Patrick Quigley 1805-1872
One of the many soldier convicts, much bolder than
most,
but a blatherskite of blarney, known for a toast;
a dark-haired, black-whiskered Boglander from
Limerick,
didn’t know his letters but seized time by the
forelock.
Patrick took the King's shilling, enlisting for
nine years as
private in the 17th Regiment of Foot, the
Leicestershires.
A regular absconder in quick sticks, the
lash he oft suffered.
Once bolted from Chatham, flaunting
regimental trousers and a
red fatigue coat, so copped three hundred
lashes, court-martial
and transportation to lags' land, fourteen
years in all. Aboard the
John, for a plug of baccy, a pot of grog he’d do the guard favours.
But charged with insolence gainst master assigned,
John Hall,
the lag was led to revolving steps, the dreaded
treadmill.
On Market Street, Sydney in 1832 this stout-made
tinman
turns shopkeeper, still right desperate to
flee. On the run,
'Your money or your life!' he cries, mock knight
on the road,
clad in ragged slops and smock marked with broad
arrow.
The bushranger stumbles wounded in a red-blooded
clinch
with Joseph Ashford, armed, whose pocket-book he'd
pinched.
Labouring in irons, not to be repressed when
charges pressed:
repeat absconding, bashing with thick sticks,
feigning sickness,
smoking in the stockade, disrespectful language,
pilfering,
exchanging clothes, lingering and malingering . .
.
Yet - marry! - twice spliced at the altar of
hymen..
Michael
Small
June 1-5, 2014
In 1838 Patrick Quigley was sentenced to life
imprisonment on Norfolk Island, but the tinsmith returned in 1845 to Van
Diemen's Land, where he twice married late.
He was pardoned in 1851 and died of pneumonia.
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