ATTEMPTED MURDER IN THE POLICE PADDOCKS

ATTEMPTED MURDER IN THE POLICE PADDOCKS

On the evening of 18th March 1851 a shocking incident occurred at the head quarters of the Native Police Corps at Narre Narre Warren (now known as the Police Paddocks) which ruined the careers of two young officers and commenced a chain of events that ultimately led to the destruction of the corps.

At the centre of the drama were William Walsh and William Dana, the second and third officers in command of the corps.

The following report of the trial was published in The Chronicles of Early Melbourne.

ONE POLICE OFFICER SHOOTING ANOTHER - I8TH MARCH, 1851.

“William Hamilton Walshe was placed at the bar upon an indictment containing four counts, viz:- (i) shooting at Williarn A. P. Dana, on 14th January 1851, at Narre Narre Warren, in the district of Dandenong with intent to murder; (2) with intent to maim; (3) maliciously wounding; and (4) doing grievous bodily harm.

Mr. Stawell appeared for the prisoner.

The parties had been brother officers for six years in the corps of Native troopers.

About 10 p.m., Dana was walking near the Police Station, when Walshe rode up in a state of much excitement, and when three or four yards off Dana, discharged a pistol at him. The ball entering Dana's right side under the ribs, passed through his body. A sergeant hearing the report found Dana stretched on his face and hands, and crying out that he was shot. Walshe was sitting quietly on horseback looking on, having a pistol in his hand. The sergeant turning to the horseman said, " Mr. Walshe! you are a cowardly fellow to do this;" and Walshe's answer was, "I wish more of them were in it."

Walshe then coolly rode off to the stables, put up his horse, and retired to his quarters, where he was found by Trooper Tolmie with a carbine in his hand and "wishing he had another shot at Dana." Though he presented the piece at the trooper he was disarmed, placed under arrest, and subsequently sent for
trial before the Criminal Sessions.

Dana remained for days in a condition of much danger.

It was elicited that the prisoner, who had not been long married, suspected the other of carrying on a clandestine correspondence with his wife, of which he accused him a few days before; but the next day they became reconciled and shook hands as friends. Even on the very morning of the shooting, Dana had lent Walshe a horse for his wife to ride out with him.

The prisoner, it was asserted, had been subject to fits of irritability and occasional eccentricity, superinduced, it was thought, by injuries received several months previously in a brush between the Native police and a tribe of blacks on the Murray. These infirmities used to be much intensified when he indulged in drink, and he was by no means a teetotaller. The defence was simply a plea of insanity, and several medical witnesses supported his theory. One of them, an M.D., was himself manifestly in a state, if not of "D.T.", at least in something so very much approaching it, as to provoke a severe rebuke from the presiding judge. He was, however, most emphatic in regarding the prisoner "as mad as a hatter".

The jury convicted on the fourth count, and the prisoner was sentenced to seven years' hard labour. The judge, in a very feeling address, remarking that the circumstances were such as would justify a verdict on the first count, and had the jury so found, nothing would have saved the prisoner's life. As to insanity, there was nothing in the evidence to sustain it, or to warrant a belief that the prisoner was not in full possession of his senses when he committed the heinous deed, or that he had ever been otherwise, except when under the influence of drink.”*

A PETITION FOR CLEMENCY

From the above account it would appear that jealousy, inflamed by alcohol, had pushed Walsh to shoot his fellow officer.

However, a subsequent petition for clemency claimed that the shooting had nothing to do with Walsh’s wife, Isabella, but was all to do with his sister, Sophia. But before going into that matter it is necessary to detail the blood and marital relationships between the commanding officers.

The commandant of the Corps was Captain Henry Dana who had been appointed to the position by Superintendent Charles La Trobe in 1845. One of Dana’s first decisions was to appoint his brother-in-law William Walsh as first officer and his 19 year old brother William to the position of second officer. So it was quite a family affair.

Sophia (Henry’s wife and William Walsh’s sister) lived at the head quarters in Narree Narree Warren and her four children were born there between 1845 and 1851. The fourth child, Augustus Pultney Dana, was born on 1st March 1851, 17 days before the commencement of his uncle’s trial.

Now, let’s return to the petition for clemency. Signed by William Walsh, his mother Mary-Anne and his wife Isabella, it puts forward an entirely different reason for William Walsh’s actions. In part, the petition claimed:
“That previously to the month of January last, it was currently reported that an improper intimacy existed between the said William Dana and Sophia, the wife of the said Henry Dana and sister of your petitioner William Hamilton Walsh …. That on this report reaching the ears of [Walsh] he immediately informed Henry Dana and demanded of him whether there was any foundation for so foul a scandal being disseminated respecting his wife and your petitioner’s sister … that Henry Dana scouted the idea and appeared to be so confident of the chastity of his wife that the apprehensions of your petitioner were quieted for a time … that immediately preceding the tenth of January last, the same report again reached your petitioner … in such a form and from such a source as to admit of little doubt in his mind that it was too true.”**

Four days after the 10 January Walsh shot William Dana.

After considering legal opinion, Superintendent La Trobe recommended that the petition be rejected. This was agreed to by the executive council in January 1852 and again in March.

Walsh was imprisoned in the Melbourne Gaol and later at Pentridge but in June 1852 the executive council agreed to his release on the grounds of his ill health and committed him to the care of his friends.

William Dana, meanwhile, recovered from his injuries and went on extended leave to England.

The removal of Walsh and William Dana - who had respectively commanded the first and second divisions of the corps – left a void in the leadership that was never satisfactorily filled. When Henry Dana fell ill while out in the field with his division in November 1852 and shortly afterwards died in the Melbourne Club, it was all over for the corps of Native Police.

According to a family friend, William Dana and his sister prevented Sophia from seeing her husband Henry as he lay dying in the Melbourne Club. Subsequently Henry’s will left virtually nothing to Sophia and by 1854 she and the children were penniless.

William Dana, on his return from England, provided for them and in November 1856 he married Sophia in Launceston.

Bryan Power

References:
*Garryowen (Edmund Finn), The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, Ferguson & Mitchell, Melbourne, 1888, page 390.
**Fels, Marie. Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853, MUP, Melbourne, 1988, page 203.

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