George Jones (bushranger)

Biography

George Jones, born around 1815 in London, was working as an errand boy by 1829. That same year, on March 20, he stood trial at the Surrey Assizes for stealing from a till. At roughly fourteen years old, he got a life sentence of transportation. He made the voyage to New South Wales on the Dunvegan Castle, along with 179 other convicts, and reached Sydney on March 13, 1830.

Once there, authorities assigned him to Richard Lang, who worked the Hunter River area in the Newcastle district. Jones’s record shows he had a rebellious streak. In June 1833 he got twenty-five lashes for taking grapes. In May 1835 he received fifty lashes for disobedience, and that September a hundred lashes for refusing and neglecting his duties.

He got fifty more lashes in March 1837 for running away. By 1841 he was working for Captain John Pike at the 'Pickering' farm near Merton, a brutal master whose convicts lived in terrible conditions. Jones escaped from Pike on May 25, 1841, and stayed on the run for eight months. During that time he joined up with another runaway, Joseph Bowers, an older man covered in tattoos who had fled from William Blaxland of Cassillis in June 1841.

On January 17, 1842, in the early afternoon, Jones and Bowers, each carrying double-barrelled guns, stopped two riders—John Lucas, who managed Buchanan’s 'Marsheen' run past Muswellbrook, and a man named Cotterell—on a road about nine miles from Maitland. They forced the men off their horses, led them forty yards into the bush, took their small amount of cash, and held them until nightfall. Before letting them go, they gave Lucas back five shillings for his bed and returned both horses.