In A Nutshell
Joseph Bolitho Johns, or Moondyne Joe, was born in Wales around 1826. After committing petty theft, he was sent to the penal colonies of Australia, where he found himself in and out of prison for the rest of his life—literally. He just kept escaping. Eventually he was given his own special cell, made just for him. He escaped that, too.
The Whole Bushel
Joe’s criminal career began in his home country, Wales. One night in 1848, Joe and an accomplice decided to break into a house in order to steal some bread, cheese, and bacon and were quickly caught by a cop while escaping. Joe’s punishment may not have been as harsh as it was if it wasn’t for Joe’s insistence that he defend himself in court. Surprisingly, a man who was arrested for stealing cheese wasn’t that good at litigation. He was sentenced to ten years and shipped off to the penal colony of Australia, arriving at Fremantle in 1853.
Upon arrival, Joe behaved himself, so he was given a ticket of leave and was eventually pardoned. Sometime later, he was arrested for branding a stray horse—this was seen as a fairly serious crime in Colonial Australia. He was jailed but quickly escaped and took the branded horse with him. By the time the police caught up with him, he’d killed the horse and cut off his brand. This meant that the police could only charge him for jailbreaking (a three-year sentence instead of the harsher one he would have received for the horse branding).
Joe was eventually released early for good behavior. But it wasn’t long before he was up to his old tricks and was soon accused of killing and eating a neighbor’s ox, a charge he denied for the rest of his life. He promptly escaped police custody and the 10-year sentence he faced with another prisoner and began committing petty crimes like robberies across the country. Around this time he picked up the name that would stick and be splashed across the papers: Moondyne Joe, borrowed from the stretch of hill country where he holed up.
Joe was eventually caught near York with a stolen firearm. He was clapped in irons and sentenced to 12 months. However, he somehow managed to cut through the irons and escaped again. After some more petty robberies he was back in police custody. But this time the prison was ready. As well as giving Joe an additional five years of hard labor, they built him a special “escape-proof” cell of stone, lined with heavy jarrah railway sleepers and studded with more than a thousand nails, meant to be nearly airtight and lightproof. Governor John Hampton, who ordered it built, is said to have taunted Joe that if he got out of this one, he would be forgiven.
However, while carrying out his hard labor in the yard—breaking rocks with a pickax—Joe piled the broken stone high enough to hide himself from the guard’s view and simply dug a hole through the prison wall. That was in 1867, and it took nearly two years to catch him again. The next time Joe showed up, he was rummaging through the vineyard of a wealthy man who just happened to have a group of policemen over for a wine tasting. He ran straight into them and probably cursed his luck for the next week.
Hampton’s rash promise more or less caught up with the authorities. After serving out more of his sentence, Joe was granted a ticket of leave in 1871 on the understanding that he stay out of trouble. And for the first time, he did. More than twenty years elapsed, mostly without incident, before Joe was next in trouble. A confused, disheveled man in his seventies was found wandering through a town. He was picked up for vagrancy and sent back to finish his sentence at a jail he’d been at decades earlier. Despite not being of sound mind—by now he was slipping into senile dementia—he quietly managed to slip out and escape a further three times. He died on 13 August 1900 at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, aged about 74, by then cemented as the man no prison could hold.
Show Me The Proof
West Australian Vista: Moondyne Joe
Joseph Bolitho Johns “Moondyne Joe”
