The towering bushranger Jack-in-the-Boots was never out of jail for very long. Photo: AI-generated.
Jack-in-the-Boots is one of the Riverina’s best named (and least remembered!) bushrangers, who landed himself in Gundagai jail after picking a fight with the region’s bullock drivers.
Along with the likes of Ben Hall and Frank Gardiner, John Molloy – aka Jack-in-the-Boots – was prowling the inland roads of NSW during the so-called ‘golden age’ of bushranging in the late 1850s and early 1860s.
Exceptionally tall for the time at six-foot-three, Molloy had a penchant for fancy clothing and appears to have been in and out of police custody in the years leading up to his dramatic recapture near Gundagai in 1861.
According to an account in the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser from July, 1861, the notorious bushranger’s “depredations in the southern districts had raised him to the bad eminence of a villain of the first class”.
Molloy had been accosting mail coaches and travellers on the roads between Lambing Flat (Young) and Gundagai, when he picked the wrong man to rough up.
On Friday 7 June, the flashily dressed Molloy had come across a bullock driver named George Finney and reportedly shot at him before robbing and beating him.
Word spread quickly among the bullockies, and three young drivers tracked the bushranger to a nearby grog shanty where he was “swelling it about the place in an elaborate toilet [outfit] including buckskin gloves”.
One of the men named John Holloway was an acquaintance of Molloy and sidled up alongside the pistol-wearing thief while his mates eased in behind.
Holloway seized hold of Molloy while the other two “rushed on him, and having succeeded in throwing him, bound him hand and foot, hard and fast, with their silk sashes”.
The thief was dragged outside and secured to a dray with a chain while one of the men headed for Gundagai and the police.
Molloy was soon under lock and key and threatening to murder his captors as locals from across the district came to town hoping for a glimpse of the notorious highwayman.
But as the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser reported, “the clanking of his leg irons may now be heard every day as he strides up and down the gaol yard, – a sound which says for the comfort of all but himself”.
The correspondent concluded that “the government, on the recommendation of the Police Magistrate of Gundagai, has handsomely rewarded the captors of this ruffian”.
In September 1861, John Molloy was convicted of robbery under arms, and sentenced to eight years hard labour but later had his sentence halved and secured early release from Cockatoo Island in October 1865.
“Jack-in-the-Boots” was soon back on the road and up to his old tricks in the south-west with an accomplice named James Marshall.
In May, 1866 the Gundagai Herald reported that two men bailed up Mr Keane’s Hotel in Coolac armed with a revolver and a double-barreled pistol.
One was tall, the other short and both were described as having a dark complexion and thin features and wearing tall wellington boots. One had a panama hat and short-waisted “monkey jacket” while the taller of the two wore a battered cabbage tree hat.
After relieving the dozen or so patrons of their silver and searching the rooms for more, the thieves became generous and shouted drinks for their prisoners.
One man named Ryan tried to catch them by surprise and the publican was almost shot by mistake.
The shorter of the two thieves “evaded his grasp, and levelling the pistol, fired, the bullet happily missing its mark, and going so close to Mr Keane’s face as to singe his whiskers”.
Taking their stolen silver and a bottle of gin, the bushrangers warned that anyone caught following them would “have their brains blown out”.
The police were soon hot on their heels and days after the holdup a pair of troopers named Cranmer and Jones fired on them as they attempted to flee in the hills near Carcoar.
Molloy was shot in the hip and thrown from his horse as Marshall spurred his mount away into the bush. The wounded outlaw ran towards a nearby creek fumbling at his belt but was unable to draw the loaded revolver before the troopers were on him.
Less than 12 months after his release, Jack-in-the-Boots was patched up and dragged back before a judge who sentenced the unlucky thief to 12 years on the roads.
