Bushrangers were outlaws who preyed on people in the Australian outback in the 18th and 19th centuries. Originally, the term referred to those who could survive in the bush, but it later became associated with British convicts who escaped and stole from remote communities. During the gold rush, bushrangers had easy access to wealth and their numbers increased. After the gold rush, native Australians became the new breed of bushranger. The last of the bushrangers were eliminated in 1880.
“Bushranger” is a term from Australian history. A bushranger is an outlaw or robber who lived in the late 18th or 19th century and preyed on Aboriginal people, miners and settlers, among others, in the sparsely populated areas of the Australian countryside known as the outback or bush. Acting alone or in small gangs, bushrangers were criminals involved in murder, robbery and rape. More often than not, however, bushrangers specialized in robbing small settlements, banks or stagecoaches.
Originally, “bushranger” only referred to a person who had the skills necessary to survive in the Australian bush. Over time, the word instead came to refer only to British convicts who escaped from one of Australia’s first penal colonies and used the relatively unpopulated areas of the outback to hide from the authorities. To survive, escapees stole from travelers and farmers in remote communities because their survival skills were limited and they often died of exposure, starvation, or disease. John Caesar, who was shot and killed by a settler in 1796, is thought to have been the first of these convict bushrangers.
Up until the 1850s, bushrangers were almost entirely escaped by British convicts. During the 1850s and 1860s, there was a gold rush in Australia which gave bushrangers easy access to large sums of wealth that could be quickly converted into cash. The gold settlements were usually extremely isolated and the police force had been greatly diminished because many of its members had left to pan for gold, so there was an increase in the number of bushrangers. It is estimated that there were between several hundred and 2,000 bushrangers operating in the period 1850 to 1880. This era is considered the heyday of the bushranger.
With the discovery of gold, escaped convicts from British penal colonies ceased to be the only type of bushranger. Instead, after the Gold Rush period, a bushranger was usually a native Australian. Often, a bushranger was the son of poor settlers or squatters who saw an opportunity for easy riches in a life of crime of ambushing gold shipments, robbing travelers, and raiding settlers near remote gold towns.
This new breed of bushranger was far more at home in the bush than an escaped convict, so survival in the countryside was unproblematic. 1880 saw the last of the bushrangers. Most bushrangers were hanged or shot by the police or otherwise died violently at a young age.
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