Not Your Usual Bushrangers

Seized back from Five Mile Press which made a mess of the marketing and went belly-up. They failed to answer my emails, and under my Use It or Lose It policy, they lost it. New material, new research.

Here's what I said about the first version when it came out, but brought up to date.

These are some of the 2000+ bushrangers who never became famous. The first British settlers invaded Australia in 1788, and for the first 50 years, there were significant numbers of convicts. Some of them escaped into the surrounding bush, but as they had no idea how to survive, they preyed upon settlers and the other convicts. 

The first bushrangers, though were more-or-less honest, and the suggestion of criminality only attached itself to the word in 1805. Bush ranging went on until about 1880, and a few desperate characters played the role until later-in fact, the last bushranger died a few months after I was born.

There are people who fume about how standards are falling, that children are no longer taught important dates and names (meaning the details of encrusted politicians). Oddly enough, it’s true: educational standards are falling, at least among the conservatives.

Ask these huffing old fogeys to define Australian history, and they serve up these fluffies: Bushrangers and Convicts (both scum), Diggers (the military sort), Explorers (brave openers of untamed wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). I call theirs the BCDEFG model.

The new cover

If you probe these stuck-in-the-muds about their headings, they will struggle to name five of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished; their grasp of the convict system is pitiful (the lash, the noose, that’s it); they could not point to a single battlefield on a world map; they would be lucky to name more than four explorers worthy of note (and note that Burke and Wills don’t count); they have no understanding of the harm done to country by agriculture, and their history of gold is complete rubbish.

So their BCDEFG history of Australia is a morass of worthless scribbles. One in fifty of them may change that to the ABCDEFG, but the ‘Aborigines’ don’t come into it for most of them—and don’t confuse the poor dears by amending it to a more polite IBCDEFG. Mention the role of Indigenous Australia, and they look at you like a mallee bull that just ran at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah.

This book is about the realities of what should be in their B file. Here you will meet the Governor's official thief, a bushranger who was given a pardon for being good at escaping, and other people who never got a mention at my school.

Where to get it:

An ebook in full colour for Kindle; $5 and

A print-on-demand paperback.  $25

The base page for all of these books is here.