FELON AND SCULPTOR.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6496, 27 May 1899, Page 2

FELON AND SCULPTOR.

A TALE OF BENOICOv (Mdbonnte Argus.) The romance of the early digging' days was not all of gold. There are strange stories of men, too,' in those old and vivid pages of Australian history. Many of them have been told; one at least- is worth retelling. It almost rivals in interest the remarkable story of Rufus Dawes in Marcus Clarke's tale,. " For the Term of His' Natural i Life. It might almost have served, indeed, | to inspire that story of wrong and martyrdom. , . . . It was in 1853 that the first Bendigo Cup was run, and "Gentleman "Bond, so well known in Melbourne afterwards as a sporting journalist and handicapper, won it on Abd-el-Kader. It was a cup of 300 guineas, given by the Government; officials on Camp Hill. There was a steeplechase; too, for which treinendoiis log' fetfees "had -'been built, and the onlookers marvelled at the ease with which a young bushman took a mere pony over these stiff and towering jumps. It was the beginning of a strange life history for the young bushman on the pony. Landing over one of these fences he bumped *' Bendigo Mac," the famous police magistrate, who was riding by. . Many tales are told of Bendigo Mac's remarkable memory, and the readiness with which he identified a Port Arthur or Norfolk Island man amongst the diggers brought before him. As a matter of fact, it was alL.a- bit of ingenious make-believe, the story of which will ba told in duo course. It is true though, that. Lacblan MacLachlan, P.M., or " Bendigo Mac," became a tremendous power on old Bendigo, and every digger with a past feared him. All the same, he made some sad mistakes. ••■ When this young man, in exultation of youth and daring, cannoned against Bendigo Mac, the autocrat of the gold-fields iustantly ordered his arrest. ".Nonsense!" shouted the indignant diggers, who were there in thousauds; "it was an accident." Some bolder spirit shouted, "Let's rescue him." There was a rush of blue shirts and clay-stained corduroys, and the prisoner was released. Better for him had he left Bendigo then for ever. A few months later, amongst a batch of diggers brought before Bendigo Mac on a Monday morning were two who. had had a stand-up fight in the street of a Saturday night, and were charged with disturbing the peace. The Magistrate- recognised in one of them the youth who had been in collision with him on race day, : and gave him three months' imprisonment for' an offence as common, on the diggings' Hs lighting one's pipe. Indeed, the usual, curt decision in such cases, " Finvd 40s ; take him away," became such a by- word that Charles Thatcher, who sang at the Shamrock concerts, made it the. theme of one of his best-known songs. No distinction was made between the civil offender, the petty, misdemeanant, 1 and the. desperate criminal. All alike were jumbled together 0n... Prison Hill — Vandemonian3 and bushrangers cheek by jowl with the sufferers from a mere spree. The police who guarded them .saw no distinction, which sometimes led to FURTHER MISCHIEF. Thus it came about that : a posse of troopers on their way to the Ovens one day met a young man riding a fine black horse down the Sydney Road. One of the constables had been on Bendigo nob long before, and recognised in the horseman one over whom he had kept guard in a prison gang. " That man is a, Bendigo criminal," he said; "he has stolen that horse, for a million !" The rider was asked for an explanation., and gave one, which seemed lame and improbable enough iv those free-handed days. The horse had been lent to him by a Mend in Bendigo, the only condition being that he took good care of it. The rider was arrest«d, and sent to Bendigo for trial. There the man he had mentioned stepped into the box, and verified his story as to the horse being lent him, but Bendigo Mac ordered his instant arrest for perjury. It would take too long to follow in detail the strange history of a man against whom Fate had taken so distinct a prejudice. The day came, however, when, for the first time, he committed a crime, and then under extraordinary circumstances. Released from Pentridge, he was tramping it to the diggings with his swag, when, just outside Castlemaine, he was stricken down with colonial fever, the scourge of the gold-digger. He lay, dying almost, in his tent by the roadside, when a party came by with a dray, and amongst them were some Pentridge expirees. Recognising in the sick man. a fellow prisoner, they, with better charity than their. reputations perhaps would have promised, lifted him, tent and all, on to their dray, and .took him to Epsom Flat.. .