A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017

By Andrew James Couzens

'A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017' is a multidisciplinary investigation into the history of cultural representations of the bushranger legend on the stage and screen, charting that history from its origins in colonial theatre works performed while bushrangers still roamed Australia’s bush to contemporary Australian cinema. It considers the influences of industrial, political and social disruptions on these representations as well as their contributions to those disruptions. The cultural history recounted in this book provides not only an insight into the role of popular narrative representations of bushrangers in the development and reflection of Australian character, but also a detailed case study of the specific mechanisms at work in the symbiosis between a nation’s values and its creative production.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783088935

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A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017

ANTHEM STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specializes in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/or conceptually. We welcome well-researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames.

Series Editors

Katherine Bode – Australian National University, Australia

Nicole Moore – University of New South Wales, Australia

Editorial Board

Tanya Dalziell – University of Western Australia, Australia

Delia Falconer – University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

John Frow – University of Sydney, Australia

Wang Guanglin – Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China

Ian Henderson – King’s College London, UK

Tony Hughes-D’Aeth – University of Western Australia, Australia

Ivor Indyk – University of Western Sydney, Australia

Nicholas Jose – University of Adelaide, Australia

James Ley – Sydney Review of Books, Australia

Andrew McCann – Dartmouth College, USA

Lyn McCredden – Deakin University, Australia

Elizabeth McMahon – University of New South Wales, Australia

Susan Martin – La Trobe University, Australia

Brigitta Olubas – University of New South Wales, Australia

Anne Pender – University of New England, Australia

Fiona Polack – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Sue Sheridan – University of Adelaide, Emeritus, Australia

Ann Vickery – Deakin University, Australia

Russell West-Pavlov – Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen, Germany

Lydia Wevers – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Gillian Whitlock – University of Queensland, Australia

A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828–2017

Andrew James Couzens

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Andrew James Couzens 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-891-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-891-5 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Defining the Bushranger Legend

Part 1 Establishing the Legend

1.The First Bushranger Melodramas

2.Alfred Dampier and the Nationalist Melodrama

3.Wild West Shows and Wild Australia

4.Hippodramas and Edward Irham Cole

Part 2 Developing the Legend

5.The Bushranger Genre from Stage to Screen

6.The Bushranger Ban

7.British and American Interventions in the Bushranger Legend

8.Radical Nationalism and the Bushranger Legend

Part 3 Fragmenting the Legend

9.Historical Revisionism and the Bushranger Legend

10.Diversification and Inclusiveness of the Bushranger Legend

11.Globalization of the Bushranger Legend in Outlaw Road Movies

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1Photo of BDC Bendigo front entrance Market Square, PXD 735, vol. 2, p. 9, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

2Photo of Cole’s Hippodrome Adelaide 1914, PXD 735, vol. 1, p. 6, item c, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

3Photo of Woods–Williamson production of Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch play, 1890, IE3420175, Perier Collection: Photographs of Streets and Buildings in Sydney, Canberra and the Blue Mountains. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

4Photo of Sydney Hippodrome view of audience, PXD 735, vol. 1, p. 9, item c, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

5Photo of Cole’s Hippodrome Adelaide 1914 interior, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 19, item b, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

6Playbill/programme ‘King of the Road’ reverse, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 33, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

7Complete damaged playbill BDC ‘King of the Road’, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 106, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

8Publicity illustrations for ‘Ned Kelly and his Gang’, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 86, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

9Publicity illustrations for ‘Ned Kelly and his Gang’, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 87, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

10Poster [?]‌ for ‘The Bushranger’, PXD 735, vol. 1, p. 96, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

11Page from Australasian Sketcher with attachments, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 10, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

12Publicity illustrations for Thunderbolt series, PXD 735, vol. 3, p. 84, E. I. Cole Collection of Theatre and Circus Photographs, Newscuttings, 1903–1940, and Realia, 1897. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

Acknowledgements

This research was only possible due to the generous support and guidance of numerous scholars and institutions. In particular I must thank Jane Stadler and Stephen Carleton who supervised my research and provided invaluable insight. Several other people have provided support and feedback either as readers or in the context of academic conferences: Tom O’Regan, David Carter, Ben Goldsmith, Mark Ryan, Stephen Gaunson, Janet Wilson and Adian Danks have all made suggestions that shaped my research. I especially wish to thank Richard Fotheringham for kindly loaning me a folio of relevant research he had compiled on Wild West shows.

