AustLit

'The "Tasman world," which was the interconnected maritime-based world incorporating the British settlements on either side of the Tasman Sea, was a microcosm of the British colonial world as a whole. The British colonial world included possessions in the Pacific, Asia and Africa which forced travelers to engage with a variety of cultures due to the nature of travel–even the speedier steamship journeys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century involved multiple stops in exotic countries. As a field, settler-colonial studies has been accused of not engaging deeply enough with the narratives created by the "settlers" themselves, despite the spread of such narratives being a huge part of the success of colonial projects. As the British ex-colonies tried to develop into autonomous nations, classification based on national allegiance became increasingly important, and Arthur H. Adams complaint was all the evidence needed to decide whether he belonged to New Zealand or Australia.' (Introduction)

'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)