Bushrangers

Antique Prints of Australian Bushrangers and Colonial Frontier Life

This category brings together original antique prints, engravings and illustrations depicting Australian bushrangers — the outlaws and escaped convicts who populated the colonial imagination from the earliest years of settlement through to the heroic mythology of Ned Kelly and his contemporaries in the 1870s and 1880s. These works document one of the most distinctive and enduring subjects in Australian visual culture, preserving period images of individuals, events and encounters that shaped both colonial society and the mythology that Australian culture built around the experience of life beyond the law in the vast interior of a convict colony.

The bushranger tradition in Australian history begins with the escaped convicts of the early settlement period who took to the bush rather than endure the conditions of transportation and convict labour. These early bushrangers — known as bolters, absconders and runaways in the vocabulary of the colonial system — were depicted in the illustrated press and in the prints produced for popular consumption as figures combining danger and desperation in proportions that reflected the ambivalent attitudes of colonial society towards the men and women the system had produced. As bushranging developed from individual flight into organised robbery and the confrontation of colonial authority, the illustrated record grew more elaborate and the cultural mythology more complex.

The great bushrangers of the mid-19th century — Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner, Captain Thunderbolt and their associates — generated extensive illustrated coverage in the colonial press, with the Illustrated Sydney News, the Illustrated Melbourne Post and their counterparts producing engraved portraits, crime scene illustrations and narrative sequences that brought the adventures of the colonial outlaw to a mass reading public. These illustrated reports, combining the sensationalism of popular journalism with the documentary authority of the engraved image, created the visual vocabulary of Australian bushranger mythology that reached its fullest expression in the Ned Kelly legend of the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Antique bushranger prints are collected for their historical significance as documents of colonial frontier culture, their connection to one of the defining mythologies of Australian national identity, and their rarity as period evidence of a subject that attracted illustrated attention primarily through the ephemeral medium of the colonial illustrated press.