Sydney Morning Herald (5)
When Mr John Sadleir left his Irish home and came to Melbourne in the Great Britain 51 years ago he intended to go on the land.
However, fate decided otherwise. No sooner did he reach his destination than he joined the Police Cadets, and remained in the Victorian force for almost half a century. His was a life full of incident and adventure, a life, moreover, which witnessed tremendous changes in the development of Victoria and brought him into contact with many notabilities now dead and gone. Its story is told in "Recollections of a Police Officer," a fascinating book, which gives a graphic picture of the works and days of a member of the force in those far-off times.
When Mr Sadleir joined the cadets the Victorian police was in rather a bad way. The great increase of population had made it impossible for the authorities to be very particular about the character of the recruits. Many were survivors from the old regime In New South Wales and Tasmania, and were, generally speaking, idle, drunken, and corrupt. The Police Cadets, however, were men of a different stamp altogether. They were mostly well-bred fellows, with a taste for adventure. "There were barristers, attorneys, ex-bank managers, medical students; others had seen service in one or other of the Continental military forces. One had been a colonel in the Turkish service; another had served with de Lacy Evans in Spain; while others had seen service in the Austrian army, and used to tell in broken English of the fighting they had shared in."
Soon the author was transferred to Ballarat. These were the roaring days of the diggings, and the police had plenty of work. The usual fraternity of crime had assembled; moreover, there were the famous "digger-drives" to see whether all had mining rights. Also the police had to come to the rescue of the unfortunate Chinamen, whom the miners delighted to harry. The author was not present at the Eureka Stockade affair, but he participated in other stirring episodes, and he has much to say about some of the figures who were prominent in the official and social life of the period.
Mr Sadleir gives a very full account of the doings of the Kelly gang, and mentions that it could have been suppressed much earlier but for the incapacity of those in responsible positions. It appears that "Captain Moonlite" and his followers offered to join forces with the Kellys, but the latter, fearing treachery, rejected the overtures. Had their decision been otherwise the police would have had a more formidable task. Mr Sadleir was in at the death at Glenrowan, but he falls to see any romance in the affair. Indeed, like most who know anything about it, he tears away a little more of the glamour which surrounds bushranging. These knights of the road were fustian rogues at the best of times. "The Kellys," he writes, "in spite of a few successful enterprises, were as poor and unheroic as any of their kind. The more one reflects on the circumstances of their enterprises, the more one wonders at the timidity and faint- heartedness of the people they had to do with, and that made these successes possible. That the Kellys should be able to round up like sheep large numbers or men at Faithful's Creek and Glenrowan, and worse still, a whole township like they did at Jerilderie, is not a pleasant subject for reflection."
Mr Sadleir goes on to give us an account of Gippsland in the 'Sixties', he tells us the inner history of certain affairs in which the police were involved – as, for instance, their escape from the retrenchment of Black Wednesday, and of the way in which a riot was averted during the great maritime strike. But it is impossible to follow him further through these interesting pages. They are the record of a varied and exciting career, and though a policeman's lot may not be a happy one, it seems at any rate to have its compensations. (G Robertson and Co)
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