- As he lay. there recovering from fever, he heard his companions plotting to stick up and rob a Bendigo bank manager, who was expected to ri3e down the Epsom road" on a particular night. Then came a strange lapse from the honesty he had hitherto observed, aud in which he had received such scant encouragement. He had always been a daredevil, even in the days when he rode his pony over the big log fences. He had associated much with criminals since thai time, and had learned to look ligiitly upon crime. Whatever the impulse — it was one which he himself could never explain — he determined to forestall his companions in the robbery. It requires a great faith in the man to believe that his motive was not the common one of loot, "though the after circumstances in some measure support the belief. However, while still suffering from the fever, he got up quietly one night, took a pistol, went down to a ionely spot on the road, and there bailed up the bank manager and robbed him of £500 in cash. Of this sum lie divided £480 amongst the men who had succoured him, took £20 for himself, and started down the road for Castlemaine. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and then for the first time in HIS .. CHEQUERED CAREER entered a' prison to undergo a punishment that was justly due. The work of brutansrng a man had been made complete,, though philanthropists may find in the process a moral that may be of value even. now. It was a long sentence this time, for the crime was serious, and many years elapsed before those who knew something of his experiences on Old Bendigo heard anything of him again. It is the sequel to this story -with part of which, perhaps, readers of "The Argus" are familiar One day Mr Panton, P.M., went out to 1 entridge to visit an old friend— the governor- of. the prison. They dined tog w? r i that night as they smoked and chatted, the governor tossed some papers across the table to his guest. "This is worth reading," he said. "It is a prisoner's confession, or, rather, the story of his life. 6 J^ mance th e most of it,' I dare say, but still a strange story." Mr Panton read .it, was interested, and said so. " But toU -dpivt- -believe . it; . suvelyr- .his-: friend" rehasi'in'ade him ie xceeojr|^;:;dubiqus-;of;.p^soners' pathetic ;tales. y-iiiey.-. .w.t}r e . not- alV'^j&ims oKxar.cumstance—«ia ijio^< of .-tho^v^ast -masters 'in guile. I honestly believe every word of this to be true," was the P.M. 's answer. "I know that tho greater part of it is true, because some of the events described happened under my own eyes. When I find events with which I am officially familiar so accurately described, why

should I not accept the whole' of Git as a truthful' narrative?" '-'■ Inquiries as to the character of the^ felon showed him a peristent breaker of prison tegulwtions in small things. Indeed; he' had' in this way' greatly multiplied ' his original | sentence, and with the ill-luck that : followed him, had won a bad record on trifles. He' was continually secreting 'old knives or chisels, or any tool he eonld get hold of. "Show its Dawes's latest," said the governor to a warder. ■■ His name was not Dawes, of course, but' it will •do as well. The warder brought in the little carved bust of a woman found illegally in. the possession of Prisoner Rufus Dawes. It had been chiselled ' by the> man Himself out of stone— not out) of the officers' quarters. The fact was tha* -this ill-starred man, wire had never had .an boor's tuition in art,: Had developed a natural gift' for sculpture —it was his passion; his hobby, bis one object in life. For this purpose he filched tools and broke prison.; regulations — an ; innocent enough purpose, God knows— but it was not recognised in tie bond. The governor/was .... .. ■ . .","'."'. .' : ~.-' ■'"-'••'" A' GOOD AND JOSTJCAN, . greatly ■wrapped up hr questions of prison discipline and routine, and with no great sympathy for art, either in the crude or culitured form. Mr Pantoo, on the other hand, had, as we know, always dabbled in it as a hobby. From his pen and pencil have come many etchings which are now valuable memorials of the stirring early days. He was attracted at once by the merit of the little carving. "This may, be' a breach of prison •regulations," .he. said, "but it is not a crime; it; is art — or.sometliing very little short of it. This man interests me." Mr Panton not only interested himself in the felbn sculptor, he interested the governor also, and. Rufus Dawes was brought in. "Now, look here, No- 54," the official said,-. " if I give you; a. little^shop to yourself in the yard, where you can go on with this work without interruption will you promise to behave yourself for the future, and respect the regulations?" 