William Douglas: The infamous bushranger

Hard drinker, bandit, prize-fighter and reader of skulls. MEG FOSTER unravels the myth of "Black Douglas", whose life of crime across 19th-century Australia made him a target of lynch mobs and the popular press

- MEG FOSTER

In May 1855, hundreds of Victorian gold miners moved to lynch a gang of alleged murderers and thieves. The Alma goldfields in the Australian colony of Victoria saw between 100 and 400 diggers set out to punish a nefarious criminal, named Black Douglas, and his brothers in crime. They knew Douglas as a dastardly goldfields’ entity, a black colonial bogeyman accused of a slew of serious crimes including violent robbery and (though all evidence suggests he wasn’t guilty) the murder of a white woman on the diggings at Avoca. The lynching was averted after a policeman convinced the miners it was in their best interests to bring in Douglas and his men to face British justice (Douglas was sentenced to two years’ hard labour). “It will give very general satisfaction to the public to be informed that the career of this notorious criminal and his mates in crime has sustained a check,” declared one report.

Douglas was renowned as a “bushranger” – a bandit who robbed to survive and hid in the Australian bush on the run from the law. While some white bushranging men gained assistance and local fame for their criminal deeds in this period, appearing as colonial Robin Hoods to some of their working-class supporters, Douglas was cloaked in infamy. The miners did not concern themselves with the details of Douglas’s life, or verifying the heinous stories told about him. They knew Douglas by reputation as a black man and a criminal, and that was enough for them. But Douglas’s time on the goldfields was just one small part of his epic life story. And there is far more to his tale than immediately meets the eye.