People Australia

James Slattery, 1898

Central Register of Male Prisoners (VPRS515), Public Record Office, Vic

James Slattery (1862-1938) shearer, trade union official, forger and bank robber.

Birth: 9 January 1862 at Fryers Creek, near Sandhurst (Bendigo), Victoria, son of Irish-born parents from County Tipperary, William Slattery (1835-1889), puddler, and Mary, née Whelan (1843-1926). Unmarried, but engaged to native-born Agnes Molloy (1872-1941). Death: 14 May 1938 at Bethesda Private Hospital, Richmond, Melbourne; usual residence Nicholson street, Brunswick. Religion: Catholic. 

• Was a shearer at Nyang when he became Amalgamated Shearers' Union (ASU), (later Australian Workers' Union) (AWU) organiser in Victoria, chosen by David Temple to accompany him on his on initial organising tour of Victoria and Riverina in the shearing season in 1886. Slattery took the Murray-Edwards rivers region.
• He was founding secretary of the New Zealand branch of the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union of Australasia in 1887. The venture was not a success, however, and he returned to Australia in 1888. In 1889 he was chairman of the Casterton branch of the ASU and opened a branch of the union at Hamilton.
• In February 1891 in Adelaide, South Australia, he was elected founding president, and W.G. Spence was secretary, of the General Labourers' Union of Australasia — Slattery remaining secretary of the Casterton branch of the AWU in Victoria. He was also secretary of the local branch of the Australian Natives Association. In 1892, after reputedly considering standing for election to the Victorian parliament, he threw his and the ASU support behind William Shiels. He also became involved in mining speculation.
• Slattery was arrested in Melbourne in July 1896 on a warrant from Adelaide and charged with forgery of scrip of the Broken Hill Junction North Company under the name “E. Long”. On 3 August in Adelaide he was sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment. His crime had netted him some £3200 which, with the exception of a few pounds was definitely traced. He served his sentence in Yatala stockade.
• It was revealed that he was engaged to be married to a Miss Molloy, and that some £400 had been deposited to his fiancée’s account, to repay a prior debt. She immediately handed back that sum. It was also discovered that he had embezzled about £129 of the ANA funds at Casterton.
• Granted a remission of his sentence at the time of the Queen’s Jubilee, he was released on 22 July 1898. He returned to Victoria.
• On 4 August that year, at Penshurst, having previously cut the telegraph wires into the town, he robbed the Bank of Victoria, at gunpoint, binding and blindfolding the manager before driving off in a horse and buggy with some £565. Later that evening he was arrested at Ararat, under the pseudonym James Ryan.
• The sensational robbery, quick arrest, and the miscreant’s previous trade union career was widely covered in the press. Altogether, the police recovered the sum of £565, 3 shillings and 3 pence.
• Slattery was tried at the Supreme Court at Ararat, Victoria, and on 26 September 1898 was convicted of robbery under arms. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment with hard labour, the first week of each year to be spent in solitary confinement. His remark that “it was a cruel sentence” earned him a rebuke from the judge.
• The press reported that his fiancée Miss Molloy, promised to “remain true to him” and to take up residence in Melbourne in order to see him in gaol.
• After the trial the recovered loot was handed back to the bank. Slattery spent his prison sentence in Pentridge Gaol and was released on 6 April 1906. His whereabouts in the following years are unknown. From 1936 until his death, however, he lived at Nicholson Street, Brunswick, and his occupation was caretaker.
• Cause of death: prostatic hypertrophy (months), and uraemia (days).
• He never married his fiancée, now known to be Agnes Josephine Molloy (1872-1941), a tobacco worker. However, it seems clear that after he regained his freedom, they had a close relationship. She may have paid for his grave, where she too was eventually buried.

Sources
John Merritt, The Making of the AWU (Melbourne, 1986); Stuart Svensen, The Shearers’ War: the story of the 1891 shearers’ strike (Brisbane, 1989); Shearers’ Union failure, North Otago Times (NZ), 19 May 1888, p 2.