Overview

For almost four months, from 9 September 1940 until his capture near Orbost in Victoria on 20 December 1940, Allan Torney, a 29-year-old sleeper cutter, an escapee from the Kenmore Mental Hospital in Goulburn, NSW, led a campaign 'of petty robbery, gunplay, and terrorisation through some of the ... loneliest forest roads' in southern New South Wales and eastern Victoria. Initially dubbed the 'Butcher's Ridge Food Bandit', he soon became known as the 'Snowy River Bandit'. In 2000, police historian, Robert Haldane came across a brief message dated 16 December 1940 on a page torn from the Swifts Creek Police Station Telephone Message Book that mentioned the 'search for Snowy River Bandit'. A four-year search led Haldane to a 1941 Victoria Police finger print form, two listings in the Victoria Police Gazette, his birth registration, and some 20 newspaper articles. Haldane published a brief history of the Snowy River Bandit in the Gippsland Heritage Journal in 2004 in which he presented what little he had found about the identity of the bandit arrested under the name of 'Alan Torney'. The following year in a postscript in the same journal, he published some photographs taken by police constable John Ernest 'Jack' Manley, who was one of the people involved in the hunt for the bandit in 1940. This work offers a reappraisal of Allan Torney's personal history, and it reveals that much more is known about Torney before his crime spree and after his institutionalisation in Ararat's Aradale Mental Hospital in 1941. Since Haldane published his research, many Australian newspapers have been digitized, especially since the launch of the National Library of Australia's Trove search engine in November 2009. At the time of writing this article, for example, the search words 'Snowy River Bandit' returned 118 results from newspapers from every Australian state and territory including six results from a newspaper in Papua New Guinea. Genealogical research and analysis of electoral roll information have added vital information to Allan Torney's back-story. The author has some personal interest in this history as Samuel Torney, who was Allan Torney's stepfather (if not his biological father), is the author's first cousin twice removed.

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