Bushranger

For other uses, see Bushranger (disambiguation).

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 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.

Notable bushrangers

Crime in Australia
Regional crime:	Timeline | Melbourne | Northern Territory | Western Australia | Sydney
Australian law:	Courts | Criminal law | Law enforcement
Australian people:	Bushrangers | Convicts | Criminals | Murderers | Prisoners
Australian prisons:	ACT | NSW | NT | QLD | SA | TAS | VIC | WA
International:	Crime by country

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