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A man and
woman with a sulky and driver pose in the afternoon light on Mitchell's
viaduct,
also known as the second bridge, on Victoria Pass.
Note the massive
convict-built masonry walls and buttresses of the causeway across the gully.
Image
by Katoomba photographer Harry Phillips, from about 1910.
Blue Mountains City Library Local Studies Collection.
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The improved line of road to bypass the steep tracks at Mt York was
surveyed by Thomas Livingston Mitchell in 1830 and named by him Victoria Pass.
In February 1832 there were nearly 400 convicts working on the Pass and its
spectacular stone causeways. It was opened on 23rd October 1832 by Gov. Bourke.
In 1836
Charles Darwin travelled to Bathurst and called it 'worthy of any line of road
in England'.
Except for a
brief period between 1912 to 1920, when early automobiles preferred the easier
grade of Berghofer's Pass, Victoria Pass has remained the principal route of
access to the west.
This section
of road is the setting for the 1891 Henry Lawson poem,
The Ghost at the
Second Bridge
YOU’D call
the man a senseless fool,—
A blockhead or an ass,
Who’d dare
to say he saw the ghost
Of Mount Victoria Pass;
But I
believe the ghost is there,
For, if my eyes are right,
I saw it
once upon a ne’er-
To-be-forgotten night...
See the link
below for the whole poem.
The Ghost of
Victoria Pass
"It was
not until 1813, twenty-five years after the colony was founded, that a
primitive road was hacked through the dense bush and rugged sandstone ridges,
opening the western plains to settlement.
Convicts
laboured and lost their lives building that road, moving thousands of tonnes of
rock with picks and shovels and constructing stone bridges as strong and
dependable today as they were nearly 200 years ago. The steepest section of the
road wound up and over Mount York, but the danger of accident was so great that
an alternate route (only slightly less precipitous) was opened and Victoria
Pass came into being in 1832. Modern travellers speeding along the smooth black
ribbon that is the Great Western Highway give little thought to the perils,
physical and otherwise, that lurked at Victoria Pass. In earlier times it was
quite a feat to climb to the top and ascend the other side without mishap or
delay and, if travelling at night, there was the added risk of encountering the
Ghost of Victoria Pass, which haunted the second bridge on the eastern side.
Travellers
reported that their horses would become restless as they approached the bridge,
then the figure of a young woman dressed entirely in black would suddenly
appear in front of them. Some reported that her long, dark hair streamed out in
the wind and that her arms were raised in a suppliant gesture. Some said that
her eyes shone in the dark like a tiger's and a few said that she was headless.
As suddenly as she appeared the spectre would disappear, leaving travellers
anxious to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the scene of
their harrowing experience.
History can
put a name to this ghost. She was born Caroline James, and at the time of her
death she was Mrs William Collits. Caroline came from a shady and unstable
family; her father ran a sly grog shop and her drunken mother had hanged
herself. Despite this unsavoury background Caroline married into a respectable
family: the Collits, proprietors of the inn at Hartley Vale. Unfortunately for
Caroline, the Collits who took a fancy to her was the black sheep of the
family, William, described by his father as a 'spendthrift idiot'. William
Collits and Caroline James were married in 1840, but their marriage was
anything but blissful. Caroline's younger sister was married to a thug named
John Walsh, who was Caroline's as well as her sister's lover before and after
their marriages. When her new husband turned out to be a poor substitute for
Walsh, Caroline left him and moved in with her accommodating sister and
brother-in-law in a menage-a-trois.
There was
talk of reconciliation between Caroline and William in the New Year of 1842.
They met, along with Walsh, for a drink in Joseph Jagger's tavern near Hartley,
but soon after leaving the tavern Walsh attacked William. Caroline came to her
husband's aid by holding Walsh's arms and screaming to William to run for his
life - which he unhesitatingly did.
At about 6
am the next morning the postman delivering mail to Hartley came upon the
battered body of Caroline Collits beside the road on Victoria Pass, about five
kilometres from Jagger's tavern. Her skull had been smashed with a large stone
which lay, stained with her blood, nearby. John Walsh was arrested for her
murder but pleaded innocence, accusing not William Collits as you might imagine
but Joseph Jagger, the tavern keeper, of committing the heinous crime. The jury
at Walsh's trial did not believe him. He was convicted and hanged at Bathurst
on 3 May 1842.
William
Collits remarried seven months after Caroline's murder and lived a long and
happy life. His family achieved posthumous fame in the 1930s when they and
their inn became the subject (with much alteration of fact) of the first
successful musical comedy entirely written and produced in Australia on an
Australian subject - 'Collits Inn', starring Gladys Moncrieff and George
Wallace. Needless to say, the black sheep's branch of the family and this
gruesome episode do not figure in the plot.
Poor
Caroline achieved fame of an entirely different kind - destined to spend an
eternity of cold and windy nights haunting the bridge at Victoria Pass,
spooking horses and terrifying innocent travellers. Some comfort may have come
to her in the 1880s when Henry Lawson and his father came to live in the nearby
village of Mount Victoria and the young poet wrote a sixteen verse poem about
her entitled The Ghost at the Second Bridge'. Some say that Caroline Collits
put a curse on the village of Mount Victoria, but its current prosperity belies
that. No one has seen the Ghost of Victoria Pass for many years, which is
hardly surprising. The road has been upgraded and widened so many times that
the old bridges are barely visible, and if Caroline was still inclined to put
in an appearance on the roadside at night, dressed from head to toe in black,
it's doubtful if the occupants of the cars hurtling by would even notice
her."
