BRANDED BY GREED
THE story of Harry “Captain Starlight” Redford droving 1000 head of cattle stolen from Bowen Downs Station near Longreach to South Australia is part of Australian lore.
The Brisbane Courier of 1873 reported that Henry “Harry” Redford was on trial for stealing 100 bullocks, 100 cows, 100 heifers, 100 steers and one bull from the property with his accomplices George Dewdney and William Rooke.
As luck would have it, it was the one white Shorthorn bull that was to bring him undone.
The trio drove the cattle south along the Strzelecki Track and sold them for 5000 at Blanchewater Station, north of Adelaide, having offloaded the white bull and a couple of cows in exchange for provisions.
Jury members were said to have been so impressed by Redford’s achievement they found him not guilty.
Some might say today’s cattle thieves are equally as daring, but most are not involved in taking branded cattle as Redford was more than a century ago.
Last week Dezso Istvan Sipos, 58, was sentenced to two years im
prisonment for his involvement in the theft of 280 head of cattle from the East Coast Cattle Company in 2014 and 2015, from a property north of Richmond in North West Queensland.
Sipos paid restitution to the property owner and must serve four months of the sentence.
Brenton Butler, 36, of Atherton, was sentenced in the Cairns District Court on June 18 over the theft of 664 head of unprocessed cattle from the same cattle company. He will serve 18 months of a three year and nine-month sentence.
Major and Organised Crime Squad Rural Detective Sergeant Liam Scanlan said the young, unbranded cattle were transported from Strathpark Station, which was managed by Butler, to a Woodstock Station in the Gulf by Sipos.
Sergeant Scanlan said that while this case was organised, for the most part cattle stealing was an opportunistic crime and hard to prove without witnesses coming forward.
“It happens more than we think,” he said.
“A lot of the time the complainant can’t confirm it’s happened because of the size of the properties and the number of cattle those properties have on them.
“There’s the timing between musters, assumptions of poor calving rates, that calves and weaner cattle didn’t survive drought or other disasters.
“We’re always looking at cattle stealing offences, but on this scale there aren’t too many cases like this one.
“Larger cattle thefts like this one are not normal, and convictions and prison time are very rare.”
MOCS Rural Detective Sergeant Nick Hempel said the Richmond case had taken four years of investigations to lead to the arrest t of the two men.
He said the investigation revealed the heifer cattle were taken to another station to become breeders and the property was later sold. The offending only came to light because a 16-year-old ringer told Strathpark Station’s owner about the cattle, who then reported it to police.
Sergeant Scanlan said the price of cattle, and the difficulty in being able to prove thefts, made smallscale stealing attractive to thieves.
In the past fortnight at the Charters Towers Combined Agents Cattle Sale steer calves sold to a high of 624c/kg, returning an average of $1000 a head.
Heifer calves sold to a top of 498c/kg, returning an average of $692 a head.
At the Central Queensland Livestock Exchange in Rockhampton, weaner steers reached $640c/ kg and returned $1138 a head. Prices are high.
Agforce cattle board chairman Will Wilson said there needed to be stronger penalties for animal theft.
He said high cattle prices meant a lot of concern within the industry among people trying to do more to deter and prevent thefts.
“I know of cases of smaller thefts that are harder to get convictions on – evidence is always the key and people need to be vigilant,” he said.
Sergeant Hempel said Captain Starlight was indicted on a smaller number of cattle 148 years ago and was found not guilty.
“In this recent case the numbers were bigger and better than that and the jury was better informed,” he said.
“There was a lot more cattle involved in this case than there was with Captain Starlight.”
Sergeant Hempel said the last time someone was imprisoned in Queensland for cattle stealing was
the 1980s Strathmore Station cattle stealing case.
A total of 3500 head of cattle, valued at just over $2m at the time, were stolen in 1986.
A conglomerate cattle company was the victim, with 10 people, including a Brisbane barrister, a Toowoomba stock and station agent, and several Croydon locals charged with offences relating to the missing cattle.
Only three men – John Andrew Pickering, his uncle Clive Robert Pickering and truckie David Leonard Keating – did time in prison.
The cattle company had not even realised that the cattle were missing until police informed them, and the case only came to light when an inside man offered to testify after he was caught with a truck full of stolen tyres.
“Without witness evidence it’s almost impossible to achieve successful prosecutions,” Sergeant Hempel said.