4 - Bushrangers

Summary

Nineteenth-century outlaws (those who live ‘outside of the law’), highwaymen or bandits were known as ‘bushrangers’ in Australia. The Sydney Gazette described bushrangers in 1805 as ‘a group of suspected highway robbers, possibly escaped convicts, who often waylaid travellers in the bush’ (cited in Tranter and Donoghue, 2008, 374). The myth of ‘bushrangers’ holds a strong place in Australia's national identity and is often featured within popular culture. Many Australian rural/regional towns have a close affiliation with their bushranger past and have built tourist attractions showcasing the lives and exploits of these personalities. According to Australian historian Russell Ward, the ‘convict system manufactured bushrangers’ (2003, 147), and nearly all of the early bushrangers were prior convicts. With the cessation of transportation to NSW in 1840 (and transportation ceased everywhere to Australia in 1868), bushrangers began to replace convicts as Australia's romanticised lawbreakers, continuing the focus on rural Australia as housing violent and dangerous criminals.

Bushranger tourism sites often fall on the lighter side of Stone's (2006) spectrum, with a focus on providing family-friendly commercialised experiences. Some sites could be likened to Stone's (2006) categorisation as ‘dark fun factories’, which provide ‘fun-centric’ experiences with high levels of tourism infrastructure. Sites focusing on bushrangers can often be perceived as less authentic because the violence and crimes committed by bushrangers are presented in a highly sanitised manner. Sites with less tourism infrastructure may constitute ‘dark conflict sites’ where, although the focus is not on ‘warfare’, the site does represent a violent conflict or a location associated with a violent individual, such as a bushranger. By featuring bushrangers that are often romanticised, the ‘narrative’ of sites diminishes both the ‘authenticity’ and ‘darkness’ of the site.

Dark conflict sites can also play an important role in creating storyscapes of bushranger activity across a broad geographical location, encompassing several towns and thus providing tourism opportunities for a region, rather than one specific town. In essence, this configuration of attractions and towns are ‘bound together by sharing a theme which tells a story’, becoming what Rodaway calls a ‘themescape’ (Fagence, 2017, 452).