My archival research was kindly supported by the many institutions I visited: The State Library of Western Australia, the Mitchell Library housed within the State Library of NSW, the National Archives of Australia, the National Library of Australia, and the National Film and Sound Archives. These institutions and their staff provide a repository of wisdom that enriches the opportunity for cultural scholarship. The images published within this monograph are courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.

Introduction: Defining the Bushranger Legend

‘Bail up!’ On the roads of rural Victoria and New South Wales throughout the nineteenth century, but particularly during the gold rushes of the 1850s–60s, these words signalled a peculiarly national encounter. Gold escorts, mail coaches, banks and homesteads were all targets of these outlaws, known in Australia as bushrangers. Even now their names – Ned Kelly, Captain Thunderbolt, Ben Hall, Dan Morgan – recall specific engagements with cultural traditions and ideologies that resonate with national concerns. Though their historical reign is now long past, their cultural reign continues unabated. Bushrangers remain a core component to the self-identification of many Australians, especially those able to trace their family history back to colonial Australia. Yet the cultural influence of bushrangers reaches beyond these family legacies and embeds itself within certain national traditions of self-definition. They have become greater than the sum of their parts, their role in Australian cultural memory far exceeding their direct influence on Australian history, resulting in the formation of a constantly evolving bushranger legend.

One of the most powerful avenues for this legend’s cultural dissemination is the visual representation of bushrangers in popular entertainments. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the cinema has been the most significant site for this cultural phenomenon. However, before cinema technologies provided the opportunity for mass popular entertainment, colonial theatre conventions established ideological and representational traditions associated with bushrangers that Australian films would also exhibit due to various industrial continuities between the stage and screen in Australia. Furthermore, both mediums shared an interest in visual and performative elements and entertained comparable popular audiences. These mediums were forced to respond to other influences on the bushranger legend, including historical developments and literature. Theatre and cinema therefore participated in a feedback loop in which they simultaneously reflected on and participated in the formulation of the bushranger legend.

This study is concerned with the history of this feedback loop in cinema and colonial theatre. It not only questions how these texts participated in the construction of national character via their representation of the bushranger legend but also how they responded to other influences, whether textual or extratextual. It establishes a comprehensive picture of the multifaceted approaches to and versions of the legend that emerged at different times, identifying industrial, political, social and historical continuities between them.

It is impossible to understand the significance of these representational traditions without understanding what the bushranger legend refers to. The introduction to this study is therefore concerned with establishing the cultural basis for the legend, the characteristics it applies to its outlaw subjects and the rationale for its national significance. I identify the bushranger legend as the convergence of several other legends from the radical nationalist Australian legend concerned with the bush as a focal point of Australian distinctiveness to the universal outlaw legend that Graham Seal theorizes to explain the cultural significance of figures like Robin Hood and Dick Turpin or indeed Australian bushrangers.¹

