General News
23 November, 2024
Barry's Corner
I got to thinking about the difference in policing from the 1800s to the 2000s and how things have changed. The modern Police have long reaching radios, fairly new station to work from with access to a comfortable divvy van with air conditioning.
Compared with the horse days where a patrol might take a number of days camping in isolated places with no communication to the outside world. In 1891 a worker at Pine Plains was instructed to go and find a missing dog trap. After a lot of searching he found the trap with a man ensnared by three fingers and laying dead in the bush. The worker considered if the dead man had his health in better shape he could have released himself.
By backtracking they did not find a swag and the tracks left from the dead man suggested he had been walking with one foot in the hollow of the track and one on the outside higher section. It was also thought the man had been crawling along the road and caught his fingers in the trap.
He was named as Charles Sweeney. He had one hundred and fifty pounds sewn into his jacket wrapped in water rat skin.
An inquest was conducted by Mr Dreher JP at Netherby with the finding that Charles Sweeney was found dead on the Kul Kyne rd from privation.
PC Albert Charles Batty hired a two horses and a buggy to shift Sweeney to Netherby where he is buried.
Inquests were often conducted by a station owner or manager on the isolated properties and to have police based at Netherby in that era seems amazing in todays thinking, while Netherby must have had a sustainably higher population or been a bit lawless.
There were a lot of deaths in the bush of workers, shepherds and others who had no hope of any medical help. Some of these have a known grave many have lost any recognition after fires burned the wooden markers.
At some sites there might be a marked grave with unknown people buried nearby but names lost forever. The Police working at that timed faced unrealistic expectations and working conditions and were widely separated across the state. Early on the nearest town was Ballarat, then Ararat,
Stawell, Horsham and in the 1880s and 90s before Rainbow was established. Suicide often kept the police and coroners busy