Ned Kelly in Khaki?
by Craig Wilcox 

Australian Magazine

Edition 1SAT 23 FEB 2002, Page 020 

It's a century since Breaker Morant was executed and began his ascension to national hero. But Boer War historian Craig Wilcox asserts that, like another famous Australian outlaw, Morant was a murderer.

When he was shot by a British Army firing squad 100 years ago, there was little hint that history would eventually transform Harry "Breaker" Morant into a national hero. Most Australians at the time dismissed him as a thug, responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Boers held in his custody. Disgrace gradually gave way to distinction - notably in the pages of The Bulletin, which at the time was moved to portray Australians as pawns in the hands of British imperialists. The eponymously titled 1980 movie took even more dramatic licence and now, a new book called Shoot Straight, You Bastards!, by Nick Bleszynski, claims a conspiracy existed at the highest level against Morant and his co-accused.

The romantic version of events paints Morant as a bushman, balladeer and black sheep, typical of the thousands of Australians who voluntarily went to the Boer War to do the British Empire's dirty work. Born in England, the 19-year-old Morant had emigrated to Australia in 1883, allegedly to escape debts that threatened to get him discharged from the Royal Naval College.

Yes, he was executed for murdering Boers in his custody. But wasn't he simply following orders, or avenging Boer atrocities? His death gradually took on the dimensions of martyrdom and his story mutated into a cautionary tale of what can happen when Australian soldiers' lives are given over to foreign wars and foreign generals. Like the legend of Ned Kelly, Morant's sits comfortably with us today. But his deeds resemble Kelly's only in so far as he was executed for murder, and he died game. The truth is, Harry Morant was a war criminal.

THE BOER WAR OF 1899-1902 was the bloody means by which the British Empire annexed two southern African republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Both were founded by European farmers ("Boer" is the Dutch word for farmer) whose descendants today call themselves Afrikaners. They were overrun within a year, but the war persisted as a cruel campaign to crush Boers who fought on.

Mounted scouts combed the countryside and quasi-military intelligence officers ran spy rings to track down resisters. Women and children were herded into desolate camps. All male Boers were considered enemies unless they turned "hands-upper" - war jargon for riding their buggies into town, handing over all their weapons and signing an oath of imperial loyalty.

Most Australians of the time considered themselves British at heart - the Mother Country's war was their war, too. Of the 20,000 who fought for a year or two, most were assigned to Australian contingents, but 5000 joined stateless regiments raised in South Africa and called "irregulars". Whatever their regiment, Australians were led by British Army generals and most were paid by the British taxpayer. They were fighting as imperial volunteers, not Australian soldiers, even though Australia federated in 1901.

Volunteer Harry Morant joined a South Australian contingent to the war in 1900. By then he had lived in Australia for nearly 20 years, droving and drifting and drinking, and had been one of The Bulletin's bush poets. His pen, like his patience for rural life, had long dried up. The war gave him a chance to pull himself together.

It also gave him a leg up from the ranks. On April Fools' Day, 1901, Morant became a lieutenant in an irregular regiment, the Bushveldt Carbineers. A mobile garrison force patrolling the northernmost districts of the conquered republics, its members were more mounted police than soldiers. Their job was to establish a chain of outposts, round up small bands of hostile Boers, and create a safe zone for anyone who accepted imperial rule.

The regiment was to have been formed from local loyalists and hands-uppers, but few came forward. Other South Africans, New Zealanders, Britons and Australians were recruited by the commanding officer, a Sydney solicitor named Robert Lenehan who attempted to command the Carbineers from his desk in Pietersburg, the north's largest town. Distant rule often meant absent rule, as was the case at an outpost called Fort Edward, where the senior soldier was not a Carbineer but an Irish-born local intelligence officer, Alfred Taylor, who claimed authority to direct local military operations himself. His operations were barbaric - he bribed a local African chief to attack Boers and take no prisoners, and encouraged the local Carbineers to do the same.

The first known killings of unarmed men around Fort Edward occurred early in July 1901, when a Carbineer patrol shot six men who had come in wanting to turn hands-upper. Two days after a Carbineer named van Buuren spoke to some relatives of the dead men, he was killed in mysterious circumstances while on patrol with Peter Handcock, the regiment's Bathurst-born veterinary officer.

When news of van Buuren's death reached Pietersburg, Captain Percy Hunt, an English chum of Morant's, was sent to Fort Edward to clean the place up. Morant and a young Victorian lieutenant, George Witton, were sent as well. Hunt did his best to remove the worst of the men and to curb drunkenness, looting and cattle stealing, but no-one was punished for killing the six would-be hands-uppers, or van Buuren. And Taylor told Hunt to take no prisoners.

On August 6, Hunt was killed after a bungled raid on a Boer farmhouse. Morant was furious. He led his men on a wild ride of vengeance, captured a Boer involved in the raid and had him shot, ostensibly for wearing part of Hunt's uniform. Morant then turned his attention to civilians. On August 23, he and some subordinates, including Witton, shot a party of eight intending hands-uppers, after making them dig their own graves.

A German-trained British missionary, Daniel Heese, spoke to the captured men just before their deaths. Like van Buuren, Heese would be found dead a day or two later. When Witton asked Handcock if he knew anything about Heese's death, he replied: "Why, wasn't you standing beside Morant when he asked me if I was game enough to follow the missionary and wipe him out?" Two weeks later, three more hands-uppers were shot dead.