Converging Legends

Bushrangers are a peculiarly Australian category of outlaw, and the bushranger legend therefore responds to the historical and mythic characteristics of outlawry. Outlawry is the concept of being outside a dominant social order’s definition of law. An outlaw is ‘cast out of society, either for a crime or because he [sic] has become a threat to those in power – sometimes a combination of both these things’.² Outlaws lose the protection of and often become antagonists to their society: in medieval England, an outlaw was legally defined as someone who could be arrested or killed without judicial repercussions. Colonial authorities introduced equivalent laws in Australia, including the Felons Apprehension Act 1865 in New South Wales, which gave anyone the right to kill certain bushrangers. Such laws were invoked against Ben Hall’s and Ned Kelly’s gangs.³ Nevertheless outlawry is distinct from criminality because committing a crime does not necessarily affect one’s social acceptability or citizenship, as in the case of white-collar crime. Furthermore, outlaws are not necessarily criminals, as could be the case for some political activists. They are distinct from other popular representations of criminal communities such as gangsters through their explicit nonconformity – whether forced or chosen – to societal laws and lifestyle. For the most part this observation might seem immaterial because the bushrangers were all criminals, but ambiguity arises when storytellers apply characteristics of the bushranger legend to characters that are not bushrangers directly. This complication is the central concern of the final section of this study on the fragmentation of the bushranger legend. As a result, it is prudent to establish a boundary for this investigation. To circumvent the potential problems of too wide a definition of the bushranger legend, I limit this study to films depicting characters that reject or are forced out of society due to the threat of some representative of authority, in which the outlaw character’s evasiveness is the key structuring element of the narrative and in which the evasion takes place in a rural space. I will justify the more ambiguous case studies individually when they arise in the final chapters, but this foundational logic for my research identifies certain essential elements of a legend that I argue is in a constant state of flux.

The mythology surrounding bushrangers reflects a sociological function of the outlaw as heroes to certain communities first identified in Eric Hobsbawm’s 1969 work Bandits. Hobsbawm defined the characteristics of rural outlawry through an anthropological investigation into what he termed social bandits. These were historical figures arising from peasant communities in response to perceived authoritarian injustice from the wealthy classes. In this respect, social bandits are inherently political, though their goal ‘is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things as it should be (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past)’.⁴

Though he focuses on the social and political function of these figures during their lifetime, Hobsbawm recognizes that

the bandit myth is also comprehensible in highly urbanized countries which still possess a few empty spaces of ‘outback’ or ‘west’ to remind them of a sometimes imaginary heroic past, and to provide a concrete locus for nostalgia, a symbol of ancient and lost virtue. […] There the outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly still rides, as in the paintings of the Australian Sidney Nolan, a ghostly figure, tragic, menacing and fragile in his home-made armour, crossing and re-crossing the sun-bleached Australian hinterland, waiting for death.⁵

Despite Hobsbawm’s explicit reference to the bushranger Ned Kelly in his evocation of the nostalgic bandit myth, American theorists including Richard Meyer and Kent Ladd Steckmesser have argued it to be an inherently American tradition,⁶ claiming its ‘ultimate function […] may well lie in a conception of our [America’s] collective national psychology which involves the need for the preservation in a modern, complex era of models which hearken back to the simpler, more individualistic values of a lost frontier’.⁷ The limitations of this cultural scope are most powerfully articulated in Graham Seal’s tracing of the outlaw legend through Anglo folk traditions in Britain, America and Australia, and his research has enormous implications for the elaboration of the bushranger legend. Seal argues that the outlaw legend resonates globally, playing an integral part in popular and folk culture worldwide. Where Hobsbawm argued that bandits emerged from and responded to specific sociopolitical contexts, Seal sees the outlaw legend as a cultural necessity:

They are therefore called into being, shaped from often unpromising clay and nurtured by the processes of myth during their usually brief lives and their often enduring afterlives. Their traditions then persist as a cultural resource to be drawn on by future generations as a means of understanding, articulating and acting on their sense of political disparity and discontent.⁸

Seal considers outlaws in terms of their cultural rather than social or political meaning, and his ideas are therefore essential to understanding the ramifications of the bushranger legend’s textual representation in Australian cultural narratives.

Like Hobsbawm, Seal primarily discusses the positive, heroic treatment of outlaws, but he acknowledges that they are often ambivalent figures. He identifies 12 elements that recur in representations of outlaw heroes:

1 The outlaw hero is forced to defy the law – or whatever passes for it – by oppressive and unjust forces or interests – usually governments and/or local power holders.

