Gwalia Tragedy – murder at the two up!

The “Sunday Times” had a visit last week from the brother of the late James Reilly, killed by Joseph Higgins at Gwalia on September 4 1906. The particulars of the case must be fresh in our readers’ minds. Reilly tried to drag a mate away from the two-up school at which Higgins was playing. The latter savagely knocked Reilly down and struck him again as he was rising, the result being that the unfortunate man died from concussion of the brain.

Higgins was tried for murder then reduced to manslaughter before Judge Rooth, and although the jury brought, in a verdict of guilty, the judge, in an extraordinary aberration of leniency – he also suffers also from aberrations of merciless severity – merely bound the manslayer to come up for Judgment when called upon.

All this occurred without the knowledge of poor Reilly’s brother. He has been working in the bush near Katanning, and did not even hear of his brother’s death, till a friend chanced upon him on Wednesday.

When informed of the tragedy and of the circumstances that followed it his grief was pitiable to witness. There is no sight more pathetic than a strong man in the agony of sorrow. His sturdy, athletic frame shook with sobs, and murmurs of revenge against Higgins mingled with inarticulate words of sorrow for the dead man. He was a good brother, he said, a good husband, and he met his death while trying to do his mate a good turn. “If I’d only been there to take his part.” So, half frantic with grief, and burning with a sense of injustice, he came to the “Sunday Times” to ask if it could do something. He wanted justice, he said. A good man, his brother, had had the life battered out of him in an unfair fight, and the slayer was walking about the streets a free man. Couldn’t anything be done to remedy it !
And then it was pointed out that Higgins had been tried by a jury that the Judge had given his decision, such as it was,  on the strength of the jury’s finding, that not one member of Parliament had been game enough to say a word about the outrageousness of the thing, that Judge Rooth  –  had gone to England for a vacation, and that the Attorney-General had not intervened. If there existed a power whereby Higgins could be placed on trial again and dealt with, in due relation to the homicidal brutality of the crime, it was a million to one that the Crown would not enforce it.

“But this spieler-killed my brother, and is walking about as free as you or I –  reiterated Reilly.

And always it came back to that.  He left at last, “The Sunday Times” could give him no hope. But there was a look on his face as he went out that augured no good to the cowardly, noaccount who had taken his brother’s life. If Higgins hasn’t yet rid the country of his pestilential presence – he is said to have been seen in Perth lately – he, will do well to keep his worthless hide away from fist range of the man from Katanning.

James REILLY is buried in the Leonora cemetery – there is no headstone.