Bushranging In Colonial Era Sydney

Here's a one-paragraph description for the article, suitable as a WordPress excerpt or meta description: Bushranging in colonial New South Wales rarely looked like the legend. It looked like a settler's kettle put on for four armed strangers on a wet... More

Here's a one-paragraph description for the article, suitable as a WordPress excerpt or meta description: Bushranging in colonial New South Wales rarely looked like the legend. It looked like a settler's kettle put on for four armed strangers on a wet Illawarra night, a gang leader who kept his word to the terrified women he was robbing, and a free man handcuffed seven times in three months for the crime of having no paperwork to prove he wasn't a convict. It also looked, on its worst days, like a widow's skull split open over her own shop counter. Drawing on the first-hand accounts of a free tradesman, a ship's surgeon, a settler's wife and a colonial historian, this is bushranging without the myth: how it started with a runaway named Caesar who had no word for what he was, how a flogging built the gangs it was meant to prevent, and why the same colony produced both a story you could laugh about and one you couldn't. Less