Vulgar History - Aboriginal Australian Criminal Heroine, Mary Ann Bugg

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to vulgar history of feminist women's history comedy podcast my name is ann

00:00:16.920 foster and this is a special episode that has been a long time coming frankly i'm gonna set

00:00:22.720 you back several months summer 2023 i was listening to the bbc history extra podcast which is a

00:00:29.420 excellent podcast. They talk to authors about new books about history and things. And what

00:00:34.260 caught my attention is that their guest is someone named Dr. Meg Foster. And I thought

00:00:38.040 Foster, but that is also my last name. So, you know, just in a sort of foster to foster

00:00:43.280 way, I'm like, well, let's see what this is about. And what she was talking about was

00:00:45.900 Bushrangers, which at that point, I did not know what that word meant. But I listened

00:00:50.560 to the episode. It was so fascinating. And what Bushrangers are, and we're going to talk

00:00:54.440 about this in depth in the episode, but they're basically bandits in colonial Australia. And not

00:01:00.320 only that, but Meg, I'm going to call her Meg, Dr. Meg Foster. She's a historian of banditry

00:01:06.800 is one of her credentials, which is just like the most iconic thing I could ever imagine. If I had

00:01:11.880 been told when I was a young history undergraduate student that you could specialize in banditry,

00:01:17.340 my whole life might've changed. Anyway, Meg is on the podcast now, but again, I said,

00:01:22.080 this is a long time coming. So I listened to the episode. I was like, this is fascinating.

00:01:25.920 And so I bought a copy of Meg's book, which is called Boundary Crossers, The Hidden History

00:01:29.800 of Australia's Other Bushrangers. Effectively, I reached out to the Tits of Brigade to ask,

00:01:34.700 is anyone there in Australia? Because I have some questions about bushrangers,

00:01:38.340 because what Meg's book is doing is sort of deconstructing the myth of bushranging.

00:01:42.560 And I was like, but what is the myth of bushranging? Like how are people in Australia

00:01:46.460 or have they traditionally been taught about this? So someone named Kate, thank you so much,

00:01:50.600 Kate answered all my questions about Bushrangers, Ned Kelly. Thank you so much, Kate. So official

00:01:55.640 Australia correspondent. And I guess another thing I want to mention too, is that I know there's a

00:01:59.900 lot of Australian listeners. That's been one of the groups who I hear feedback pretty regularly.

00:02:04.520 People asking, you know, are you going to do someone from Australia? And I've wanted to,

00:02:08.400 but I haven't found quite the right person. And then I read Meg's book, Boundary Crossers,

00:02:12.320 The Hidden History of Australia's Other Bushrangers. And one of the people in it is named

00:02:15.900 Mary Ann Bug. And that's what this episode is about. But I'll say that the book chapter,

00:02:20.060 I was like, this isn't quite enough for a whole episode, really. But I was so excited about

00:02:23.880 Bushrangers. Patreons will know simultaneously and coincidentally, friend of the podcast,

00:02:28.460 Alison Epstein, was also really into Bushrangers this past summer. And so Alison and I did a

00:02:33.420 special Patreon podcast, just basically talking about how much we love Bushrangers. I got Alison

00:02:38.140 to rank the different Bushranger names because the names are great. Like we're going to talk

00:02:42.640 on this episode about Captain Thunderbolt is one of them. There's also Captain Moonlight,

00:02:47.580 incredible names anyway so yeah so i was just excited about bush rangers i talked to allison

00:02:53.120 about bush rangers and then eventually i was like well let's just see what's meg up to maybe she'll

00:02:57.660 be able to come on this podcast and i was so excited she was i think my email to her was like

00:03:01.920 you know i'm writing to you as a foster to another foster you know do you want to do a foster x foster

00:03:06.820 podcast anyway she did it was the most complicated timing to figure out because the time difference

00:03:13.180 from Saskatchewan, Canada to Australia is beyond my comprehension. Anyway, it all worked out. Both

00:03:19.800 of our internets worked. It was great. And so, I mean, I don't know. I feel like I've just given

00:03:24.860 a lot of ado. So without further ado, this is my conversation with Meg Foster about Mary Ann Bug,

00:03:31.620 but also she really helps explain bush rangers and their cultural context in Australia. So I

00:03:37.560 can't wait for you to hear this. It's so exciting to me.

00:03:43.180 so I'm joined today by Meg Foster no relation welcome Meg thank you thank you for having me

00:03:52.840 I'm really excited to talk to you for all kinds of reasons but first can we just talk about the

00:03:57.760 fact that your last name is Foster and my last name is Foster you're in Australia where were

00:04:03.780 your Fosters originally from was it Scotland my dad's actually a Kiwi so from New Zealand but I

00:04:10.220 think they emigrated from England at some point. But shamefully, I don't know a lot about the family

00:04:16.340 history that far back. So I should probably know a little bit more than I do. Mine is all sort of

00:04:21.820 back and forth. It's like Scotland, England. Anyway, it's all sort of conflated. But I feel

00:04:27.520 like spiritually, we have a connection. Because can you explain what your, the banditry, how you

00:04:34.860 have this degree in studying bandits what is that explain that please yeah yeah sure well

00:04:41.060 technically my PhD is in history but yeah I call the umbrella term is banditry studies so looking

00:04:46.640 basically at people who run away and live in the wilderness and I'm putting wilderness and kind of

00:04:51.180 air quotations obviously we'll talk a little bit about the fact that it's not exactly wild they're

