The Bushrangers: Outlaws, Police and the Making of the Australian Legend (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184774565)

Australia has always had a complicated relationship with authority. Few figures reveal that more clearly than the bushranger.

The Bushrangers: Outlaws, Police and the Making of the Australian Legend tells the story of the armed horsemen who haunted colonial roads, robbed coaches, challenged police, terrified victims and later became part of Australia's national mythology.

This is not a romantic tribute to outlaws. Bushrangers were criminals, and many were violent men whose victims were ordinary travellers, workers, storekeepers, troopers and families. But their story cannot be understood by crime alone. They emerged from a harsh colonial world shaped by convict punishment, distance, poor policing, gold rushes, class resentment, Irish grievance, newspapers, public sympathy and the old Australian instinct to distrust authority.

This book follows the bushranger story from its convict roots through the early runaways, the gold-rush road robbers, Frank Gardiner and the Eugowra gold escort robbery, Ben Hall and his gang, Captain Thunderbolt, Mad Dog Morgan, colonial policing, newspaper mythmaking and the rise of Ned Kelly.

It examines the central questions behind the legend:

Why did bushranging take hold in colonial Australia?

How did roads, distance, gold and weak policing create opportunity?

Why did some violent criminals become folk heroes?

What role did newspapers, ballads and public sympathy play?

Were bushrangers rebels, criminals or something in between?

Why did Ned Kelly become the most powerful outlaw symbol in Australian history?

Written in a direct, readable style, The Bushrangers is a historical account of crime, punishment, violence, policing, class tension, national memory and mythmaking.

The men. The crimes. The myth. The truth.