From: The
Ghost Guide to Australia by Richard Davis. Bantam, 1988.
*****
Below is a contemporary newspaper account from 1842, the original spellings have been retained.
THE MOUNT VICTORIA MURDER.
"MOST of our readers are aware that there is a man named John Walsh, a freed man, at
present lying under sentence of death, in Bathurst Gaol, for the murder of
Caroline Collitt, on Mount
Victoria, on the 3rd of January last.
The case was tried before Mr. Justice Stephen, at the last Bathurst Assizes, when,
after a lengthened trial, the
Jury retired for about twenty
minutes, and returned a verdict of guilty
against the prisoner, when his Honor passed
sentence of death on him, which is to be
carried into effect at Bathurst, on Tuesday, the
3rd of May. The perpetration of this crime
appears to have been marked with circumstances of peculiar atrocity, such as we believe have seldom been met with in
the annals of crime ; and as the history
of the case is fraught with
unanswerable arguments in favour
of the cause of temperance, we have collected the most material of them in the following brief sketch.
Caroline Collitt, the person who was murdered, was, at the
time of her death, about seventeen
years of age ; she had been married about
eighteen months to a man named Collitt, who
was possessed at the time of their marriage of a considerable number of cattle,
but is generally regarded as a
person of weak mind. About twelve months after her marriage, her mother,
who was a notorious drunkard,
hanged herself in her own house,
her husband being in the house at
the same time, but so much in liquor, that
he could not prevent her from destroying herself. He was taken up on suspicion
of being a party to her death ; but after lying about six months in gaol, was
discharged.
About six months before the mother's untimely end, a
younger sister of Caroline Collitt married John Walsh, the convict at present under sentence of death in
Bathurst Gaol, and, it appears, continued to live with him up till the time of
her sister's murder; but she, as well as her sister Caroline, since the trial, have been ascertained to
have been very loose characters,
which is fully established by the fact, that both before and after Walsh had
married the younger sister, Caroline cohabited
with him, and had in fact been for
a considerable time living with him, under the
same roof with her sister, and in a state of
separation from her own husband (Collitt). It
has also been ascertained, that just before she
lost her life, she was on terms of intimacy with
her husband, and intended to go and live
with him again.
John Walsh appears to be a native of Ireland, from which he
was transported to this Colony in
1833, for seven years; he is about thirty
years of age. Since his arrival he has been
twice tried for murder, once before Sir
James Dowling, in the year 1830, for the murder
of a person named Crate, but was acquitted.
He was again tried, before Mr. Justice
Stephen, in 1839, on a charge of having
murdered a woman and her son—a little
boy. In this case he was also acquitted, on account
of the character of the principal witness against him, coupled with the
ingenious line of defence which
he set up, and which bore a great
similarity to that adopted by him on
the late trial at Bathurst for the murder of his sister-in-law (Caroline
Collitt). In the former case, it
was established, by evidence, that
the residence of the woman had been robbed
of a keg of rum and some tobacco, and
that she and her son had been beaten to death
with a stick, which was found near their bodies, at a short distance from their
hut.
Soon after the murder, the
prisoner took a native black with
him to help him to remove the plunder from the place where they found it concealed in the neighbourhood, at
the same time telling him that he
had been told by some bushrangers
where the property was concealed,—that
they had done the robbery and
committed the murder, but were afraid of
being taken if they went to remove it. Some
clothing was subsequently found concealed, which had marks of blood on it; and he accounted for the clothing which he
had on when taken, by alleging
that the bush- rangers had given
it to him, in order that he might
enable them to disguise themselves so as to affect their escape out of the
district. So, in the case
of Caroline Collitt, he pre- tended
that four or five men had set upon him
and the deceased, and after compelling him
to quit her, and taking his clothes, they had murdered her.
In the case of Collitt's murder, it was proved, that she, her husband, and
Walsh, were all in company on the evening of the murder, and had been drinking in a
public house kept by one Jaggars,
at the foot of Mount Victoria ;
that although they were sober when they went there, he had been drinking previously, and
while there, he took two glasses of randy, which intoxicated him, while the man
Collitt drank one, but his wife
had only some lemon syrup.
After leaving Jaggars' house, without any provocation he knocked Collitt
down, whose life was saved by his wife seizing hold of Walsh, and allowing her husband to
escape. This was the last
time she was seen alive, and the
last words she was heard to utter were addressed to her husband, “Run, he has
got a stone, and will murder you.”
About a mile from
the place where the husband fled for his life, her body was found early on the
following morning, the face and head covered with
blood and bruises, and a frightful wound in
the temple, which had penetrated to the brain.
This had evidently been inflicted by a large sharp jugged stone, one corner of which fitted into the wound, and was
clotted with blood and hair.
We have heard, that, after Walsh was condemned, when Mr.
Justice Stephen was inspecting the gaol in which he is confined, he recalled to his Honor's memory the
circumstances of his trial before him in 1839. "
John Merriman,
Local Studies Librarian
2014 Blue Mountains City Library