00:04:57.040 indigenous people but usually it's it's white guys who run away to live in the wilderness through the

00:05:02.500 proceeds of crime. The idea being that, you know, there are no honest means to survive in the 0.83

00:05:06.620 wilderness. So banditry usually involves robbery or burglary or housebreaking, but that's kind of

00:05:12.540 the kind of criminal subset that I'm really interested in, particularly in the case of

00:05:16.440 Australia. And your degree is in the history of banditry. Is that right? So it was a PhD in

00:05:24.600 bush rangers in australia so yes oh my god a phd in bush rangers yes this kills me this is great

00:05:34.420 if i had known these are possibilities when i was a young undergraduate choosing my

00:05:39.260 major like the fact that you could anyway that's great go on thank you thank you i mean it's

00:05:43.960 something that i kind of fell into i guess um but yeah so bush rangers are bandits that are

00:05:51.740 particular to the Australian context. They're national heroes in Australia, which is something

00:05:56.500 that's quite unique to us. Not many nations celebrate criminals as their national heroes.

00:06:02.300 That's quite distinct. But to Australians today, these bandits are seen to represent this kind of

00:06:07.880 underdog, kind of rough form of justice. There's this idea that they're kind of more just,

00:06:12.720 more true than the authorities, and that their anti-authoritarianism are kind of like values

00:06:17.580 that Australians like to believe that we hold as a country. But obviously this tradition that we

00:06:22.360 celebrate today has longer historical roots and those roots and the kind of messy entanglements

00:06:27.260 of what are these white guys doing? Why do they become celebrated? And also where are people of

00:06:32.020 color in this story? That's something that I'm particularly interested in. I heard an interview

00:06:37.660 you gave on, I think, the BBC History Extra podcast where you're talking about bush rangers.

00:06:41.680 And I was like, this is so interesting. So then I got your book and I was reading it and I was

00:06:46.080 explaining this to anyone who would listen i was just like did you know about bush rangers and i

00:06:50.400 was trying to explain it to my friends like in canada or in the u.s trying to explain how they

00:06:53.940 were heroes and they're kind of like the cowboy myth in america well and then also there's sort

00:06:59.720 of like a robin hood element like in england and so one of my friends was asking oh so did they

00:07:05.140 did they give to the poor and i'm like no they they kind of just they took from the rich and

00:07:11.160 they didn't take from the poor but there wasn't like a benevolent s they were just kind of like

00:07:15.740 badass guys just kind of like doing what they needed to do is that right yeah yeah that's right

00:07:21.260 but once again it's kind of important to disentangle the myth from the reality so a lot of

00:07:25.740 these bushrangers would say that they only robbed from the rich or say that they you know treated

00:07:31.100 women particularly well whether they actually did or not was another story but tapping on that

00:07:36.400 Robin Hood thing obviously Robin Hood is still like a cultural figure in the 19th century in the

00:07:41.620 1800s in the early Australian colonies and so it would actually serve a bush ranger well to try to

00:07:47.420 draw on these kind of noble robbing outlaw traditions to try to get off the hook so if

00:07:52.660 you've got like a jury of your fellows there you want to seem to be noble or to be fighting some

00:07:57.360 type of moral battle as opposed to just a degenerate criminal out for their own goods or

00:08:03.340 to kind of advance their own interests so once again that myth and reality is important particularly

00:08:08.320 in the 1860s in Australia there's an attempt to kind of make bushrangers seem kind of like noble

00:08:13.460 highwaymen so in the British context that kind of idea that you've got these kind of these nobles

00:08:19.440 who are down on their luck and they become highwaymen in Britain that's the kind of myth

00:08:23.000 and so in Australia bushranging in that time there are some unique elite bushrangers who draw on that

00:08:29.460 tradition explicitly and say you know actually I am very chivalric and I'm very polite to women and

00:08:35.200 I'd never rob a woman or you know what if I robbed a poor man on the road I'd give him back

00:08:39.580 you know enough to kind of go to the next station and kind of catch a coach somewhere or I'd give

00:08:44.540 back items of sentimental value and you have hostages who are very well treated and who are

00:08:49.900 kind of entertained so that's another thing as well so there is an attempt to kind of create

00:08:54.120 somewhat of a mystique around bush ranging in their own times and to yeah kind of draw on those

00:08:58.680 international connections as well. Can we talk about how and why and when these British and

00:09:06.780 Irish white men started showing up in Australia? Yeah. Yeah. So bush ranging actually starts with

00:09:12.880 the colonization of the Australian colonies by the British in 1788. So convicts from Britain

00:09:18.920 were sent to Australia as punishment. The punishment was exile essentially. And the idea

00:09:25.180 was that there'd be a colonial outpost that they were hoping

00:09:28.140 would become self-sufficient.

00:09:30.060 And that's how the country of Australia, as we know it today,

00:09:32.840 the European tradition kind of came about.

00:09:35.440 But the first convicts very quickly escaped to live in the bush

00:09:39.960 and there were quite a few reasons for that.

00:09:41.980 So in the early years there were really big issues

00:09:45.040 when it came to transporting goods to the other side of the world.

00:09:47.960 So there was an issue with rations and some convicts ran away

00:09:50.420 to try to actually hunt and get more kind of food for themselves.

00:09:55.180 But there is very early on this idea of freedom, freedom from tyranny, freedom from oversight

00:10:00.420 by the colonial state.

