Bushranger Country

Bushranger Country.
ISBN: 9780908272174 / 0908272170
Publisher: Atrand P/L , 1980
Edition: Softcoverv
Language: English

About the book

Bushrangers were outlaws who used the Australian “bush” as a refuge to hide from the authorities between committing their robberies, roughly analogous to the British-American “highwayman”. Their targets often included small-town banks or coach services. The first bushrangers were escaped convicts fleeing from the early Australian penal colonies. Fleeing convicts would find they had almost no idea how to support themselves in the harsh Australian wilderness. As a result, most turned to stealing supplies from remote settlements and travellers and on-selling stolen goods to other free settlers. Their heyday was the Victorian gold rush years of the 1850s and 1860s, but the increasing push of settlement and improvements in transport (railways) and communications technology (telegraphy) made it increasingly difficult for bushrangers to evade capture. In Australia, bushrangers often attracted public sympathy. In Australian history and iconography bushrangers are held in some esteem in some quarters due to the harshness and anti-Catholicism of the colonial authorities whom they embarrassed, and the romanticism of the lawlessness they represented. Some bushrangers, most notably Ned Kelly in his Jerilderie letter, and in his final raid on Glenrowan, explicitly represented themselves as political rebels. Attitudes to Kelly, by far the most well-known bushranger, exemplify the ambiguous views of Australians regarding bushranging..
Previous owners name on two pages.