In Boundary Crossers, author Meg Foster investigates the lives of four historical figures who were, ostensibly, known as bushrangers - Black Douglas, Sam Poo, Mary Ann Bugg and Jimmy Governor.
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However, evidence contained in Foster's research casts doubt of this classification.
Rather than relating their adventures - and crimes - Foster, in her introduction, warns "the only way to access these bushrangers' lives is to disentangle what they did and said from what colonists said about them".
Black Douglas came to Australia from America via England as a convict. He escaped. He "made only one attempt at bushranging" for "a bundle of goods and provisions", and served a sentence in Tasmania. Later, on the Victorian goldfields, he was guilty of theft, assault, drunkenness and vagrancy. He was rumoured to have murdered a white woman - but never charged. This, and his skin colour, enhanced his evil reputation.
Sam Poo had an equally unimpressive career as a bushranger and murderer, lasting only 25 days. In 1865, he was hanged for the murder of respected Senior Constable John Ward, the fifth police officer to be killed by bushrangers in New South Wales in less than a year. Sam Poo was Chinese, there had been rioting against the Chinese in the goldfields, but there is doubt as to whether Sam Poo was the culprit.
Mary Ann Bugg was the partner of Captain Thunderbolt, "one of those elite, white, gentleman bushrangers upon which the bushranging legend relied". Foster's research indicates that the four years she spent as the Captain's Lady - and their later romantic liaisons - have been largely misrepresented. Thunderbolt died in 1870; Mary Ann Bugg, in 1905. During those 35 years, she took other partners, bore children and endured the vagaries of white man's laws as applied to indigenous women.
Foster begins her coverage of Jimmy Governor with a description of the social complications associated with indigenous Governor having married a white woman. The horrific murders are barely mentioned, but the attitude of the people in the regions where Governor and his brother eluded capture, and the attitude in the distant cities and towns, is investigated. Governor liked to think himself a bushranger - rather than a "killer on the run".
Foster's research has yielded a comprehensive picture of the existing social and physical conditions during the lives of her four "bushrangers". The reader is challenged to consider the degree to which these conditions affected their behaviour. The degree to which they were authentic Australian bushrangers depends, in many ways, of the reader's perception of this age-old concept.
