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as it might have been. Another man who got away from it and out of the state was the safebreaker Frank Flood, known as The Hawk and who his contemporaries regarded as reckless. His record was peppered with assaults and offensive behaviour, and on one occasion, after stealing a safe as it was being loaded onto a cart, he said he was cold and returned to the premises to steal the proprietor’s coat. His record also included a 1900 conviction in Coolgardie for shooting at a love rival with intent to maim. When it became clear the jury had been told of his previous convictions, possibly by the jury bailiff, the trial judge reversed the sentenceof a year’s hard labour and ordered him to remain in custody for the rest of the day.
    A two-month sentence for possession of a revolver followed almost immediately, and it was then he escaped. Flood was something of a cyclist, said to be able to cover several hundred miles in a day. It was off to Adelaide, where, after a housebreaking went wrong, he stole a bicycle and pedalled away from the pursuing constable. It is doubtful that he pedalled as far as New South Wales but it was there that, now known as Frank Duggan, he was convicted of robbing the well-known Chinese businessman Mei Quong Tart on 19 August 1902.
    An active philanthropist, Tart often provided at his own expense dinners, gifts and entertainment for recipients ranging from the Benevolent Society home at Liverpool, to the newsboys of Ashfield, Summer Hill, Croydon and Burwood. From 1885 to 1888, he provided a series of dinners for the destitute inmates of asylums. He was a spokesman for the Chinese community, often advocating for the rights of Chinese–Australians and working as an interpreter. He also had progressive ideas about Sydney social politics. His tea rooms were the site of the first meetings of Sydney’s suffragettes, and he devised new and improved employment policies, such as paid sick leave. In June 1884 Tart also tried to win support for a ban of opium in Melbourne and Ballarat. In 1887 he presented a second petition to the Victorian Parliament, and produced a pamphlet,
A Plea for the Abolition of the Importation of Opium
. He was also part of the 1892 New South Wales Royal Commission on Alleged Chinese Gambling and Immorality and Charges of Bribery Against Members of the Police Force.
    It was alleged Duggan had called at Tart’s office at the Queen Victoria Markets, posing as a detective and warning him of a likely robbery, and had then attacked the unfortunate man with a lead pipe and taken £20. The attacker had been seen coming down the stairs from Tart’s office by John James, a civil engineer who drew a sketch of him and later picked out Duggan in an identification parade as having been at the markets. A glass engraver, Frank Webb, also identified him as having been there, as did a Chinese man, Tommy.
Truth
, in a racist mood, produced one of its more alliterative headlines: ‘Frank Flood. Charged with Tapping Tart’s Topnot Committed for Trial.’
    Duggan had what appeared to be a solid alibi, with a number of witnesses saying he had been watching boxers train at Her Majesty’sHotel and, in November 1902, the first jury could not reach a verdict. At the second trial, he received twelve years, something the press, with the exception of
Truth
, thought a heavy sentence but well merited. The underworld thought he had gone down for someone else’s robbery but that that was the luck of the game. There were suggestions that Henry Jones, who had been executed for the shooting of Constable Long at Auburn, 19 kilometres from central Sydney, had confessed to the attack.
Truth
pointed out that the officer conducting the identification parade had pressed the witnesses either to identify Duggan at Tart’s office or at least to put him at Queen Victoria Markets:
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    After perusing the deposition, as we have done, it seems a most extraordinary thing that this man