“Shoot Straight You Bastards!” — The Execution of a Frontier Partisan, Part I

Breaker Morant in the uniform of the 2nd South Australian Mounted Rifles.

They called him Breaker Morant for his skill at breaking rough horses. Aye, and he was a fine horseman, a drifter, a drover, a drinker, a brawler, a bush poet, a Boer War soldier in a tough irregular unit — and ultimately a convicted and executed war criminal. He was the kind of man around whom legends gather.

Harry Harbord Morant (or Edwin Henry Murrant) came out to Australia from England late in the 19th Century, claiming a mysterious aristocratic lineage, perhaps from the wrong side of the blanket, perhaps a black sheep. He is said to have been the illegitimate son of Admiral Sir George Digby Morant, though the admiral denied it. (But then, he would, wouldn’t he).

As with many aspects of the life of Breaker Morant, there’s no knowing, for he was a spinner of tales in the great frontier tradition. Which is not to say he was a liar, exactly. Breaker Morant was a charismatic scoundrel, the kind of fellow you can’t help liking, even when he borrows beer money from you and never pays it back. He did that a lot. Much of his drifting in the Australian bush was propelled by the need to escape creditors.

Men liked him, and women did, too. In 1884, a year after arriving in Australia, he married a young Irish governess named Daisy May O’Dwyer, who would win fame under a different name — Daisy Bates, the pioneering anthropologist who was among the first to study Aboriginal culture. She apparently kicked him out after he got into hot water for writing hot cheques for some pigs and a saddle. They never actually divorced.

The Breaker was an educated man and he wrote well. In those days, Australian newspapers published a lot of poetry, and Breaker Morant made a name for himself as a bush balladeer, penning what we would think of today as cowboy poetry. He was friends with the great Banjo Patterson of “Waltzing Matilda” and “The Man From Snowy River” fame. The Breaker’s bush ballads aren’t in Banjo’s class, but they’re good. A few years ago, I heard a poet recite The Breaker’s “Who’s Riding Old Harlequin Now?” to a packed auditorium at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. It was wonderful.

Morant’s main claim to fame was as a bold and reckless rider. In the culture of the bush, the best roughriders were like kings and The Breaker was royalty, no question. He won bets making suicidal jumps and staying on outlaw bucking horses during booze-fueled rave ups in bush towns. He was a good polo player. But by the turn of the century, at about 35, he was feeling every reminder of spills from the saddle and punches in bars. He needed to fortify himself with a stiff brandy before getting on a bad one — a sign that the game’s about up.

Meanwhile, across the globe in South Africa, the British Empire had gotten itself embroiled in a nasty conflict with the Boer Republics. The doughty, mostly-Dutch-descended Boers, bred to the saddle and the Mauser rifle, were giving the British fits. The Empire put out the call to its Colonials for mounted riflemen. And from Canada, New Zealand and Australia, they came. The Breaker enlisted in the 2nd South Australia Mounted Rifles and shipped out on early in 1900 for South Africa. He had two years to live.

It is said that he hoped winning military glory would redeem him in the eyes of his estranged family in England — whoever they really were. Perhaps. Or maybe the Boer War was just another adventure he drifted into, wayward and unmoored as he had always been.

In Part II, the trail grows dark as Breaker Morant fights dirty in a nasty, brutal guerrilla war…