00:10:02.040 And so that's kind of some of the convict origins of bushranging.

00:10:05.600 But our first bushranger was actually a six foot tall African man named John Caesar, also

00:10:10.680 known as Black Caesar.

00:10:12.240 And that's something that most Australians today don't know.

00:10:14.380 The kind of typical bushranger from the colonial period is a man named Bold Jack Donoghue,

00:10:19.420 or also known as the Wild Colonial Boy.

00:10:21.380 but he's operating in the 1820s, well after Caesar's operating in the late 1700s.

00:10:27.200 This kind of origin point is quite interesting as a launchpad, I think, to look at, well,

00:10:32.280 if our first bushranger was a man of colour, why is it that Australians only know of and celebrate

00:10:39.060 these white bushranging men? What is that about? And why is that the tradition that we hold? And 0.82

00:10:45.820 why don't, you know, the average Australian here, why don't they know about these other people?

00:10:51.380 Well, and that's like, you're here bringing all the expertise. And I'm just kind of remembering

00:10:55.540 what I've read, basically, from the book that you wrote. Because the whole Bushringer myth 0.99

00:11:00.220 really caught on around like 1900, I want to say when Australia was like, let's have our own

00:11:07.100 national identity. So like, just a couple decades after these people were being chased down by the

00:11:11.340 authorities, suddenly they're like, actually, those are our national heroes. Let's celebrate

00:11:15.460 them. So they chose the white ones to celebrate because they were intentionally deciding this 0.93

00:11:21.060 will be our national identity sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So my argument is that 0.73

00:11:26.880 bush ranger is meant to have ended in 1880 with the execution of the most famous bush ranger in

00:11:31.840 Australia called Ned Kelly. So listeners might be familiar with his very distinct helmet that was

00:11:37.360 actually made from a plow that was bashed into this very kind of weird, almost like knightly

00:11:43.100 armor, very rectangular armor, very impractical, very heavy. But he dies in 1880. And then by 1900,

00:11:51.060 1901 actually when the Australian colonies federate there's this quest to actually ask

00:11:56.620 who are we as Australians as a distinct colonial type and there's this kind of push both to say

00:12:03.060 well what is unique but also how do we connect ourselves to this broader masculine Anglo world

00:12:08.640 we still want to seem to be connected to Britain in some type of way but instead of like a parent

00:12:13.440 child relationship more of a relationship of like equals or the child has grown up type thing

00:12:18.380 um and so these bush ranges become really handy because they show this kind of manly masculine

00:12:25.800 strength they also kind of naturalize a white settler presence so the idea that these men

00:12:30.860 could be at home in the bush they could use the bush to their own ends makes them seem like

00:12:35.360 they've earned their place there and they they belong in the Australian context and also very

00:12:41.220 nicely obscures the fact that this is dispossession this this settlement this country is founded on

00:12:47.480 the dispossession of First Nations peoples who had been in Australia for tens of thousands of years

00:12:53.180 before 1788 when the white convicts came. And so it's a very handy national mythology. And that 0.99

00:13:00.360 distance between when real bush rangers were threatening real people, taking livestock, taking

00:13:05.840 goods, and not being as discerning as the myth makes out in terms of who they were robbing,

00:13:11.940 that enough time had passed for people to put on their rose-tinted glasses and to kind of just

00:13:16.300 celebrate and lean into the heroic narrative and forget those kind of messy, sticky details that

00:13:21.100 really show that bush rangers could be villains just as much as they could have heroic qualities

00:13:25.740 as well. I keep things you say and things that I read in your book as well, just keep making

00:13:30.620 connections in my mind between like the American cowboys and the bush rangers. Like part of what

00:13:35.540 you just said a minute ago too, was like the first, like cowboys were originally, I think,

00:13:40.420 mostly black people. And then the original lone ranger was a black sheriff. And then just the

00:13:46.260 myth became of white people. And then Hollywood kind of really expanded on that. And it just seems

00:13:51.180 like a similar thing in this as well. So this brings us to your book, Boundary Crossers. So

00:13:56.240 the hidden history of Australia's other bushrangers. So you've got, I think there's five

00:14:02.180 distinct people who you profile. Is that right? Four individuals. Yeah. Four people.

00:14:08.040 Yeah. So how did you come to choose which people you're going to profile for this book?

00:14:13.720 Yeah, it wasn't a conscious choice at the very beginning.

00:14:17.940 I was trying to find as many other people, so women and people of colour who'd been

00:14:22.980 excluded from this tradition as possible.

00:14:25.220 But the four I ended up writing about in the book were really the four that I had the greatest

00:14:28.880 archival trace on.

00:14:30.600 So although white criminal men were obviously denigrated by the authorities and the well-to-do 0.59

00:14:37.300 classes of society, we have way more about their lives, these white wishrangers, even

00:14:42.240 And if it came to these political arguments, well, how do we prevent other white men becoming 0.95

00:14:47.260 bushrangers? 0.56

00:14:47.920 Well, let's look at their upbringing.

00:14:49.480 Let's look at their education.

00:14:50.540 Let's look at these push factors that may have led them into crime.

00:14:54.460 But for these people of color who I look at, there are none of these kind of stories about 0.97

00:14:59.000 their origins. 1.00

00:14:59.560 There's no real interest in them before they start engaging in crime.

