He thinks to himself. Has he done everything needed to hang a man? He goes through his checklist. He has already boiled the rope. He and his assistant have stretched it, too. The pair of them then sat down and soaped it, working the lubricant into every strand of the hessian. Bob is a craftsman who knows his reputation depends on the attention he pays to the little details. A rope not immersed in water and stretched will retain a great deal of spring. Worse, a rope not vigorously massaged with a bar of soap might prevent the noose slipping easily into place. And that could lead to all sorts of mishaps.

Bob cant have that. Too many people important people, like the politicians and prison officials who keep him in his job are counting on him to get this right. A mistake on the gallows in front of dozens of them tomorrow morning the knot incorrectly placed behind the left ear, or the drop and the weight of the condemned man poorly misjudged would be... unfortunate .

It would lead to even more criticism and assaults on his professionalism and character.

Bob is no stranger to the slights and cruel barbs of his fellow man. Is there a job in the world that carries more stigma than the role of state executioner? Bob likes a drink. That is true. In the days leading up to an execution nerves will sometimes get the better of him. Locals will often spy him clutching a lamppost for support after downing one too many. Hes a big man with an even bigger appetite. But many pubs will no longer serve him a beer, and those that do often smash his used glass so it will not taint the lips of other drinkers.

Why, he still burns with the memory of that night not so many years ago when the Sheriff, Mr Charles Cowper, invited Bob into his home to help his wife prepare a dinner party. Bob had never been one to turn down an opportunity to earn a few more quid. He took on the role with his usual gusto and enthusiasm. He polished the silverware. Helped the cooks in the kitchen. Made sure the place was spotless. But when the guests learned the executioners death-stained fingerprints were all over their cutlery, they rose together and angrily demanded he be removed. An embarrassed Mr Cowper was forced to ask him to leave.

A man needed a thick skin to persist in such a vocation. No point becoming bitter whenever you walked into a room and all conversation stopped, or good folk saw you coming down the street and quickly crossed to the other side.

Who could blame them? They all read the newspapers, which had been hurling insults Bobs way for years. But few, surely, had been as cruel as those that appeared in print just a few months earlier when Bob presided over the hanging of a young man in a small country town.

Journalists are a bloodthirsty mob eager to entertain their audiences with the most grotesque details of a man swinging from a rope. But being the good bloodhounds they are, they have caught a whiff of change in public sentiment and are campaigning fiercely. Whipped into a frenzy of righteous indignation by preachers and other do-gooders, polite society has now determined that capital punishment for anything less than murder is a crime before God, the act of an uncivilised nation.

In Sydney, thousands had taken to the streets, walking solemnly in time to the beat of Handels Dead March on muffled drums. They had signed petitions and gathered in growing fury to oppose the impending execution of Alfred, an Aboriginal man convicted on flimsy evidence of the rape of a 60-year-old woman. While the crowds prayed and lit candles and called on the Governor of New South Wales to show compassion, Bob had taken a train and then a Cobb & Co coach to Mudgee to carry out the governments orders and oversee the hasty erection of the gallows.

He arrived to discover a town on edge. The governor of the local gaol was racked by guilt over the impending hanging and was drowning his self-loathing in whiskey. The local carpenters had no experience putting together a scaffold and Bob had to pay attention to every little detail, overseeing the placement of every beam and nail. Sandbags weighing roughly the same as Alfred had to be stitched together so the execution could be rehearsed and the drop for the body accurately measured.

A reporter for one newspaper opposing the hanging stole the rope that Bobs assistant had brought from Sydney. A new one had to be quickly found, stretched and soaped.

On a bitterly cold morning just after nine oclock, Bob and his assistant had escorted Alfred to the gallows. Despite all the obstacles and setbacks, the hanging went smoothly. Alfred, baptised hastily overnight as a Christian, had been dispatched to his new God with a minimum of fuss. Bob could once again take pride in his work.