The Gold Escort Robbery Trials
Australian History Reference True Crime Legal History Colonial Crime Bushrangers Gold-Rush Era
The Gold Escort Robbery Trials by Noel Thurgood is the definitive account of Australia’s most sensational colonial-era heist, the 1852 hold-up of the gold escort near Blackwood, Victoria. In this scarce 1988 first-edition hardcover, Thurgood uses surviving court transcripts, newspaper reports and family papers to reconstruct how a small band of bushrangers relieved the escort of almost 4,000 ounces of gold and £1,200 cash—then vanished into the bush. The book follows every twist of the manhunt, the dramatic arrests and the marathon trials that followed, laying bare the legal cat-and-mouse between Melbourne’s best barristers and a colonial government desperate to show it could police its new-found wealth.
What makes this volume stand out for collectors and historians alike is its textbook-level detail: maps of the original coach route, facsimile witness statements, biographical sketches of the jurors and a roll-call of the gold-buyers who fenced the bullion. Thurgood’s narrative is fast-paced enough for true-crime devotees yet footnoted like a reference work, making it ideal for senior-school projects, university Australian-history courses or family-history researchers chasing 1850s Victorian connections. A vintage Kangaroo Press binding and the surviving dust jacket add shelf appeal to researchers and rare-book lovers.
Because copies seldom surface in tidy, readable condition, this inscribed (but otherwise unmarked) example is a pragmatic buy. The binding is square, the pages are clean and un-creased, and the dust jacket is bright—light shelving wear is the only clue that it has spent three decades on a private shelf rather than in a library. For anyone building a collection of bushranger, gold-rush or colonial-crime titles, The Gold Escort Robbery Trials is the missing cornerstone that turns a shelf of general histories into a specialised, authoritative library.
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