00:15:03.500 And a lot of that is very heavily racialized because they're believed to be degenerate

00:15:09.020 or to be naturally predisposed to crime because of their race. And so it was really difficult to

00:15:14.980 piece together the lives of these people. And so the people in the book were the ones that I could

00:15:19.560 find the most material on. And even then it took me a decade to actually create the book and to

00:15:25.500 write it properly because I didn't just want to look at each of these people through colonial

00:15:30.000 eyes. I didn't want to just see them the way that white colonists saw them as kind of these

00:15:34.120 colonial boogeymen in some instances, or as these nefarious criminals, I wanted to see them as

00:15:40.060 people. And I wanted to try to recreate as closely as possible what they saw their own world, what 0.64

00:15:46.440 they saw their own actions in relation to. And so that took a very long time. So that's another

00:15:52.640 reason why there are only four individuals and the ones in the book are the way they are. But

00:15:57.260 also narratively, it becomes quite handy because the trajectory of when they operate, I can actually

00:16:03.440 look at a broader span of Australian history through looking at that chronology of how each

00:16:08.640 individual's life story intersects with these broader trends in Australian and global history

00:16:13.980 in general. So it was quite handy in that way as well. So you outlined these four different

00:16:22.420 specific individuals in your book and one that I wanted to focus on just for our discussion today

00:16:26.720 for many reasons, one of which is that this is ostensibly a women's history podcast,

00:16:31.820 although I talk about all kinds of people at this point but Mary Ann Bug I think her story is so

00:16:37.740 what you're talking about just Australian history but also um everything that her story has to do

00:16:43.760 with the role of Aboriginal people it gets into the status of Maori people like it's got it's

00:16:49.980 quite expensive so I think it clearly um the research you did here like talking to some of

00:16:55.000 her descendants but also she was in court a lot so I would imagine the court case records would

00:17:00.040 be useful. So could you set up, well, maybe first what people might know about her and then we can

00:17:05.660 kind of dive into the research you did to explain the real story. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So Marianne

00:17:11.860 Bug is most famous in Australia today for being the partner of a white male bushranger called

00:17:17.240 Captain Thunderbolt, very extravagant name. So in some depictions of his story, she's kind of like

00:17:24.080 a loyal sidekick, someone in the background kind of wanting to help out, but kind of never a

00:17:29.900 protagonist in the narrative always on the sidelines there's one particular myth that

00:17:34.880 she's meant to have swum across sydney harbour to try to liberate thunderbolt from prison at one

00:17:39.200 point that that's actually a myth um even though it seems quite extravagant but my point is even

00:17:45.180 by looking at that myth she's still only interesting in our story because she's helping

00:17:51.380 her white male partner who's the main guy the main one we're focused on her story is way more

00:17:57.660 interesting than these kind of myths and legends really lead us to believe. So she's born in the

00:18:04.920 1830s to an Aboriginal Wurrami woman mother and a white convict father. And she's actually

00:18:11.780 incredibly well educated. So her father saves up money to send her to Sydney to be educated when

00:18:17.100 she's younger. She marries quite young and has a couple of partners before she actually meets this

00:18:22.960 guy, Captain Thunderbolt, whose real name is Frederick Ward. And she goes on the run with him

00:18:27.920 and she goes on the run with him with their children. She's also heavily pregnant while 0.58

00:18:32.660 on the run from the police as well. And she's just a massive batter. She's not afraid to speak 1.00

00:18:39.040 her mind or to kind of push back both physically and vocally against the kind of the structures

00:18:45.620 that are trying to oppress her. At one point where I opened the chapter, she's heavily pregnant and

00:18:51.000 she has been kind of caught with these stolen goods in her possession thunderbolts left the

00:18:55.980 camp and she and her children are there and caught by the police and she refuses to go quietly she

00:19:02.060 taunts the police she calls them cowards for taking her in and not looking for thunderbolt

00:19:07.140 and at one point while heavily pregnant she's meant to have leapt off a horse and ripped an

00:19:11.820 officer's shirt to ribbons and she's also very savvy and willing to use whatever she has at her

00:19:19.020 disposal to survive. And you can really see this in this story where she is heavily pregnant and 0.74

00:19:26.440 claims to be going into labor partway through when the police have caught them. Like, you know,

00:19:30.660 my contractions have started, you have to leave me. So they leave her at a nearby station and

00:19:34.960 the police go away on the hunt for the main bush rangers again. And lo and behold, as soon as the

00:19:39.880 police leave, the contractions miraculously stop and she's able to escape. And I love that story

00:19:44.920 because it does speak to something of her character and her ingenuity and her incredible

00:19:50.720 wills to survive in these very oppressive conditions in colonial Australia. Yeah.

00:19:56.320 Can you talk to you about, you mentioned her parents. So just the context in which

00:20:01.240 an Aboriginal woman and a white man would have married was, I was just relicking at this chapter

00:20:08.180 of your book, you were saying there's just, there wasn't a lot of white women in Australia because

00:20:12.260 it was white male convicts being sent there. So like if men wanted to get married, if they wanted

00:20:16.160 a female partner, it was going to be someone Aboriginal. But then there were laws and things

00:20:20.520 set up to discourage that. Can you talk about that side of things? Yeah, yeah, of course. So

00:20:25.760 the gender imbalance from the early colonies stayed well into the middle of the 19th century. 1.00

00:20:31.580 So there were way more white men than there were white women. And there was kind of this tacit

00:20:36.540 agreement that it was okay for a white man to have an Aboriginal partner as long as that

00:20:42.260 Aboriginal female partner wasn't recognised through the kind of legally binding and the

