The year started with drought and ended in bloodshed. It was almost as if Godless Goulburn was being punished with the biblical plagues.

The township boasted a population of several hundred souls, but most of them had already been lost. It was a wild and woolly frontier town with five pubs and a brewery … but not a single church.

A visiting preacher held a service in a nearly-empty barn. Scanning his scanty congregation, he remarked that the locals apparently preferred a public house to the house of God.

New Year’s Day began with a dust storm. Convicts working in the Road Gangs collapsed from heat stroke. The only shade was from clouds of flies over dead sheep bogged in the shrinking waterholes. “All the way down the Wollondilly,” recalled Charles Macalister, “it would have been almost impossible to find enough water to drown a rabbit in.” The countryside, he said, “was as bare as a billiard ball.”

The crops withered, the livestock perished, and so did the dreams of the pioneers. Then the second and third plagues hit - scab and catarrh in the sheep. There was no cure.

Desperate farmers boiled down sheep for a few pence worth of tallow, and waited for the long summer to end.

When it did, fate delivered another blow – one of the harshest winters on record. Flocks froze to death in a freak snowfall. That was the fourth.

That brought the fifth - financial ruin.

Banks crashed. People lost their life savings. Many walked off their farms with nothing. They headed for Goulburn, because there was nowhere else to go. It was too far to walk to Sydney.

Food was in short supply here, and expensive. Prices were five times higher than in Sydney.

Those that could afford to dined on “Valparaiso flour”, a rank mixture of stale flour, rice, cornmeal and weevils that had arrived from South America as ship’s ballast, then bounced around on a bullock dray for a couple of weeks.

There was no social welfare, and no charity. The poor had to choose between starvation and crime.

It was a simple choice. Most of the population had already been convicted and transported half way around the world for stealing to survive. They chose crime. That was number six.

Soldiers guarding the road gangs on the Great South Road at Towrang felt the pinch. Their rations were less than those supplied to the prisoners, and in normal times they would have purchased extra food. But the prices were out of reach, so they started robbing travellers in their spare time, or organised the convicts to do the dirty work for them.

Prisoners strolled out of the stockade to rob and pillage at night, emerging like trolls from under the stone culverts that they had built in the daytime, to startle travellers and relieve them of their cash.

Goulburn Gaol was a joke. It was falling apart. The lockup keepers were underpaid and easily bribed. They frequently got drunk and fell asleep, and prisoners would “borrow” the keys. Skinny ones could slip through gaps in the loose slabs. One regularly traipsed off to rob the Royal Mail Coach, go to the pub, and return in time for breakfast.

At least you could get a feed there.

The postman hid the mailbags, clouted himself on the noggin, and blamed it on the “bushrangers”.

One gang cantered down Sloane Street in broad daylight, thumbing their noses at the police barracks. The troopers, shoeing their horses, were unable to give chase. They became the laughing stock of the town.

A magistrate commented that one half of the population earned a living by trading sly grog for the sheep and cattle stolen by the other half.

The Illawarra Mercury newspaper said “the settlement will become a perfect den of thieves, prostitutes and drunkards unless vigorous methods are taken”.

Moral decay infected the police and the military. The Government had sent most of the mounted police out to collect taxes. Those that remained were more interested in taking bribes than villains.

Crimes were recorded daily. Homesteads were robbed, women raped, horses lifted, cattle duffed, drays plundered, coaches held up, travellers bailed up and houses burnt down. Anyone who resisted was shot out of hand. Even a Benedictine monk was stripped of his few possessions.

Bullock drivers camped in the rowdy market place where Belmore Park now stands.

Pickpockets worked the crowds as spielers sold goods that had already been stolen once, and would probably be stolen again. Noisy punters barracked around the cock-fighting rings, dogs whirled and fought, pigs squealed, and drunks brawled and rolled in the dust and the dung.

Winter turned to spring, and spring into summer, but still no rain fell. Then, one day in November, all eyes turned skywards as thunderclouds marched across the horizon.

Lightning flashed and thunder crashed and the air reeked of fire and brimstone. The sky tore open and water cascaded down in torrents. With it came rattling hail – as big as hen’s eggs, pulverizing bark roofs, scattering and slaying the poultry and panicking the pigs, sending the sheepdogs slinking for shelter.

Men rushed to shift the sheep away from the gullies and riverbeds that were about to become deathtraps. Some were too late. An entire flock – with the men, horses and dogs that tried to save it – was swept away by a wall of water.

That was the seventh. Carpets of grass soon covered the landscape, but not for long – the eighth and ninth plagues were about to descend. First the wheat crops were struck by blight, and then came the invasion.

An army of millions was on the march. Ranks of invaders advanced relentlessly across the country on countless feet. Caterpillars, munching their way through anything that was green, left nothing behind. It would have been the last straw … but they ate that, too.

Employees were laid off, and labourers had to be let go - there was nothing left to feed them. Many of them had no choice but to join the bushrangers.

One gang murdered a policeman. They were tracked down and shot like dogs as they floundered in the morass at Bundong. Another constable was killed whilst trying to make an arrest at Bungonia.

The worst month in the entire history of Australian crime was October 1839, right here in the Goulburn district.

Nearly 30 homesteads were bailed up. Three large gangs, armed to the teeth, preyed right up to the edge of the town. Five more operated around Yass, and a dozen or more in the Monaro, Queanbeyan and Illawarra districts.

“There is scarcely a station that has escaped one or more visits by the bushrangers during the last two months”, wrote the “Herald”.

Twenty-two bushrangers were executed in Sydney in November, and sixteen murderers awaited trial.

Landowners with dogs formed vigilante groups to scour the countryside. Several people were shot on both sides. A beefy bullock-driver twice disarmed would-be-robbers and brought them into town on the back of his dray, trussed like turkeys. A hut-keeper repulsed three separate attacks, either shooting or capturing his assailants each time. The fourth time, he captured three men with nothing but bluff and bluster and an empty blunderbuss.

The Mounted Police had a win when Ensign Millard’s detachment ambushed a gang in a gorge. Another time, Trooper Riley dashed in to the centre of a mob of five and arrested them all single-handed. In December, they finally caught the notorious Dublin Jack, after five years on the run. He boasted to the murder of three victims. Thrice caught, he had always managed to escape, but not this time.

The busiest day on record was the last day of the year. Four homesteads were robbed, a squatter was shot dead, and a party of police was routed in mortal battle.

So New Year’s Eve of 1839 didn’t just go off with a bang - it finished with a volley of gunfire.