AustLit

'Ned Kelly is an Australian national icon. A nineteenth-century bushranger, murderer, thief and bandit who survived in the Australian bush is now a symbol for the nation writ large. Kelly has come to represent ‘quintessential’ Australian values – those of the anti-establishment, egalitarian underdog, fighting corrupt authorities and championing a higher form of justice. Kelly is part of our heritage and folklore, our tourist trails, songs, and national iconography.' (Introduction)

'I remember my first encounter with history well. I was young. I can’t quite recall my age, but I was young enough to believe myself old for having such grown up things as a white-and-pink Spice Girls backpack and matching T-shirt. Frilly lace socks were cool, Sailor Moon pigtails and buns were a fashion statement, dunkaroos were the envy of all Australian school lunch boxes and I was on holiday. As Mum ushered me and my sister into our beat-up, once-white Ford Falcon, I had no idea that we were heading far beyond our tiny Northern Beaches flat, let alone back in time.' (Introduction)

The remarkable and revealing stories of the bushrangers history forgot.

'Bushrangers are Australian legends. Ned Kelly, Ben Hall, ‘Captain Thunderbolt’ and their bushranging brethren are famous. They’re remembered as folk heroes and celebrated for their bravery and their ridicule of inept and corrupt authorities. But not all Australian bushrangers were white men. And not all were seen in this glowing light in their own times.

'In Boundary Crossers, historian Meg Foster reveals the stories of bushrangers who didn’t fit the mould. African-American man Black Douglas, who was seen as the ‘terror’ of the Victorian goldfields, Sam Poo, known as Australia’s only Chinese bushranger, Aboriginal man Jimmy Governor, who was renowned as a mass murderer, and Captain Thunderbolt’s partner, Aboriginal woman Mary Ann Bugg, whose extraordinary exploits extended well beyond her time as ‘the Captain’s Lady’.

'All lived remarkable lives that were far more significant, rich and complex than history books have led us to believe. Governor saw himself defending his family and fighting injustice. Mary Ann Bugg lived on the run with Thunderbolt, dressed in men’s clothes, assaulted and outwitted the police and manipulated colonial expectations to further her own ends. Sam Poo may have been an innocent victim instead of a violent killer. And Black Douglas was never simply a colonial bogeyman of settlers’ creation.'  (Publication summary)

'On 20 July 1900, an Aboriginal man named Jimmy Governor murdered two white women and three white children at Breelong in northwest New South Wales. Despite the plethora of information on Governor, there is a story that remains to be told: how did the Breelong murders affect Governor’s Aboriginal family at Wollar? This article pieces together the experiences of the Aboriginal people of Wollar alongside settler responses to Governor’s crimes. It demonstrates not only that the law proved malleable in the fall-out of the murders, but the profound fear of warfare that overshadowed the push towards Federation. By tracing the lives of this group of Aboriginal people as well as settler Australians, we can see the interface of settler colonialism, nation-building and protection at a crucial moment in Australian history, as well as the precariousness of white Australia at a time when it was meant to have been triumphant.'  (Publication abstract)

'This chapter explores how colonial Australians used folklore to deal with the threat that Jimmy Governor posed to their ideas about race, gender, class, and sexuality. Three years after the Breelong murders, a "bush ballad" about the crimes began circulating throughout the areas that Jimmy had operated in. The chapter argues that The Ballad of the Breelong Blacks was created in an attempt to restore white settler-colonial power. It focuses on an Australian incident, its central concern with the complex ways that frontier settlers made sense of their world resonates with settler societies elsewhere. The chapter looks into the discursive inconsistencies, and this is a relatively new but urgently needed approach to settler colonialism. In Governor's case, hybridity is manifested in Jimmy's ambiguous position as a part of the working-class struggle and an aberrant threat to white society. To overcome the ambivalence, the poem focuses on the murders to re-establish firm boundaries between the "Breelong Blacks" and white society.' (Introduction)