2 The outlaw hero has sympathy and support from one or more social groups who form a ‘resistant community’.

3 The outlaw hero rights wrongs, or perhaps settles disputes.

4 The outlaw hero kills only in self-defence or justified retribution rather than wantonly or capriciously and does not attack or harm women or the otherwise vulnerable.

5 The outlaw hero may be kind and courteous to his victims.

6 The outlaw hero distributes loot among the poor and deserving and/or is otherwise sympathetic to their plight and helpful to their circumstances.

7 The outlaw hero outwits, eludes and escapes the authorities, usually with some style, often in disguise.

8 The outlaw hero frequently employs some form of magic that confers invulnerability, invisibility, superhuman speed or another useful attribute.

9 The outlaw hero is brave and strong or, if not strong, especially skilled in some ability useful to the outlaw life.

10 The outlaw hero is ultimately betrayed by a member of his gang or otherwise supporting social group.

11 The outlaw hero dies bravely and defiantly, whether by rope, axe, sword or bullet.

12 The outlaw hero may be said to have escaped the showdown, execution or other manner of death and to have lived on elsewhere in secure obscurity. ⁹

Though these are intended as broad, universal elements of the outlaw legend, they are useful in a contextualized study like this because the specific implementation of each reveals a great deal about social, political and historical circumstances. Though most outlaw heroes have a so-called resistant community, whom that community consists of varies, as does how the outlaw is first forced to defy the law. Some communities may also place different degrees of emphasis upon the different criteria. For instance, William Van Deburg defines African American social bandits in unique terms, arguing that they

are not required to divide the spoils or to become public benefactors in order to be immortalized in song or verse. Their supporters permit antisocial ways to be portrayed in realistic fashion, without romantic embellishment or the sugarcoating of brutality and boorishness. In the black worldview, it often is sufficient that the bandit exhibit a type of unadorned hypermasculinity normally denied the menfolk of a maligned race.¹⁰

Interrogation of the applicability of Seal’s criteria to specific depictions of outlawry therefore unveils a rich interrelationship between the outlaws and the contextual framework in which they exist. These may reflect the society as it was during the outlaw’s lifetime, but they may equally reflect the time of their cultural reproduction and commodification.

In Australia, many of these later contexts arise from specific colonial features that contributed to the historical activities of bushrangers. The colony’s original purpose as a penal settlement creates a sharp distinction between mistreated convicts and their authoritarian guardians, and as the colony’s numbers gradually expanded with ticket-of-leave holders and emancipists,¹¹ disaffection with colonial authority grew. The first bushrangers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were escaped convicts popularized due to the experience of captivity they shared with the ex-convict portion of the population. The shared experience and kinship felt between community and outlaw would remain an important factor in bushrangers’ cultural significance. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the source of these experiences shifted from the struggles of convicts to that of settlers as other legal and political concerns became more salient. Pat O’Malley argues that bushrangers emerged from a class struggle particularly fraught between the late 1840s and the 1880s ‘between pastoral wealth and bourgeois wealth, manifested in a conflict over land’.¹² The legal circumstances of colonial Australia at the time, particularly in relation to land ownership, created the prerequisites for this conflict. Some settlers had established pastoral stations illegally on crown land, generating vast amounts of wealth for both themselves and within the colony due to their economic activities. O’Malley’s choice of the late 1840s as the start of the class conflict marks the point at which the colonial administration began to issue long-term leases to these wealthy pastoralists, known as squatters. In the 1850s, a rise in immigration due to the New South Wales and Victorian gold rushes created a boom in the number of people looking to establish themselves in the colony. To facilitate this, the colonial administrations introduced new legislation intended to support smaller independent farmers. The legislation typically allowed private individuals to survey small selections of crown land and pay a reasonable rate for a freehold on that small plot if they demonstrated their determination to improve the land through farming or a similar pursuit.¹³ This directly threatened the holdings of the squatters who, despite their wealth, had only a tenuous legal hold over their leases. Squatters therefore criticized the legislation that threatened to divide up and distribute land they considered theirs as harmful to the colonies, citing examples of selectors – the beneficiaries of the freeholdings – failing in their duty to effectively enrich their holdings. Squatters also used underhanded tactics to maintain their privileged position, including hiring dummy bidders to purchase the parcels of land that made up their estate and then purchasing these smaller selections to eventually gain freehold over enormous stretches of pastoral land.

