‘Right. It was a presentation, but of a somewhat unusual sort.’
‘I grow curious. Let us have the story.’
‘Very good. It is a story I have had to tell more than once. You must know, then, that I began my journalistic life in the colonies as editor of that able and distinguished organ of public opinion, the Burragundi Beacon. I had been conducting it for some six months, to the satisfaction, I am always proud to remember, of the proprietors, when that outbreak of bushranging which was headed by the notorious Frank Gardiner began to keep the country in a state of continual excitement and terrorism. I need not tell you that of all the knights of the bush, Frank Gardiner was in prowess and achievement second to none. For several years, he and his gang eluded all efforts at capture on the part of the government, until the country-people began to think that Frank, like his illustrious forerunner and prototype, Dick Turpin, bore a charmed life. At last, two thousand pounds was set on his head, alive or dead.
One morning I received a short letter something like the following, addressed to the editor of the Beacon:
Sir—I observe a statement in the Sydney Morning Herald of to-day to the effect that myself and my mates last Monday night attempted an attack upon Lawson’s Station, Woonara. Will you allow me the use of your widely-read columns to say that this announcement is entirely erroneous, from the simple fact, that on that night I and my party were busily engaged elsewhere.—I am, yours, &c.,
Frank Gardiner.
I was so tickled with this letter—there was something so funny in its cool audacity, and the whole circumstances—that I at once inserted it in the Beacon.
About a fortnight later, I received a second letter, which ran pretty much like:
Sir—It must necessarily be the fate of all public men to encounter much misrepresentation, and I must just submit, I suppose, like others. At the same time, when there is a remedy at hand, a man is merely doing himself justice in availing himself of that remedy. I appeal, therefore, simply to your sense of right and fair-play in requesting you to publish my flat and emphatic denial to a paragraph which appeared in the Sydney papers of last Friday—namely, that in the recent encounter with troopers, one of my mates was wounded in the arm. Nothing of the sort took place, thanks to the clumsy shooting of our opponents. The same paragraph also states that in the last sticking-up of the Binda Flat mail we treated our prisoners with much harshness. The very reverse of this was the actual case, and this statement can only have emanated from persons wilfully and maliciously determined upon prejudicing myself and my comrades in the public mind.—I remain, yours, &c.,
Frank Gardiner.