Andrew George Scott, better known in Australian history as the bushranger Captain Moonlite, was a man far removed from the traditional image of a bushranger.
Educated and articulate, Scott was a poet and a preacher, an excellent horseman, a civil engineer, skilled with and knowledgeable about firearms, a gifted public speaker, gentlemanly mannered, a soldier, a sailor, a prison reformer, an adventurer and a rebel. He was staunch to his comrades and, by all accounts, possessed of a magnetic personality.
On January 20, 1880, just before he faced the hangman’s noose at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Gaol, Andrew Scott wrote,
“I want to rest in the grave of my friend, James Nesbitt. Gratify my last wish if you can. I have one hour to live.”James Nesbitt It took 115 years to grant his last wish, but on January 13, 1995, the remains of Captain Moonlite were finally laid to rest in the Anglican section of Gundagai cemetery, within feet of his friends James Nesbitt and Augustus Wernicke.
Close by is the grave of Constable Edward Mostyn Webb-Bowen, who (along with Nesbitt and Wernicke) was tragically shot in the bushranging siege at Wantabadgery (pron. want-uh-BADGE-uh-ree), near Gundagai. Scott called him “Brave Bowen”.
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