00:20:47.520 kind of moral and spiritual connection that marriage was meant to bring. And so the foundations

00:20:53.560 of the colony of New South Wales in particular, there's a real kind of murkiness around what

00:20:59.460 these relationships between white convict men and Aboriginal women look like. In some instances,

00:21:04.920 there does appear to have been coercion women were stolen they were assaulted but in other

00:21:11.880 instances there appear to have been real loving relationships between the two and in some

00:21:17.180 instances as well if we look at aboriginal cultural practice we can see that a lot of groups including

00:21:22.900 the one that marianne bug's mother was from the war am i they had a diplomatic practice where if

00:21:29.220 a newcomer comes into your area one way to kind of incorporate them into your community into your

00:21:34.100 group as kin is to send an Aboriginal woman almost as a diplomat to kind of establish relations with

00:21:39.700 the kind of highest man in that group. And then once they've had kind of sexual connections and

00:21:46.740 formed this relationship, not only are they part of the Aboriginal group, but they have

00:21:51.760 responsibilities to that group as well in terms of providing for the community. And we can see

00:21:56.840 that James Bug, Marianne Bug's convict father, actually did provide for the community. He gave

00:22:02.720 them food from the stores when he was an overseer, the Australian Agricultural Company, this background

00:22:09.560 context of these very intricate relationships between white men and Aboriginal women. But the

00:22:16.240 frontier context is also a really important one. So at the same time, you also have very fierce

00:22:21.180 resistance by Aboriginal people to try to reclaim their land from the newcomers as well. And this

00:22:27.540 also seems to have formed a part of Marianne's early life. When she was one year old, her father

00:22:33.900 was attacked by a group of Aboriginal people. It doesn't appear to be her Aboriginal kin. It seems 0.50

00:22:39.320 to be another Aboriginal group, but her mother actually discharged a gun at the assailants and

00:22:44.820 kind of saved her husband from being killed essentially. And some previous stories in this

00:22:50.500 kind of myth about Marianne's life have said, oh, you know, Aboriginal mother chose the white people

00:22:56.100 over her own people. But if you look at the material and as I go into in the book, there's

00:23:01.660 actually more evidence that this is a different Aboriginal group or that this may actually be an

00:23:06.420 instance of trying Aboriginal men trying to claim back Aboriginal women when they were frequently

00:23:12.320 being taken or coerced or enticed to be with white men. And these strong Aboriginal kinship networks

00:23:20.520 and kind of family networks are kind of being really impacted

00:23:24.240 and kind of thrown into not a state of disarray,

00:23:28.100 but definitely not as strong and in a state of flux

00:23:31.940 where it's quite a kind of tumultuous time

00:23:34.420 in Aboriginal communities on that respect as well.

00:23:37.900 I like the information you give in your book about her mother, Charlotte,

00:23:41.840 because you just see like if Marianna is growing up

00:23:43.860 and her mother is the sort of person who just like whips out a firearm

00:23:47.160 to, you know, when they're being attacked,

00:23:49.780 It's just like, okay. And so she's growing up seeing like women are equal partners or at least

00:23:53.700 women are fearsome, you know, like they're not just sitting there hiding, like they're taking

00:23:59.180 a stance. And that's very much what Marianne grows up to be like. Completely, completely. And that's 1.00

00:24:04.000 something that's been completely excluded from any type of story about her before. The idea is that,

00:24:08.360 oh, if she thinks about bushranging or resistance at all, it will be through, you know, being 0.81

00:24:13.140 partnered to a white bushranger. That's her frame of reference. It's like, well, no, there's actually 0.84

00:24:17.540 a long, very deep rooted tradition of Aboriginal resistance fighting. And also this family

00:24:23.280 tradition as well of her mother actually saving her father and potentially even protecting Marianne

00:24:29.160 as a baby herself from being attacked or injured in some type of way. And so I think it's really

00:24:35.780 important to expand our frame of reference. And this is where looking at someone's entire life,

00:24:40.300 instead of just this little snippet where they encounter the law or where there are,

00:24:44.620 you know, colonial court records, etc. That's where we start to get this really rich and nuanced

00:24:49.420 picture about these people as individuals and get to see those broader connections that would

00:24:53.700 otherwise remain hidden. I'm just looking at the part of your book where you're talking about that

00:24:58.460 stuff, like the, from the Aboriginal perspective, this mode of resistance. So as a Canadian person

00:25:04.180 who had never heard of bushrangers until six months ago, it seems to me that perhaps the myth

00:25:09.760 was presented was these white convicts came in. The Aboriginal people were just taken by surprise

00:25:15.040 and it was the white bushrangers who were the great rebels, the great doing these things,

00:25:20.960 where actually the Aboriginal people were, there was resistance from them as well. And that seems

00:25:25.880 to be not as talked about. Is that sort of correct? Yeah, completely. I mean, in the Australian

00:25:32.560 bushranging tradition today, Aboriginal people are not really thought of at all, or if they are,

00:25:37.440 they're kind of thought of as maybe trackers who are assisting white policemen hunt white

00:25:41.720 bushrangers down. But it's actually incredibly intertwined and complicated. And if we go back

00:25:47.640 to that early convict history in particular, there are real concerns that Aboriginal resistance

00:25:54.600 fighting is going to intersect or is going to combine with white bushrangers at one point.

