18th Century Celebrity Outlaw Traded For Five Gallons Of Rum

A great piece from Michael Stutchbury on why Australians love gangster television (because an admiration for bushrangers is hardwired into Australian culture) at Crikey (excerpts) :

John Caesar (or “Black Caesar” as he came to be known) was the first to take to the bush in search of a life of crime. A huge, hulking man built like the entire front row of the All Blacks, Caesar was a former Negro servant who was transported for theft. Arriving at Botany Bay in 1790, driven by hunger he stole an Aboriginal canoe and escaped into the surrounding bushland. Following a brief period raiding homesteads and Aboriginal camps, he was captured and returned to authorities, yet was not severely punished.

This set forth of a pattern that was to repeat itself over the next few years  — Caesar would escape, wander the bush for a time, receiving food and ammunition from sympathetic settlers who had heard of his exploits breathlessly recounted in the newspapers, before he was sent back to prison.

Unfortunately for Caesar, his exploits eventually went too far and provoked the authorities into appealing to that other great love of Australians  — drinking. Five gallons of rum, a liquid damn near worth its weight in gold to thirsty Sydneysiders, was the bounty placed on his head. A month later, in February, 1796 he was shot dead at Strathfield by a settler, who promptly claimed the reward.

The Full Story Is Here

If This Was America, We'd Already Have A Ned Kelly Amusement Park




By Darryl Mason

Bon Scott's grave in the Freemantle cemetery gets thousands of visitors a year.

How many visitors do you think the grave, and a monument, of Ned Kelly would bring to country Victoria each year? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? What might the value of a dedicated memorial and museum to Ned Kelly be worth each year to Victorian tourism? $10 million? $30 million?

The idea of exhuming the bones of Ned Kelly, holding a very public funeral and entombing his remains beneath a monument that would draw tens of thousands of tourists no doubt repels some in Australia. Those who don't want to remember the chaos of the decades of bushrangers and police harrassment and brutality that led to Federation.

But most Australians, I suspect, would think it a fine and brilliant idea, and would enjoy the media fuss and furious debate about his criminality and probably a televised pseudo-retrial of Kelly as well.

Before the corporatisation of sports, and the reckless slaughter of World War I, the bushranging era, through the mid-to-late 1800s served up to a young nation a series of heroic, but flawed, outlaws who then defined the spirit of what it meant to be an Australian : protect your family and take absolutely no shit, from anybody.

Pentridge Prison Chaplain : Give Ned Kelly Back To His Family :

The remains of Ned Kelly and other prisoners found at the Pentridge Prison site should be returned to their families, a chaplain says.

The outlaw's remains should be returned to his family and he should be given a decent burial, former Pentridge Prison chaplain Father Peter Norden said.

Fr Norden said Kelly should be granted a final resting place with his deceased relatives...

Bushranger movies, and movies about Ned Kelly in particular, were extremely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Some of the first full-length feature films produced anywhere in the world were about Australian bushrangers fighting back against police brutality in a fascist police state. These films, of course, had to be banned :

• 1907 Victorian Chief Secretary bans screenings of The Story of the Kelly Gang
  in Benalla and Wangaratta.

• 1911 exhibition of The Story of the Kelly Gang film banned in Adelaide.

• 1912 New South Wales police department banned the production of bushranger films.

And here's that excellent shot of Ned Kelly's armour again :

I Didn't Kill Anyone, But I Like That Movie Where I Did

By Darryl Mason

Unconvicted murder suspect Roger Rogerson was heard on 2MMMFM this morning promoting the DVD of the brilliant corrupt NSW cops TV movie, Blue Murder.

Roger Rogerson was never convicted for murder, and yet Blue Murder clearly shows him wasting scumbags. Why would he want people to think this is true?

It's Australian surreality.

Australians can't get enough true crime. Movies, half a day a week of it on TV in prime time, shelves full of best-selling books about those who simply did not give a fuck.

They try and convince us that cricket and football players and prime ministers are our real Australian Heroes, but since our convict ancestors stepped ashore on this land, we've always, usually quietly, admired the outlaws the most. From bushrangers to bank robbers, from gangsters to bikers, from drug dealers to drug dealer killers. Most Australians stop short of openly admiring our serial killers, but true crime books about such murders, and the true crime TV doco-reanactments, are immensely, suspiciously, popular.

We must be only a matter of months away from a journalist embedding a camera in his eye and joining a Lebanese biker gang to soak up the predicted carnage to come.

(thanks to Kerry for the tip)


Photos taken during a recent visit to the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney :