For 18 months Malcolm Naden, an expert bushman suspected of murdering two young mothers, has hidden in the vastness of the Australian Outback. He has been sighted occasionally but has thwarted every attempt to catch him.

Yesterday the New South Wales Police resorted to a device that was last used

130 years ago to flush out Ned Kelly, Australia’s most infamous fugitive. They put a A$50,000 (£20,000) bounty on Mr Naden’s head.

Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford, head of the state’s homicide squad, emphasised that Naden should not be regarded as a folk-hero comparable to Kelly. Mr Naden was “extremely dangerous”, he said and added: “No fame should be attached to Mr Naden at all.”

Mr Naden, a 32-year-old Aboriginal, disappeared from his grandparents’ house in the town of Dubbo in June 2005. Two days later the body of his cousin, Kirsty Scholes, 24, was found strangled in his locked bedroom. Her two children were left wandering the house.

The previous January another cousin, Lateesha Nolan, also 24, had disappeared from the same house after dropping two of her four children there. She has never been found.

The former shearer and abattoir slaughterman, who is described as a talented artist, is also wanted for the alleged indecent assault of a child.

Mr Naden had learnt to hunt wild game and seek out water as a child.

He was once spotted in the far northwest of the state in an area of abandoned underground mines and deserted camps — places where a man could live for months without seeing another human. Mr Naden gave police the slip.

He is also known to have hidden in a vast open-range zoo near Dubbo designed to replicate Africa’s plains, eating food dropped for lions and elephants. A year ago the keepers caught sight of him. Police closed the zoo for days, but again he evaded capture.

Nine months ago police thought they had cornered him in a tiny Aboriginal community 300 miles (480km) inland from Sydney. Sixty officers with dogs and a helicopter swooped, but he had vanished.

The trail has gone cold since the last sighting, six weeks ago, hundreds of miles further east near the coastal city of Coffs Harbour.

Police believe that he has survived thanks to his bush skills, loner mentality and help from people in Outback communities.

“He is a cunning character and certainly skilled at bushcraft, and no doubt knows the environment very, very well,” Mr Beresford said.

The last time the Australian authorities offered a bounty for a fugitive was in 1879 when they put £8,000 on the head of Ned Kelly, wanted for shooting three police officers. Kelly claimed that he acted in self-defence.

Kelly and his gang of horse thieves and bank robbers eventually held up a hotel and took 60 hostages. Kelly was riddled with bullets in a shootout with police, arrested and later hanged.

He entered folklore — and what is believed to be the world’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, received its premiere in Melbourne in 1906.

The national Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a biography for schools, presents a sympathetic portrayal of Kelly, born to an Irish ex-convict father, as a kind of Robin Hood who robbed the rich because of injustices towards the poor.

The Australian police have, on rare occasions, paid rewards for information that has led to the conviction of criminals, but the bounty on Mr Naden will be paid to anyone who leads the police to him. Lawyers were concerned that bounty-hunters would form vigilante groups.

Cameron Murphy, of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said: “It is not right to create a vigilante atmosphere where people can put themselves in danger and commit crimes themselves in trying to apprehend this person,” said “I think this will put the suspect in danger. There may well be a mentality that develops in terms of the Wild West’s ‘wanted dead or alive’,” he said.

Mr Beresford insisted that the bounty was designed to generate information, not to encourage vigilante manhunts which he dismissed as “the stuff of cowboy movies and fables”.

Mr Naden’s aunt, Janette Lancaster, said that he had lived like a hermit in his grandparents’ house, stuffing blankets under his door so nobody could see his light and accepting food only through his window.

Two days before he vanished he destroyed every photograph of himself that he could find.

But the next day, knowing that Ms Scholes’s body was lying in his bedroom, he allowed Mrs Lancaster to take the photograph reproduced here.

“You don’t want to think someone you trusted and loved and helped raise can murder someone,” said Mrs Lancaster. “Until he gives us his story, we don’t know what happened.”

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