XIX. 
Inn on the Goulburn road on December 19th with one of the most notorious of the 
gangs of outlaws that during the gloomy period of 1863-66 infested the country and 
overawed large numbers of persons in the interior by their audacity and success. 
His courageous conduct on this occasion and his commendable example in successfully 
asserting, rifle in hand, his right to travel on the high road when three desperate 
ruffians, Gilbert, Hall, and Dunn, one of them a recent murderer of police, held 
possession of it on the hill overlooking the inn, and having just finished with the 
Goulburn coach were actively engaged in the process of “ sticking-up” several 
teams and a number of travellers when Sir William, accompanied only by a boy who 
was driving the buggy, came on the scene and raised the siege, afterwards received 
official recognition by his being chosen one of seven gentlemen to whom in 1875 the 
Government awarded gold medals “granted for gallant and faithful services” rendered 
during the period when bushranging was rife. 
During Sir William’s early Parliamentary career the exigencies of Parliamentary 
life necessitated residence during at least part of the year in the metropolis, but 
about the time of his marriage, in June, 1857, to Miss Susan Emmeline Deas-Thomson, 
second daughter of the late Sir Edward Deas-Thomson, C.B., K.C.M.G.—a colonist 
of great merit and high standing who succeeded Mr. Alexander Macleay as Colonial 
Secretary—he made Sydney his permanent home. This paved the way for what 
after all was the most important work of his useful life, and for the service of greatest 
value rendered by him to his adopted country—the task he set himself of advancing 
the study of natural history in this colony, and this in a way not calculated to 
attract particular notice or provocative of the stimulus of public applause, and at a 
time when the prospects of the zoological branch of biology in Australia were not 
very brilliant, and its development in the embryonic stage. 
And in taking this course not only did Sir William Macleay directly confer 
benefits of a substantial character upon Science, but the moral force of his example 
cannot be without beneficial influence in a community so young. He was essentially 
the product of his old-world birth and early experiences, of family tradition and 
example, and of the invigorating new-world influences under which he attained his 
maturity. Fortune rewarded his early efforts with success after experiences that 
were sharp if comparatively short, but found him indisposed for inglorious ease. In 
the rational utilisation of his knowledge and resources he found his work, and in 
carrying it through he may be said to have been inspired with the sentiment “ of the 
larger, more generous, modern spirit of democratic society in which each man has the 
opportunity and is consequently under the responsibility to make the best of himself 
for the service of his fellow-men.” And in some measure he found his opportunity 
in the fact, not a little strange, that the oldest of the three earliest of the Australian 