News of the killings spread, but Morant was unperturbed. "I came here to shoot Boers," he told one critic, "not to play." Fort Edward was quietly investigated by Frederick de Bertodano, an intelligence officer born and raised in Australia. He convinced 15 Carbineer troopers, led by Robert Cochrane from WA, to accuse their officers of murder.

While the troopers could be accused of working off a grudge or trying to save their own necks, their depositions were damning nonetheless. Taylor resigned. Lenehan, Morant, Handcock, Witton and Harry Picton, an English Carbineer lieutenant, were jailed and interrogated. They insisted they were only following orders. Morant claimed the "Kingdom of Brass Hats" - the generals and their staff officers - was conspiring against them. At least the efforts of Cochrane and de Bertodano showed it was not simply a case of Britons conspiring against Australians.

They were tried by a series of courts-martial over six weeks during January and February, 1902. Taylor was tried, too, though military jurisdiction over him was dubious. The courts were composed of regular officers - Morant's Kingdom of Brass Hats - but the accused were defended by one of their own, James Francis Thomas, a Tenterfield solicitor and former volunteer. Thomas shared his clients' views on how the war should be fought: "I say they deserve all they [the Boers] get," he wrote. "With less nonsense and sentiment, the war would be over."

Taylor denied everything. Lenehan was unlikely to be guilty of much beyond negligence. There were no eyewitnesses to the deaths of van Buuren and Heese. That left the spotlight on Morant, Handcock, Witton and Picton. Their claim to have been "just following orders" did not impress the court. No written order could be produced, even in a war in which every rule and regulation was written, in triplicate, in hundreds of army record books. Yet Horatio Kitchener, the British Army commander-in-chief in South Africa, had often called on his troops to wage war relentlessly. Some soldiers interpreted the calls as a licence to brutality. This is the kindest explanation for Alfred Taylor's sadism.

Not that Taylor should carry the entire blame. Only the "very green", commented one Australian Carbineer, believed Taylor's call to take no prisoners had official support. In any case, the killings after Percy Hunt's death were not primarily influenced by Taylor. They adapted a furtive custom, observed at other times during the war, where a regiment would respond to some real or imagined breach of accepted rules of war by waging a miniature vendetta for a time, refusing to accept Boer surrenders in battle.

Army headquarters often seemed to turn a blind eye to vendetta custom, perhaps because many soldiers heartily approved of it. So, after failing to produce evidence for an order sanctioning the killings, defence lawyer Thomas claimed in court that vendetta custom set a precedent. The court would have none of it. Two wrongs hardly made a right. Anyway, the dead were essentially civilians, not armed combatants.

TOWARD THE END OF FEBRUARY, the court pronounced its verdict. The Irish intelligence officer, Taylor, wriggled free of any punishment; commanding officer Major Lenehan was sent back to Sydney in disgrace; and Lieutenant Picton, the English Carbineer who had opposed the killings, was stripped of his commission and medals. Morant, Handcock and Witton were sentenced to death, though the court recommended mercy: the three had not long been officers, and Morant had been enraged by Hunt's death.

Kitchener commuted Witton's sentence to life in prison but was otherwise opposed to granting mercy. After consulting the imperial government in London - but not the Australian government - he sent Morant and Handcock to their deaths. They died bravely, refusing blindfolds, on February 27. No doubt some of their dozen or more victims had died bravely, too.

It was shameful that Taylor got off. Otherwise the trials, verdicts and punishments awarded seem consistent with British military legal practice and imperial relations at the time. Morant and Handcock were not Australian soldiers, but stateless irregular volunteers. They were singled out for crimes similar to those committed by many others, but their guilt was clear. Their victims were unarmed, their claim that they had simply followed orders yet had been provoked by Hunt's death was illogical, and military justice traditionally relied on making examples of some soldiers to frighten others out of villainy.

Though uneasy about the lack of consultation, most Australians felt that justice had been done. Hobart's Church News spoke of "the disgraceful incidents that have come to light respecting the shooting of Boers in cold blood by men whom we deeply regret to call Australians". To the Labor newspaper Sydney Worker, the "Kelly gang was surely a mild and merciful body of buccaneers compared with the Bushveldt Carbineers".

The Bulletin dissented, claiming that Kitchener was the real villain and Morant a hero. This simplistic condemnation of the Boer War and British generals eventually caught on, and so the myth of Breaker Morant was perpetuated. He was the English black sheep who had redeemed himself under the Australian sun, only to have been exploited to fight a dubious war and then discarded by a hypocritical British Army.

The author David Malouf recently wrote that it "was by seeing ourselves so strongly as victims - of British injustice, or at best of British indifference - that we managed for so long to obscure from ourselves that we were also oppressors". Malouf was referring to the conflict between white and black Australians, but his words are a fitting epitaph for Morant.

Even if it is one day confirmed that Kitchener had ordered the Bushveldt Carbineers to kill unarmed men, it won't change the meaning of what Morant and his comrades did - just as the claim by junior Nazis that they were themselves only following orders did not save their skins at Nuremberg. Morant and Handcock will remain cruel murderers of innocent victims, war criminals who were turned in by their own men.