In the relationship between squatters and selectors, the former became associated with oppressive, corrupt and authoritarian practices, while the latter identified with the grievances of the bushrangers that arose from that conflict. As many of the selectors were Irish immigrants, and the squatters English, there was also an ethnic component to some elements of that political conflict. The selector community’s ability to identify with bushrangers was likely due to the fact that the police were in many respects considered tools of the pastoral aristocracy, who controlled the police through magisterial positions and were therefore able to bias the legal system to their political favour.¹⁴ Seal notes the peculiarly antagonistic feelings held toward the police, arguing that ‘for the first seventy years of Australia’s European history the police were seen to be given the powers, and assumed the character, of something akin to an army of occupation’.¹⁵ Further suspicion, especially in New South Wales, ‘was aggravated by the fact that the New South Wales police forces were poorly paid, and were consequently largely recruited from convicts and ex-convicts’.¹⁶ As a result, the colonial police forces earned a reputation for corruption, cruelty, incompetence and self-interest.

In her account of bushranging and its policing between 1860–80, Susan West uses police records and depositions to present an alternative to the common antipolice legends of bushrangers. She argues that a small number of popular elite bushrangers including Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner and Fred Ward are overrepresented in accounts of bushranging and that this emphasis has resulted in unfair generalizations about the cowardliness of the police force and an exaggeration of the amount of support bushrangers received from their community, which she claims was typically limited to their immediate family. West considers the historical rather than mythic implications of bushrangers, and it is from elite bushrangers that the legends were formed. Nevertheless, she does suggest an explanation for the romantic and mythic connotations attached to bushranger at the time, arguing that the rural conception of masculinity engendered

in plebeian men engaged in physical work, a self-image that diverged markedly from urban men, whose world view broadened to include a wide range of recreational pursuits in addition to their employment. Rural men’s self-concept remained tied to their employment and, in the 1860s bushranging came to be seen as the supreme exemplar of bush skills.¹⁷

Through their identification with the bush and their successful coexistence with it, bushrangers set themselves ‘in opposition to the urban middle class who, harking back to the English view of the countryside, saw land as something to be tamed and to be made profitable through agriculture’.¹⁸

There were therefore contextual features of the historical bushranger phenomenon that contributed to their affinity to the heroic elements of Seal’s outlaw legend. This does not account for the elevation of bushrangers to nationally specific figures. That elevation occurred later, and the bushranger legend therefore emerges from the intersections between the outlaw legend and other legends constructed to describe and explain aspects of the Australian character. The most pervasive of these is the one developed and detailed in Russell Ward’s 1958 book The Australian Legend. The legend Ward refers to emerged, he argues, from the bush and itinerant workers who made their living in the pastoral industry there. Despite representing a small proportion of Australia’s population, he argues, their distinctiveness allowed Australians to differentiate themselves from other nations, particularly Great Britain. Ward establishes within these bush workers the origins of many attributes often assumed to be characteristics of Australians – including anti-authoritarianism, mateship and self-confidence.

Criticism of Ward’s legend tends to coalesce on two points. First is the suggestion that he has misidentified the source of the legend. As John Docker argues, the Australian legend

was created not by the outback male nomads, as Ward thought, but by the Bohemians of the Sydney Bulletin. These masculinist Bohemians, these poets and journalists, projected the values most dear to themselves, male camaraderie and bachelordom, onto the men of the Bush. They translated their own bachelor lifestyle as the Bushman’s nomadic freedom from family ties, and their own urban camaraderie as bush mateship. In promoting and eulogising the Bushman as cultural hero, Bulletin writers and Bohemians like [poet Henry] Lawson were promoting and eulogising themselves.¹⁹

