AustLit

'Boundary Crossers offers a history of bushrangers who have been forgotten, misremembered or neglected. Meg Foster’s central premise in Boundary Crossers is that “not all bushrangers were white men”, and she offers case studies of four “other” bushrangers to prove it. William Douglas, for example, was a widely feared African-American bushranger on the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s, to whom two chapters are devoted. There is a chapter each on Sam Poo, a Chinese man accused of bushranging in the 1860s, and Mary Ann Bugg, a Worimi Aboriginal woman who lived on the run with her better-known white bushranging partner, Captain Thunderbolt, and two final chapters on Jimmy Governor, a self-styled bushranger popularised in Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Each chapter sketches out its subject’s backstory, to which Foster adds details and context to paint a more complex picture.' (Introduction)