The true (and not-so-true) story of the notorious bushranger Frank Gardiner

When Queensland picker Shane Esmond isn’t delving into the bush and backyard sheds looking for rusty gold and vintage wares, you’ll likely find him on the hunt for a different kind of treasure.

An antiques and collectables dealer based near Toowoomba, Shane is a keen fan of Australian history and he has just self-published a new book on the notorious bushranger Frank Gardiner, who terrorised travellers in the central west districts in the 1860s. Gardiner, along with fellow bushrangers Ben Hall and gang, pulled off what is still Australia’s biggest-ever gold robbery; opening fire on the gold escort coach at Eugowra Rocks and stealing 77 kilograms of gold and £3,7000 in cash. Their haul today would be worth more than $4 million and a significant portion has never been recovered.

Details of this robbery circled the globe, making Gardiner one of the first Australians to gain truly worldwide notoriety.

But more than any other bushranger in Australia’s history there is just so much mystery, folklore, and often outright lies, surrounding the life of Frank Gardiner, Shane says, which is what has drawn him to dig deeper into the story in his book, In the Tracks of a Bushranger.

The result of six years of research, the book is full of anecdotes and little details Shane’s uncovered through his research, some of which have not been published before. 

“The story just contains so much folklore and myth and legend and rumours and everything! It just really grabbed my interest and I ended up getting more and more information and thinking, Well, this is a good subject for a book,” Shane says.

Shane was initially drawn to the Frank Gardiner story after discovering that, following the Eugowra robbery, he’d fled from police to the tiny community of Apis Creek in Queensland, just a short distance from where Shane had spent 45 years of his life.

“To find out that one of the most famous bushrangers had lived a stone’s throw away from where I'd grown up… it just really resonated with me,” he says.

But, digging deeper into old newspapers and archives, what then struck Shane was just how much ambiguity and uncertainty there is around even basic details of Gardiner’s life.

Take Ned Kelly for example, he says, most of the details of his life, death and bushranging exploits are largely agreed upon — but not so with Gardiner.

“Frank's story, right from the start, seemed to have a lot more of that myth and folklore in it,” Shane says.

“For every aspect of Frank's story, there seems to be about at least four or five different versions of how it happened and each version can really vary from just a little bit to a massive amount.

“There's conflicting reports about what people said at the time, what people said afterwards, what the descendants of people involved say now.”

In his book, Shane has included many of these little snippets of information; anecdotes and recollections uncovered in old newspapers.

“I found quite a lot of interesting information where people who claim to have known him or know somebody he was associated with had come forward, they'd written a letter to a newspaper and they told these little stories,” he says.

“Some of them may be correct. Some of them might be just folklore, but I just found them really interesting and they just add a different perspective to Frank and the events in his life. “So I think even the experienced Frank Gardiner reader will find a few new snippets of information in my book.” 

Another intriguing aspect of Gardiner’s story is that, unlike most who take up bushranging, he went on to live a long life. In 1974, ten years after he was arrested and gaoled, Gardiner was released from prison on condition of exile and he left Australia for the United States, never to return. It is reported that he died in a gunfight in Colorado in 1903, but even this fact is contested.

“Again there's a whole bunch of different varying stories about when he left here, but we know he lived a fairly long life for those days and there was a lot of adventure all the way through it,” Shane says.

But one of the most enduring and tantalising stories about Gardiner takes place after his death. Around 1910, two young Americans, supposedly prospectors, are said to have been digging near the site of Gardiner’s former home before abruptly departing, never to be seen again.

“The underlying rumour of that is they were Frank's sons. That after he went to America, he married a rich widow and had a couple of sons and he'd left the map with them and they’d come over here later to retrieve his loot,” Shane says.

Like so much else in Gardiner’s story, hunting out those nuggets of truth from the legend is a near-impossible task. But it is the mystery that also makes Frank Gardiner’s story so intriguing, Shane says.

“There's also rumours in the Apis Creek area that those same two guys turned up there and did something similar,” he says.

“Of course, whether or not any of that is true, it's very hard to know. But I just find it really interesting. I love to examine all those different stories and wonder, what if?” 

Anyone interested in a copy of ‘In the Tracks of a Bushranger’ can get in touch with Shane via his Facebook page “Frank Gardiner. In the Tracks of a Bushranger’, text him on 0429 776071 or email shane.esmond@bigpond.com.