Protecting the Colony from its People: Bushranging, Vagrancy, and Social Control in Colonial New South Wales

Abstract

During the 1830s, the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act were crafted to prevent crime, revolt and insurrection in the colony of New South Wales. These statutes contained exceptional methods to police and control colonial populations and suspended legal safeguards designed to protect the population from abuses of power. Supporters of the laws argued that extreme measures were necessary due to the emergency of the occasion. Understanding the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act’s enactment and operation, as well as the purposes they were designed to serve and the liberties they infringed to achieve these ends requires attention to local circumstance. A fine-grained analysis, rooted in the peculiarities of life in colonial New South Wales and anchored by the law’s operation on the ground is needed to understand the malleability of British law at this place and at this time. In this article, I argue that rather than a select criminal contingent, the New South Wales’ authorities increasingly feared that the composition of the colony threatened their colonial enterprise. The Bushranging Act of 1830 and the Vagrancy Act of 1835 contained wide coercive and discretionary powers to mitigate the extent of this threat.

Bandits, heroes and villains: A view from a settler colony

“…In 1835, for instance, a series of deadly raids by Aboriginal warriors were attributed to a white bushranger who supposedly used Aboriginal people as minions to do his bidding. Although there is no evidence that such a man existed, the story took hold because it served the dual purpose of depicting Aboriginal people as an inferior race and obscuring their fight for their Country (Foster, 2022b, pp. 662–666).…”

“…But such historical origins were replaced by the increasingly powerful myth of bushrangers righting wrongs, challenging tyrannical authorities and representing a rough and noble form of justice. White bushranging men created a useful, usable history for the new nation as it demonstrated national distinction at the same time as situating Australia in a wider, male‐dominated, Anglo world (Foster, 2022a, 2022b).…”