Joseph Bolitho Johns, Convict "Pyreness" 1853 [Bushranger Moondyne Joe]

Joseph Bolitho Johns (c. February 1826 – 13 August 1900), better known as Moondyne Joe, was an English convict and Western Australia's best-known bushranger. Born into good circumstances that would have deteriorated after the death of his father, Blacksmith Thomas Johns in 1833, he became something of a petty criminal robber with a strong sense of self-determination. He is well remembered as a person who had escaped multiple times from prison. He would go on to be remembered in word and song in Australia.

Little is known of Joseph Bolitho Johns' early life. Born in Cornwall, England, around 1826 and raised as a Wesleyan [Wikipedia incorrectly claims that he was raised Roman Catholic, but there is no evidence for this at all], he was the third of three children of blacksmith Thomas Johns (1799–1833) and his wife Mary Bolitho (1804–1860). Joe was a tall man with black hair and hazel-coloured eyes, and it is likely that he contracted smallpox in his youth as, later, records describe him as "pockmarked". His father died some time in 1833, and Johns and his older brother took work as copper miners. In 1841 the family was living at Porkellis, Cornwall [Census records], but by 1846 Johns had migrated to Wales, taking work as an iron ore miner, probably at the Clydach Iron Works.

In 1846 he was in Gaol for the first [known] time; 1846 Bodmin Gaol, Cornwall Joseph JOHNS aged 20, Birth place Wendron but lately of Lostwithiel, single, miner. Discharged from Bodmin Prison in 1846 [Cornwall, England, Bodmin Gaol Records, 1821-1899. From records at Cornwall Records Office, sighted online at Ancestry]

Back in Wales, 1849 23 March 1849 at Breconshire, Wales Joseph Bolitho JOHNS convicted of theft of bacon, cheese, mutton & fat.

He found himself at Dartmoor Prison in October 1851 alongside John Williams who had both been convicted of burglary and stealing and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude.

About two years later, he stepped aboard the prison ship Pyrenees for transportation Western Australia to serve out the remainder of his sentence. He would then be moved to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).

Pardoned for good behaviour, he was back in jail in 1861 after stealing a horse and then breaking out of jail – something which would become a theme.

Johns was jailed for another 10 years in 1865 after being accused of killing a horse – something he would deny for the rest of his life.

He went on the run with another prisoner later the same year, committing a number of small robberies while on the run. During the spree he adopted the name Moondyne Joe after the area where he lived.

Back in jail in Perth he got a further six months in irons for trying to cut the lock out of his door. In 1866, he escaped again and committed his biggest robbery in a bid to track to the colony of South Australia. He was caught 190 miles north east of Perth.

Despite having a “escape-proof” cell built for him and being kept with his neck chained to the iron bar of a window, he would go on to escape again.

Ordered to break rocks in the yard, he would occasionally strike the prison wall instead. The hole was big enough for him to escape, again, in 1867.

At large for two years, he was caught again trying to steal some wine. He was finally freed, having failed to copy a key and escape again, in May 1871.

His bush skills and escape talents, made him a legend in Western Australia where an annual festival is still held every year in his name. He has also been the subject of a children’s book and numerous songs. He died in 1900.

Joseph Bolitho Johns (1826-1900), bushranger known as 'MOONDYNE JOE', was born in Cornwall, son of Thomas Johns, blacksmith. He became an ironworker in Glamorganshire and on 23 March 1849 was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for larceny. He was transported to Western Australia and arrived at Fremantle on 1 May 1853.

Granted an immediate ticket-of-leave and in 1855 a conditional pardon, Johns by 1860 was living in the Toodyay district. Suspected of rounding up and branding cleanskin horses, working from an isolated gorge on the Avon River known as Moondyne Springs, he was arrested on a charge of horse stealing in 1861. While awaiting trial he escaped from Toodyay gaol but was recaptured to serve three years' imprisonment. Released, he was again sentenced in 1865 to ten years for killing an ox with the intent of stealing the carcass. Determined not to serve this long sentence and protesting his innocence, Johns from November 1865 to March 1867 made four attempts to escape, three of them successful. With two companions, he was once at large for two months in the unsettled Darling Range. Recaptured he was placed in irons in solitary confinement in a specially reinforced cell with triple-barred windows at Fremantle gaol. Allowed out for exercise on medical advice, he escaped again in 1867 through a clever trick and for two years roamed the hill country east of Perth. He was recaptured while raiding a wine cellar and sentenced to a further term in Fremantle prison. He was released in 1871 and gained his conditional pardon in 1873.

After his release Johns became respectable and worked in the Vasse district as stockman and timber-feller and at Fremantle as carpenter and shipwright. He is reputed to be the discoverer of one of the Margaret River caves named after him. In 1879 he married a widow Louisa Frances Hearn, née Braddick, who died in 1893. In 1900 Johns was finally ordered to the Mount Eliza depot for the destitute and because of increasing senility was transferred to the Fremantle asylum where he died on 13 August.

Moondyne Joe is popularly described as Western Australia's only bushranger of note. No Ned Kelly, he neither held up mail coaches nor attacked banks; he raided poultry runs, visited half-way houses and perhaps stole horses. Yet through his determined bids for freedom against the harsh prison discipline of the convict period he became a romantic figure in the eyes of the public. His small triumphs over authority inspired John Boyle O'Reilly, a Fenian convict who escaped from Western Australia to the United States, to write in 1887 a novel on convict life in Western Australia featuring a fictitious and highly romantic Moondyne as central character. The twentieth century has seen further romantic legends grow around his name.