School of Geography - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    The geographical dimensions of social banditry: the Kelly outbreak 1878 -1880
    McQuilton, Francis John ( 1977)
    Bushranging was an integral part of nineteenth century- rural settlement in Australia and the bushranger earned a favoured place in the nation's folklore. There he has remained Academic studies of the bushranger and bushranging outbreaks have been few in number and limited in scope to biographical studies, divorcing the bushranger from his times. An academic tradition exists that treats the bushranger as a social aberration. Many, in fact, were social bandits, similar to those in southern Europe as identified and described by Hobsbawm. The bushranger often represented an extreme reaction to social conditions. His views were more extreme than but still compatible with social attitudes and mores developed in rural areas during the conflict that accompanied political ' attempts to foster agricultural settlement in nineteenth century Australia. This thesis examines the Kelly Outbreak of 1878-1880 in North-Eastern Victoria, sets the Outbreak in the context of its time and examines the inter-relationship between settlement failure and social banditry. Three successive rural land-use systems dominated the North-East between 1835 and 1884. The pastoralists (squatters) were the first settlers establishing huge runs for sheep. Gold discoveries of 1852 disrupted squatting land-use and mining dominated the region " for a decade. Declining yields and political ferment brought the first of the selection acts in I860. The digger was expected to turn to agriculture for his. livelihood. The acts pitted the selector and squatter against each other in a competition for the control and utilisation of the region's rural resources. The squatters' easy victory compounded the problems already posed by the failure of selection as a commercial agrarian enterprise. Selector communities developed a code of ethics that accepted selective stock theft. The four members of the Kelly Gang came from local selector communities in the North-East. All had served jail sentences for stock theft or crimes related to stock theft. The Kelly brothers belonged to a clan whose members had failed as selectors and who were notorious to the police and local squatters as stock thieves. The Kelly's had much in common with their selector neighbours and although their views were more extreme, they were never alien to those who lived in the same communities. In 1878, when four young selectors' sons formed the Kelly Gang after the tragedy at Stringybark Creek, they found widespread local support amongst selector communities in the region, a support that enabled them to elude the police for over I8 months. Without the failure of selection as an agrarian settlement process, a failure rooted in the conflict for the control of rural resources by two socially antagonistic groups, and the development of attitudes in rural areas favourable to the existence of social banditry, the Kelly Outbreak would not have posed the serious challenge to the Victorian authorities that it came to be. And the existence of social banditry in the capitalistic social structure of nineteenth century colonial Victoria suggests that the preconditions and social situation described by Hobsbawm as being necessary for the development of social banditry should be modified.