Bushranger

Bushrangers were armed robbers and outlaws who resided in the Australian bush between the 1780s and the early 20th century. The original use of the term dates back to the early years of the British colonisation of Australia, and applied to transported convicts who had escaped into the bush to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term had evolved to refer to those who took up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base.

Bushranging thrived during the mid-19th century gold rushes, with many bushrangers roaming the goldfields and country districts of New South Wales and Victoria, and to a lesser extent Queensland. As the outbreak worsened in the mid-1860s, colonial governments outlawed many of the most notorious bushrangers, including the Gardiner–Hall gang, Dan Morgan, and the Clarke gang. These "Wild Colonial Boys", mostly Australian-born sons of convicts, were roughly analogous to British highwaymen and outlaws of the American Old West, and their crimes included robbing small-town banks, bailing up coach services and raiding stations (pastoral estates). They also engaged in many shootouts with the police.

The number of bushrangers declined in the 1870s due to better policing and improvements in rail transport and communication technology, such as telegraphy. The last major phase of bushranging peaked towards the end of the decade, epitomised by the Kelly gang, led by Ned Kelly, Australia's best-known bushranger and outlaw. Although bushrangers appeared sporadically into the early 20th century, most historians regard Kelly's capture and execution in 1880 as effectively representing the end of the bushranging era.

Bushranging's origins in a convict system bred a unique kind of desperado, most frequently with an Irish political background. Native-born bushrangers also expressed nascent Australian nationalist views and have been described as "the first distinctively Australian characters to gain general recognition."^[2] As such, a number of bushrangers became folk heroes and symbols of rebellion, admired for their bravery, rough chivalry and colourful personalities. However, in stark contrast to romantic portrayals in the arts and popular culture, bushrangers often led lives that were "nasty, brutish and short", with some earning notoriety for their cruelty and bloodthirst. Australian attitudes toward bushrangers remain complex and ambivalent.