Clarke brothers

Brothers Thomas (c. 1840 – 25 June 1867) and John Clarke (c. 1846 – 25 June 1867) were Australian bushrangers from the Braidwood district of New South Wales. They committed a series of high-profile robberies and murders which led to the embedding of the Felons' Apprehension Act (1866), a law that introduced the concept of outlawry in the colony and authorised citizens to kill bushrangers on sight.

Active in the southern goldfields from 1865 until their capture, Thomas and John were joined for a time by their brother James and several other relations. They were responsible for a reported 71 robberies and hold-ups, as well as the deaths of five policemen—four of them bounty hunters looking to bring them in. The Clarkes also murdered one of their own gang members and a man they wrongly assumed was a police tracker, and shot several other victims. They were captured during a shoot-out in April 1867 and hanged two months later at Sydney's Darlinghurst Gaol. Their execution ended organised gang bushranging in New South Wales.

Some modern-day writers have described the Clarkes as the most bloodthirsty bushrangers of all, and according to one journalist, "Their crimes were so shocking that they never made their way into bushranger folklore — people just wanted to forget about them."

The Clarkes' father Jack, a shoemaker transported to Sydney in 1828 for seven years aboard the Morley, arrived in the Braidwood district as a convict assigned to a pastoralist. He married Mary Connell and took up a leasehold in the Jingeras, which proved too small to support his family of five children. He took to selling sly-grog, initiated his sons Tom and John into cattle duffing, and raised them to believe in his view of the fair and equitable distribution of property. They constantly raided crops and livestock, aided by their uncles Pat and Tom Connell. Their gang, the Jerrabat Gully Rakers, were regarded as scientists in the art of cattle duffing and horse stealing. The Clarke gang of relatives and friends was well trained in bushcraft and heavily armed.

They plundered publicans, storekeepers, farmers and travelers. They ambushed gold shipments from Nerrigundah and Araluen and the coaches that traveled from Sydney and the Illawarra. Till November 1866 they marauded virtually unchecked in a triangle through the Jingeras from Braidwood to Bega, and up the coast to Moruya and Nelligen.

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