For George the Barber, life ended on hangman’s noose

His life of crime ended on the gallows but George Clarke was a catalyst for early white settlement on the vast North West Plains 200 years ago.

Clarke was a runaway convict, who was 18 years of age when he was transported to the colony for the term of his natural life, having been convicted of robbery, with arms, of goods to the value of 40 shillings.

On arrival in the colony, he was assigned as a servant to Benjamin Singleton, a free settler who had been given a grant of land in the Hunter Valley in 1820, the first white man to settle in the Singleton district, outside the line of settlement.

For Clarke, however, this was his opportunity to regain his freedom, and he fled north into the great unknown, where he was adopted by the Kamilaroi natives, learning their language and customs and crossing land which had never seen a white man before.

Painted black and deeply scarified and in the company of two Aboriginal women, he spent the next five years roaming the valley of the Nammoy (River) as a “white aboriginal” before giving himself up to his master, Benjamin Singleton. Instead of turning him in, Singleton put him back into service.

There, Clarke regaled his master with tales of a great river flowing to the north, called Kindur by the natives. He claimed he had seen it and had twice reached the sea shore while following its course.

Singleton was excited by the prospect of finding the Kindur and he and Clarke and another pioneering settler set off on a private exploration in the hope of locating the river and the rich grazing lands Clarke had described. But along the way, Clarke again absconded, aborting the exploration.

Clarke rejoined the Kamilaroi tribe but was no longer fully immersed in tribal life. According to historical accounts, he was joined by as many as seven other escaped convicts with whom he roamed far and wide on the fringes of settlement, raiding isolated stations for food, arms and horses.

Eventually, he was recaptured and incarcerated in Bathurst Gaol, where he repeated his stories of the Kindur, the great river flowing to the west.

Clarke’s tales aroused the interest of Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Mitchell, who obtained the permission of the Acting Governor Patrick Lindsay to lead an expedition to test the convict’s claims.

Accompanied by a Mr White and a party of 15, mostly convicts, Mitchell left Sydney on November 24, 1831.

But not long after the party set out, Clarke the Barber escaped from Bathurst Prison, sawing off his irons and digging through the wall of his cell, assisted by his native wife.

He was later recaptured and condemned to death.

Meanwhile, by mid-December, the exploration party had reached the Nammoy (later Namoi) at a point which later became the mail centre of Gulligal, between Gunnedah and Boggabri of today, then following the course of the river for six miles downstream before they came across a very large stockyard and campsite on high ground away from the river, which the natives indicated had belonged to George the Barber (Clarke).

Mitchell named the site Tangulda.

From there, Mitchell and his party struck out for the Nandewar Ranges, crossing a stream which he called Maules River, after a friend in
England. He tried to cross the Nandewars but found it impossible and retraced his steps to Tangulda, where he built a sawpit and constructed canvas boats to proceed down the river.

As Mitchell’s diary recorded, however, the boats “ran foul of sunken trunks,” so the party decided to proceed overland.

For two months, Mitchell’s party tramped through the Nandewars and beyond to the Gwydir. Tragedy marred their journey – two members left at a campsite and “apparently stolen upon while they were asleep” (Mitchell’s diary), were killed by natives.

The party, eventually, returned to Sydney, where Mitchell commented that “Clarke’s account of his travels beyond Tangulda … was little else than pure invention.”
Mitchell wrote that he had interviewed Clarke in the prisoners’ hulks in Sydney and was “quite satisfied that he had never been beyond the Nandewar Range.”
After his recapture, Clarke was condemned to death, but this was soon after commuted to banishment to the remote penal settlement of Norfolk Island, reserved for convicts who had been convicted for fresh colonial crimes but spared the gallows.

On Norfolk, the prisoners were worked in irons, harshly treated and regularly bashed – the island was described as “Hell in Paradise” by Marcus Clark in his classic book (1846), For The Term Of His Natural Life, a place of extreme punishment, short of death.

Eventually, The Barber was given another reprieve and sent to Tasmania where he gained his ticket-of-leave, which gave him freedom to move around in a designated area, as long as he regularly reported to authorities.

But, in his new environment, his old ways returned – and the law lost patience with him.

He was hung in Hobart on August 11, 1835, for the armed robbery of William Evans, of Lemon Springs, Oatlands.

In his book, Eastern Australia, published in 1838, Major Mitchell made the observation that: “The Barber was … undoubtedly, a man of remarkable character and far before his fellows in talents and cunning, a man, in short, who, under favourable circumstances, might have organised the scattered natives into formidable bands of marauders.”