AustLit

'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)