A Bushranger

Jackey Jackey gallops on a horse like a swallow

Where the carbines bark and the blackboys hollo.

When the traps give chase (may the devil take his power!)

He can ride ten mile in a quarter of an hour

Take horse and follow, and you'll hurt no feelings;

He can fly down waterfalls and jump through ceilings,

He can shoot off hats, for to have a bit of fun,

With a bulldog bigger than a buffalo-gun

Honeyed and profound in his conversation

When he bails up Mails on Long Tom Station,

In a flyaway coat with a black cravat,

A snow-white collar and a cabbage-tree hat.

Flowers in his button-hole and pearls in his pocket,

He comes like a ghost and he goes like a rocket

With a lightfoot heel on a blood-mare's flank

And a bagful of notes from the Joint Stock Bank

Many pretty ladies he could witch out of marriage,

Though he prig but a kiss in a bigwig's carriage;

For the cock of an eye or the lift of his reins,

They would run barefoot through Patrick's Plains.

William Westwood, the bushranger in the poem had a brief but eventful life.He operated in and around the Berrima district of New South Wales, he escaped from cockatoo Island, led a prison riot on Norfolk Island, all this before he was hanged in 1846 when he was still in his twenties.