00:26:01.120 So there's an instance, actually Mary Ann Bugg's family instance of frontier warfare that I

00:26:07.400 just outlined where Charlotte discharges this gun. It's not the only Aboriginal resistance fighting

00:26:12.240 in the area. There are actually several more properties around there that are compromised

00:26:15.860 and where men, white men were actually killed by Aboriginal resistance fighters. But white colonists 0.52

00:26:23.240 refused to believe that Aboriginal people were intelligent enough, were capable enough to have

00:26:28.280 come up with such a coordinated and like lightning strike. And so this myth started circulating that 0.85

00:26:34.220 it was actually a white bushranger who was leading these Aboriginal people and getting them to commit

00:26:39.200 these types of crimes. There is absolutely no evidence to support this, that there was a white

00:26:44.100 bushranger who was telling Aboriginal people what to do, the idea being that Aboriginal people 0.86

00:26:48.560 were too unintelligent or were dupes, all these racist tropes around them. But there was a real 0.92

00:26:54.300 concern by the colonial authorities that both white bushrangers and Aboriginal resistance fighters

00:26:59.600 were going to undermine the foundations of the colony. Because when you think about it,

00:27:03.720 You've got this outpost on the complete other side 0.89

00:27:05.820 of the world from Britain.

00:27:07.720 Communication takes months between them. 1.00

00:27:10.540 You've got these kind of little pockets of white settlement 0.97

00:27:14.100 but on the seemingly boundless Aboriginal country 0.99

00:27:16.800 and Aboriginal people strike with lightning speed. 1.00

00:27:20.000 They're known for the raids on goods and houses in particular. 1.00

00:27:26.700 And so some of these tactics that are associated 0.54

00:27:29.660 with white bush rangers, so lightning raids, taking goods,

00:27:32.960 taking guns as well, are things that Aboriginal people did as well as a form of resistance

00:27:37.460 fighting. And so they're both threats to the authorities, but I make a very conscious effort 1.00

00:27:44.340 in my book to only look at Marianne Bug and the other Aboriginal bushranger, Jimmy Govner,

00:27:50.260 who's operating in 1900. I choose them and look at them as bushrangers because this is the 1860s 0.73

00:27:58.340 when Marianne is on the run from the law, frontier warfare is meant to have ceased in New South Wales

00:28:03.360 by that time. And these are both two individuals who make active claims or have a kind of active

00:28:09.700 connection with white bush ranging that we think of it today. What I really don't want to do is

00:28:14.920 look back with my, you know, white colonial term of bush ranging and say, oh, all these Aboriginal

00:28:20.580 people in the early period of the colony, what we're calling resistance fighting, oh, that was

00:28:24.740 actually bush ranging. Like you can't just use a colonial label and whack it on, especially because

00:28:30.080 it diminishes and undercuts the fact that this is resistance fighting. This is pushback for

00:28:36.580 colonization. This is an attempt to stop dispossession. And we need to see it on those

00:28:41.480 types of terms. It's warfare. Yeah, it really reminds me just of what I've read about Canadian

00:28:47.780 history, just where I live, but also in American history, when it's been filtered down through the

00:28:53.880 white people who founded these countries so they describe what the indigenous people are doing

00:28:59.280 in a way that serves the narrative that they want people to believe um completely from what

00:29:04.620 you're describing like australia being like the modern concept of australia is a pretty recent

00:29:09.400 country so they kind of out of whole cloth they just sort of invented okay here's our national

00:29:14.500 identity and here's how things have been it's so the fact that they were sort of building up

00:29:20.340 the bushranger myth so quickly after it had happened, but also how at the time the bushrangers

00:29:25.360 were doing their thing, white bushrangers, the Aboriginal people were being kind of like,

00:29:29.780 oh yeah, but they're not really doing it. Like the fact that writing said, oh, they were all 0.81

00:29:32.900 following a white man. Like it was rewriting history as it was happening, which is so obvious

00:29:39.880 when you, the way they're looking at it now, but at the time they were just building a narrative

00:29:44.460 and people bought into it, I guess. And also keeping in mind that these are the types of

00:29:49.440 sources that we have left, right? And so what we have first is that white narrative. What we have

00:29:54.920 first is that kind of elision or that overshadowing of any alternative possibilities. And it's very

00:30:00.960 easy to read primary documents and think, oh, okay, well, there was a white bush ranger who

00:30:05.780 was leading Aboriginal people in resistance, like in these kind of attacks. But then it's up to us

00:30:11.880 as historians to actually be critical and to go back and to look at the evidence and to try to

00:30:16.540 actually not take any of this material for granted, just because we have written documents

00:30:21.280 does not mean what they describe is true. We need to actually look at them against a whole

00:30:26.380 swathe of material, including in some instances, Aboriginal oral histories and other types of

00:30:31.420 sources that were discounted by earlier kind of groups of historians. And so I think that's part

00:30:37.960 of this rereading and this re-understanding is being very critical about the sources, being aware

00:30:43.880 that there will be absences and there will be silences and that we can't take any of these

00:30:48.420 narratives for granted well and then we get into so marianne bug ends up arrested and she's arrested

00:30:56.060 for vagrancy is that what the initial yes and there's so much context around that can you

00:31:02.060 explain the whole thing about aboriginal people versus white people and who is a vagrant and who

00:31:07.380 is not can you explain that whole messy thing and now we're just going to take a break for a word

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00:34:23.500 and we're back yeah it's super interesting so for anyone in who's listening who's interested

00:34:38.780 in legal history there's like a whole thing there um vagrancy is a very common public order

00:34:43.920 offence at the time essentially if you can't prove that you have a fixed place of residence

00:34:48.680 and a fixed form of income, you can be charged as a vagrant. But interestingly, in New South Wales,

00:34:56.600 there's a particular clause that discounts Aboriginal people from being vagrants. The

00:35:01.360 idea being that they can't be punished for, quote, living as their ancestors have lived.