However, even the Bulletin writers were inconsistent in their adherence to this legend. W. G. McMinn points out that in their writings ‘the democratic temper eclipses the Australian bias: […] these writers were much more interested in utopianism than in federalism’.²⁰ Even after Federation, he argues, national loyalty tended to be overridden by loyalty to the individual colonies (now states) and to the British Empire.²¹ Evidently Ward’s Australian legend had only tentative claims to historical validity. Rather than an articulation of the construction of Australian character it was, as Paul Eggert argues, a participant in it, responding to a sociopolitical movement Ward belonged to known as the radical nationalists.²² This movement saw value in raising some of the characteristics they believed the 1890s Bohemians celebrated as a way of divorcing Australian culture from its British allegiances. Ward’s legend promoted certain attributes as possessing uniquely Australian characteristics and the bush as playing a formative role in their construction. Many of these still inform the way Australians think about themselves.

Attempts to define a singular national character in the way Ward does are necessarily selective, and Ward’s exclusions are the second common criticism. Richard Nile’s edited collection The Australian Legend and Its Discontents compiles a wealth of scholarship reflecting on that legend’s exclusions and other neglected myths of Australian nationhood.²³ J. B. Hirst outlines an entire parallel legend that celebrates Australian pioneers rather than bush workers, foregrounding the taming and controlling of land.²⁴ Patricia Grimshaw et al. respond to the masculine bias in legends like these in their book Creating a Nation, which historicizes the contribution of colonial women to aspects of Australian character.²⁵ As in the case of Ward’s legend, the salience of these critiques changes over time for various social and political reasons.

Perhaps the most unsettling limitation of Ward’s legend is that the colonial attitudes it draws upon appropriate perceptions of Aboriginality as a way of indigenizing Australia’s settler culture. As Ross Gibson points out,

Although the native becomes a traduced and neglected figure in the colony, and although he is portrayed in English literature as a sadly inferior type of contemporary man, the imagined best features of a former Aboriginal culture are still relevant to an image of the colony. The noble Aborigine’s outdoors activity, his virtues of stamina, independence, bravery, and communion with nature are all combined in the beginnings of a bush ethic.²⁶

The legend displaces Aboriginal culture, endorsing settler bush dwellers as uniquely adapted to the challenges of their environment. In failing to acknowledge the origins of many of these attributes, it contributes to Aboriginal dispossession.

Despite its limitations Ward’soutline of an Australian legend has had a lasting influence on the discourses surrounding Australian self-conceptualization and provides bushrangers with a manner of national significance. Ward himself argued that in the nineteenth century bushranging ‘amounted to a leading national institution’ and that they embodied his legend by being ‘more completely independent of the authorities, more adaptable, resourceful, and loyal to each other, than even the most thoroughly acclimatized bush workman’.²⁷ This marks the convergence of the outlaw and Australian legends, an interpolation of global traditions upon local circumstances that achieved national significance through both coincidences of history and through the efforts of particular political and social movements. The bushranger legend, then, is found in the interactions between those traditions, political forces, and national conceptualizations. Though its historical basis lies in the behaviours – both imagined and actual – of the famed Australian outlaws of the nineteenth century, it is constantly recontextualized in cultural and historical works, with each new context building upon the last to suit both contemporary and historical exigencies.

The cinema and its industrial predecessor colonial theatre are important outlets for those interactions, and it is these that are the focus of this study. They are not the only cultural artefacts that participate in this constant redefinition of the legend. There is a rich vein of scholarship into the interactions between cultural memory and Ned Kelly in particular, drawing on the literature and biographies of that famous figure.²⁸ However, the modes of cultural and artistic expression in cinema and theatre have received less sustained critical attention for their potential as far-reaching and influential ways of embedding the bushranger legend into the national consciousness. There are deep industrial interactions that emerge between the bushranger legend and cinematic and theatrical conventions, with affinities to the western genre providing opportunities to establish narrative conventions expanding the bushranger legend further. Elaboration of the contributions