Breaker Morant
pp. 100-101 · Read in the full issue
The Strange Case o Breaker Morant
A war and a tradition is thl subject of “Breaker Morant”, by F. M. Cutlack. The war was the Boer War and the tradition that of Harry Morant, who was executed in the Transvaal in February, 1902.
THE crime for which Morant w executed was that of shooti Boer prisoners. But whether the were extenuating circumstances! whether he was the victim of British War Office witch-hunt h been a matter of controversy—] Australian controversy—ever since Whatever is the case, the who business was carried through wi the stiff-necked stupidity that h periodically poisoned the relatioi between Britain and her Dominion The court-martial of Morant an the three men who were charge with him, was undertaken under smoke-screen of secrecy. Weeks afte the execution of Morant an Handcock (another Australian), th Australian Government had had n word of proceedings. Even toda) according to the author, inquiry i the War Office about the cour martial meets with the curt repl that the records are no longer ii existence.
The case of Morant has, there fore, been a recurring matter o interest in Australia, althougl Cutlack’s account is probably th( most comprehensive and is givei added interest by the fact that a a youth he knew Morant personally Morant was an Englishman 0 good family although his origins are not precisely known. He arrived in Australia about 1880 and became a drover and a horse-breaker of con siderable merit. He had a gift for writing and jingling verses of this bush-ballad era and under the pen name of “The Breaker” contributed to the Sydney Bulletin about the same time as Paterson and Lawson.
He went to the Boer War with the South Australian Mounted Rifles and became a lieutenant in an irregular unit called the Bush Veldt Carbineers.
The Australian horsemen, used to much the same kind of life as the Boers, needed no training in veldt tactics and this superiority over the English who were trying to win the war on military text-book lines is thought by many to have provided a background of resentment that
i a large part in Morant’s tion, hough neither the Australian :nment nor any other individual ver able to get any satisfaction the British War Office, the nt case did have one lasting When Britain was again at in 1914 Australia refused to the British Army regulations rning the death penalty in the to apply to the AIF. ? second half of Cutlack’s book ts of a selection from the bush- Is of Morant.
BAKER MORANT. Published by mith. Price, 21/-.)