00:35:06.200 The idea being that Aboriginal people are naturally nomadic. They move from place to

00:35:11.380 place. They're itinerant. And so you can't stop or punish Aboriginal people for this.

00:35:16.480 so obviously that in itself is quite loaded the the discourse around that so you've got these

00:35:22.360 so-called or self-described benevolent white men being like we're not going to punish aboriginal

00:35:26.240 people for this but marianne is convicted of vagrancy and there's this whole debate as to

00:35:31.660 whether she is actually being quote civilized and if she has been civilized and i've got yeah

00:35:37.660 this in air very heavy air quotes she is i can say i'm witnessing the air quotes yes if she has

00:35:44.200 been appropriately civilized, then the Vagrancy Act can apply to her because she's not living as

00:35:49.480 her ancestors have lived. She's been lifted up out of that state of primordial Aboriginal 1.00

00:35:54.800 tradition. And once again, very heavy on this being a colonial view. And that would mean that 0.62

00:36:00.480 she is entitled to be convicted under this particular act. There's a huge discourse around

00:36:05.260 this. There are people talking about the fact that she has actually been educated. So the

00:36:11.720 convicting magistrate presents documents higher up the food chain to the Attorney General saying,

00:36:17.080 look, I know her father. I know she's actually been sent to Sydney to be educated. And she's

00:36:23.160 actually more educated than a lot of colonial white men at this stage too. So one of the concerns

00:36:28.960 about the bush ranging outbreak of the 1860s by white bush ranging men is that one of the reasons

00:36:34.640 they're committing bush ranging is there are not a lot of schools in these rural areas. They don't

00:36:38.860 have a lot of education or religious instruction and so she's actually an outlier and there's

00:36:44.280 evidence she actually taught her partner Captain Thunderbolt to at least write his name because

00:36:51.400 when he's previously imprisoned on Cockatoo Island he just signs X for his name but after his time

00:36:57.260 with Marianne he actually can sign his full name and so anyway back to the story about vagrancy

00:37:03.000 There are these very stark debates. Is she civilized enough? Is she just a poor, pitiable

00:37:09.220 Aboriginal woman who's been oppressed by this law that's not meant to apply to her? 1.00

00:37:13.400 In the end, she's released. She's actually released on a legal technicality, but the

00:37:17.920 newspapers still refer to it in terms of this racial discourse. Is she civilized enough or is 0.98

00:37:23.460 she just a kind of an Aboriginal woman in her natural state? And meanwhile, she slips between 1.00

00:37:29.440 in the cracks, she gets out and it's unclear whether she's aware of this discourse, but it

00:37:33.900 is clear that she's not going to wait on ceremony to kind of find out why she's released. She goes

00:37:39.080 straight back on the run again and meets up with Thunderbolt. Well, and there was the thing when

00:37:43.760 she was arrested too, she was going, she's claiming to be his wife or she was using his

00:37:48.760 last name, not Thunderbolt tragically, his actual last name, which is Ward. So can you explain about

00:37:55.000 that decision and why she might have done that in that instance? Yeah, so I should foreground by

00:38:00.420 saying there's no evidence she and Frederick Ward ever married, but she said that they were married

00:38:04.700 by a traveling minister. So there's this kind of plausible deniability there and that there were

00:38:09.820 traveling ministers and actually trying to consolidate a lot of colonial paperwork back

00:38:15.280 in that day was quite difficult. So it was kind of a plausible story that she may have been married.

00:38:21.820 now looking back at the archive she does not appear to have been married but it was a very

00:38:26.760 handy and useful strategy because it legitimized her relationship with ward for one thing so it

00:38:32.680 made her appear someone who is entitled to his support and that was her her defense against this

00:38:38.460 vagrancy charge she's not a vagrant as her husband keeps her so like all good women good wives she 0.96

00:38:44.960 wasn't expected to go out and fend for herself if her husband provided for her through the proceeds 1.00

00:38:49.420 of crime. Well, that was his doing, that was his crime, but she was being provided for by her

00:38:54.700 husband. So it legitimizes their relationship. And as we were talking before about marriage and the

00:39:00.500 politics of marriage and Aboriginal people and white people in colonial Australia, it also makes

00:39:05.920 it appear that their relationship is not just something that is casual, is not something that

00:39:11.860 can kind of be passed aside or looked over by white colonists because she's using a white frame

00:39:17.460 of reference, this frame of marriage, to actually legitimise that relationship. And as you kind of

00:39:23.120 motioned to before, her white convict father petitioned the church in Australia for about

00:39:28.120 seven years to be allowed to marry her Aboriginal mother. So Charlotte and James Bug were eventually

00:39:34.400 married. But even then there's this discourse around, well, is this person, Aboriginal person,

00:39:40.200 civilised enough to enter into the sacred state of marriage? Do they know enough about the church?

00:39:45.180 And so she's very, Mary Ann Bugg is very aware of the politics of marriage and using it as a very 0.63

00:39:51.420 savvy strategy when you're trying to get off the vagrancy charge.

