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whom he had known since childhood, at Mudgee in April 1871. By the following September the newly married
couple were the owners of the Criterion Hotel at the Three Mile Diggings, Gulgong.
In November 1871, Readford was arrested as an accessory to the burglary of a store at Gulgong. He did not
stand trial but was extradited to Blackall, Queensland, from where he was moved to Roma. Here, after many delays
during which the white bull was recovered from South Australia and witnesses were assembled at considerable
expense to the Bowen Downs management, Readford was tried for ‘the great cattle theft’ on 10 February 1873.
He was found not guilty and an astonished Judge Charles Blakeney said to the jury, ‘I thank God that verdict
is yours, gentlemen, and not mine.’ Readford returned to New South Wales and an embarrassed Queensland
Government cancelled the criminal jurisdiction of the Roma court from March 1873 to January 1874.
Within a few months, Readford returned to southern Queensland and during the next five years engaged in many
episodes of cattle and horse theft on either side of the border. He and his associates frequented such provincial
towns as Walgett, Armidale and Tenterfield in New South Wales and St George, Toowoomba and Warwick in
Queensland. During several escapades made more confusing by his cunning use of aliases, Readford sought refuge
south of St George where his brothers-in-law, the Skuthorpes, had extensive leasehold. With several warrants out
for his arrest in connection with stock theft, he was finally captured at Brighton Downs on the Diamantina River in
April 1877. He was tried at Toowoomba two months later for stealing a horse and served an 18-month gaol term in
Brisbane. He was released in September 1878. Subsequently Read ford moved to north Queensland and the Gulf
country where his brother had leasehold. He engaged in droving large mobs of cattle to markets in New South
Wales and stole the odd horse when opportune. However his halcyon days of stock thieving were over; he was
prematurely grey, going bald and was overweight.
Readford’s introduction to the Northern Territory was in April 1881 when he overlanded horses to Elsey Station,
returning to Queensland by ship from Palmerston two months later. Then in 1883 Captain Charles Smith and his
partners, John Donald Macansh and John Kerr McDonald, began stocking Brunette Downs. Macansh moved a
herd of some 3 000 cattle north along the Diamantina River from his lease Albilbah on the Barcoo River but just
south of present-day Boulia, he broke his leg. He was taken north to Burketown in a dray while his teenage son,
Tom, followed with the herd. Readford, hired near Burketown to take the herd on to Brunette Downs, moved the
mob down the Gregory River, through Gregory Downs and Riversleigh, along the Nicholson River to Creswell
Downs and then south to their destination.
Readford managed Brunette Downs for at most 12 to 18 months and tradition has it that the Armchair Waterhole
there took its name from Eliza Cook’s well-known poem ‘The Old Armchair’ which he used to recite in his camp
of an evening. Early in 1885, he brought another 1200 cattle and two thoroughbred stallions from Burketown to
Corella for his employers and later that year he developed Buchanan Downs with the assistance of Tom Macansh.
At that stage, he adopted his second prename possibly to distinguish him from his nephew, Henry Readford, in
New South Wales. About 1886 he became associated with Corella Downs that included Corella Creek and Corella
Lagoon. E A McPherson owned the lease and Readford might have supplied some of the finance to stock the
property. Supposedly, he won 1800 Pounds at the Tennant Creek races in June 1886 under dubious circumstances
when his hand-fed ‘Brumby Filly’ won five races for grass-fed entrants. He never owned Corella Downs and his
ill-gotten gains were probably lost with the 26 000 Pounds McPherson had invested by 1890 without gaining a
return. To add to the confusion it has also been suggested that Readford had an interest in Corella Creek, a lease
on a tributary of the Rankine River further south.
In 1886, Rolf Boldrewood’s newspaper serial ‘Robbery under Arms’ was published in book form. With suitable
literary licence, the novelist used the theft of the Bowen Downs cattle in 1870 as the setting for its opening chapters
and Queenslanders and Territorians were able to identify Readford with Starlight, leader of the cattle thieves of
Terrible Hollow. Later in the book, shades of many bushrangers, including Frank Gardiner and Thomas Laws, alias
Smith (‘Captain Midnight’), were incorporated into the mythical character. As a result, Readford, gaining notoriety
that he neither sought nor deserved, became ‘Starlight’, and fantasy fused with fact to make him a folk hero.
After 1886, only glimpses of Readford can be gained as he roamed the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys.
Known as ‘The Dodo’, he was the friend of Tom Holmes, alias Nugent, the reputed leader of a band of stock
thieves known as ‘The Ragged Thirteen’; however there is no evidence that he was one of them. Possibly, he
drove cattle to Western Australia in the early 1890s and he may have explored the Wolf Creek meteorite crater
about 1893. In the latter part of 1896, after the failure of the Pine Creek goldfield, tradition has it that he guided
Chinese diggers south across the Barkly Tableland toward Camooweal. In 1898, he was again camped at the
Armchair Waterhole waiting for tick quarantine to be lifted on cattle travelling between the Kimberleys and the
eastern part of the Northern Territory. By October 1899, he was managing McArthur River Station for Amos
Brothers of Sydney and between then and June 1900, he moved several thousand cattle east to the meatworks
at Burketown. In January 1900, he was sued successfully for 20 Pounds in wages in civil action at Borroloola,
Northern Territory, in what was to prove his last legal encounter. During successive wet seasons Readford and his
mates used to prospect for minerals around Limmen Bight and he encouraged the mining of copper and galena on
the McArthur River.
By mid-November 1900, his employment at McArthur River had been terminated and during the monsoon
rains, he rode south with his packhorses to Brunette Downs. He left there on 9 March 1901 to travel to Wallow
Downs and the overland telegraph line intending to visit Tom Nugent on his property Banka Banka, 96 kilometres
north of Tennant Creek. James Hutton, the Brunette Downs manager, rode to the Corella Lagoon four days later to
inspect the flooding. In the old hut beside the flooded lagoon he found Readford’s bedding, saddles and other gear
and, suspecting that he may have been drowned or injured while swimming to reach his horses, Hutton began a
search. He found Readford’s badly decomposed body the following morning and with the help of stockmen from