Bail up: a pictorial history of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers. Geoff Hocking. 2002.

Australia’s colonial history is washed deeply with a convict stain. One of the first songs that tells of Australia’s convict history is ‘Botany Bay’, a lament for the leaving of old England forever. This tune was soon followed by ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Australia’s first unofficial anthem, which revered the life and death, in 1836, of the last of the convict outlaws, ‘Bold’ Jack Donohoe.

Onto the colonial horizon rode band after band of other wild colonial boys, young Australian-born ‘currency lads’, who began to take liberties in a land they sought to claim as their own. Most were regarded as folk heroes by the labouring classes, but were despised by the squatters, bankers and property owners. Almost all suffered the might of British justice, and many met their fate dangling from a rope or shot in battle.

Not all were charming rogues like ‘Captain Moonlite’ or gallant highwaymen like young and handsome ‘Bold’ Ben Hall. There were callous killers, such as Thomas the ‘Monster’ Jeffery, the marauding Aboriginal brothers Jimmy and Joe Governor, and Alexander Pearce the cannibal, who encouraged other convicts to escape with him only to kill them and dine on their flesh. Bail Up takes the reader on a chronological journey from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, to the tormented years of port Arthur and Norfolk Island, to the goldfields of the 1859s, and on to the saga of the last of the fighting and defiant Irishmen - Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly - who was hanged in Melbourne on 11 November 1880.