1 "If you'll do that, sir," was the answer, " I'll promise you that never again while I'm in Pentridge shall I wilfully break even the smallest of the' regulations." So the bargain was made, the sculptor was given his chance, and made the most of it. After' all it was not so strange that this man, who had known nothing of art,. should discover the bent of his genius while, immured .in a prison. All the , little distractions of life — except the ever-present struggle for tobacco — were removed .from him. , He had.abundant time for self-examination. If it were possible to so suddenly isolate all men,. there would be fewer " mute inglorious Miltons," though hardly more Cromwells. . The trivialities of life are possibly art's worst enemy. When Mr Panton next visited Pentridge on his official duties he found that Rufus Dawes had planned a fountain, the drawings of: which he had prepared. In the original design it was somewhat ambitious —and included a bronze Cupid, but the resources of Pentridge did not run to bronze;— and the sculptor had to modify his schemes and keep to basalt! Of this there was abundance. Both in its natural and manufactured state it ..was. the chief product of the prison. He was just then modelling some arum lilies for his fountain. His plan was to pin them on to a piece of brown paper with the stem in water, and then, with no preparatory modelling in clay, to ' carve them from. the solid bluestone. But. THE POOH. PRISONER WAS IN DESPAIR. He had got his arum lilies, bnfc what of the eagles and a baby Cupid. "Til see to the eagle," Mr Panton said— and he got an eaglehawk stuffed in the. required, poise. "Surely some of the warders would bring one of their youngsters for a. model for the Cupid." "Ah, no!" said the despairing sculptor. "You see I've got a bad name with the warders. Given them a lot . r* trouble in .my time, planting away .bits o stone and stray tools that I wanted, to work on. None of ''em would bring their youngsters for me to model./ -.Not, likely.'.' ''Then I will promise you a model," said his new patron. .He called upon Ins friend,, a late superintendent of police, whose wife was an intellectual woman. She had in her. care just then a nephew, a little toddler, who is now the young pastor of a Oiiurch of England in one of the Melbourne suburbs The P.M. told the lady the whole story, and said, "Now, are you game to take that little chap up to Pentridge as a model iur this poor beggar?" "With all" my heart, was the <*ood-nattiral response ; as c.teu as may be required." It was not necessary, however. The Rev Mr S— -s spent none of his youth in prison. When the warders heard that a. real lady-a society woman---was willing to bring her baby to be a model for this troublesome fellow, Dawes— m'spite of the fact that he had so often broken the regulations-they, too, forgave him. All the children in the prison wouTd sit for him if he needed them, and thereafter he S3 no scarcity of models The founts upon which he was engaged— his first bit of work-was set up afterwards m the spare mot of ground between Parliament and TrVasurv^mldings, just behind the Gordon Monument. It is there still— AN INTERESTING MEMENTO OF A STRANGE CAREER. Later, Mr Panton and Mr L. L. Smith interested themselves in securing the prisoner's release, and for a while the doctor" had him at work in. a little studio behind his house in Collins Street. Afterwards he started business as a modeller and sculptor in one of the suburbs, married a pretty little woman, and was happy for a time. But Fate was never long kind to the poor chap. His wife died, and her tomb is such a memorial as love and art alone can build. He has long since been laid beneath the tomb he builded with such solicitude. Much of his work may be seen in both cemeteries, but few know that tile name S— — -d cut at the foot of it covers such -a strange, eventful history. , " His wreaths of ro9es cut in marble are .often exquisite. Some of his, best carvings— now yellow with years. and grime and rahY— are marble tablets thrown into' relief against a basis of blue basalt. The angels of Love and Hope and Mercy, that he so often carved, have in them often the true touch of genius, though, there rimsfc have been times when this man doubled greatly the influence of auy good spirit on earthly things, and distrusted most of all the blindfold goddess with the sword and scales. Much of his work has, by a fault in the setting, fallen into disrepair, especially where graves have been long neglected. It was the custom then— following a plan favoured in Scotland-^-to set the tombs and railings in sulphur 'instead of lead. It did very well in the cold Scottish climate, but in semi-tropical Australia it was disastrous. Stones have baen burst asunder and tombs wrecked as though by the mad fury of a. mob. Even here chance has deprived the eouTict-sculptor of half his laurels— the" grass is growing rank over them. If ever man was the, sport. of pircumstahpes it was surely this inati. Such, m brief, is the sfcory of a man who, under, a luckier star, might have been bom to greatness. Fate, .in unkind mood, robbed him, . iiofc only, of the chance of fame, but. denied , him even the privilege of being an honest man. ."