00:39:55.300 And actually, if you can just, well, she's back on the run, just for like this chronological,

00:39:58.980 she's back on the run. She finds Thunderbolt again. Can you talk a bit about the thing

00:40:02.740 she invented, or there was some sort of way that she did horse stealing, or I forgot what it was,

00:40:08.620 but she had some sort of spear or something that she used? 1.00

00:40:11.320 oh she's meant to have hamstrung cattle yeah so she she's meant to have dressed in men's pants

00:40:17.920 which obviously um and sorry i don't know whether american canadian listeners is the same i know in

00:40:23.180 the uk pants means underwear i don't mean underwear i mean trousers i should say no pants

00:40:28.020 pants is the word we use in this podcast a lot we have a lot of the women i've profiled end up

00:40:32.600 wearing pants and that's when i got to that part of marian bug story i was like i have to talk

00:40:36.840 about on the podcast because she's wearing pants yeah um i mean incredibly practical right when

00:40:43.040 you're riding around in the bush trying to evade the authorities it's a lot easier to ride a stride

00:40:48.140 and to wear men's pants than it is to ride side saddle in a huge skirt um so she's meant to have

00:40:54.220 worn men's pants and hamstrung cattle so she's meant to have had a sheer blade tied to a kind 1.00

00:40:59.220 of a spear to have ridden up behind these cattle and kind of cut part of the thighs so that they 1.00

00:41:05.140 couldn't walk anymore and to stop them from running away and then kind of, yeah, prepared

00:41:10.140 the meat accordingly. And this is also brought before the court as well. So this is used to say

00:41:16.720 that, I guess, to try to undermine this respectable persona that Marion's trying to present before the 0.99

00:41:22.460 court of her as this kind of poor, pitiable woman who's just, you know, a loyal wife. The arresting 1.00

00:41:27.960 officer says, you know, she dressed in men's pants, she's hamstrung cattle, and she's volunteered

00:41:32.800 hear this information when she's been captured as well so it seems like in terms of berating the

00:41:37.240 police she may have gone a little bit too far in this respect because it came back to bite her

00:41:41.440 but she she resists these charges she says that she didn't do wear men's pants and she didn't

00:41:47.020 hamstring cattle but we do have other sources that support this story so it seems that once again

00:41:51.680 she's very aware of her audience she's very aware of when she has to maintain this respectable

00:41:55.980 public persona and it wasn't going to fly to own up to either of those things when facing the court

00:42:02.200 and trying to get off a charge for vagrancy well and i love that she was let out on a technicality

00:42:07.760 and the way you described it it's like did she even know what she was let out and she's just

00:42:11.520 like great i'm just gonna go find my guy take my like six children and just hit the road which she

00:42:16.980 did and she found him completely okay and so then there's this myth of her death can you explain

00:42:22.840 for a long time people thought that she died shortly after this yeah so in 1867 under the

00:42:28.980 alias Yellow Long, also known as Louisa Mason, she's meant to have died in the bush. And this

00:42:35.640 lends a kind of tragic element to the Thunderbolt myth, the idea being that he's lost his lady love

00:42:41.520 and therefore he goes even more headlong straight into crime because he's got nothing left to lose.

00:42:48.320 That's completely not true. But I should say that it's a very enduring myth. I've given public

00:42:53.720 talks in Australia and people always bring it up the the instance of her death in 67 it was so sad

00:43:01.540 and so tragic it's like but it it never happened there was another person called Louisa Mason who

00:43:08.660 died under these circumstances Marianne seems to have left Ward willingly after this time

00:43:15.120 and she actually goes on to start a whole other family she gets married she has other children

00:43:21.660 and she's actually reunited with this partner called John Burrows and she's actually previously

00:43:26.620 had a child Burrows and so this is more of a reunion than the beginning of a new relationship

00:43:32.160 and Burrows is actually her longest partner and she actually ends up living to the age of 70

00:43:37.000 she dies after 1900 so 1905 and she's a woman who is a nurse whose own property who has had over

00:43:46.700 10 children she's had a lot of children to different partners but Burroughs is her most

00:43:52.140 enduring relationship her most children produced to him but also her longest love if we can look

00:43:59.100 at it through that lens through the record she's the one who he's the one who she's actually built

00:44:03.820 a life with and he's completely erased from this this myth about um her life but the other thing

00:44:12.660 that's very interesting about the end of her life is not just the fact she was able to

00:44:17.140 fade from public view after being so notorious, after being in the newspapers, after being on the

00:44:23.940 radar of the police and the authorities, the fact she was able to slide from public awareness

00:44:28.940 actually shows a great deal of strength and ingenuity. And that in itself is something to

00:44:33.620 be celebrated, especially as an Aboriginal woman at this time. The other element that's really

00:44:38.820 interesting is that on her death certificate, it actually says that she's Maori and she's from the

00:44:45.040 Bay of Islands in New Zealand. And this was shocking to me because she's someone who's

00:44:51.500 renowned for her Aboriginal heritage in her own time. And it seems that one of her children

00:44:56.520 actually is the notary on the death certificate. So they're the one who put down this Maori 1.00

00:45:02.940 ancestry. But way back in the 1860s, there's a couple of newspaper articles that seem to mention

00:45:08.780 Maori heritage. So it seems that it's something, it's a legend, it's a myth that was started

00:45:12.980 by Marianne in her own lifetime. And then of course, my next question is why,

00:45:18.240 why would someone claim that? And I think there have been some, I guess, insinuations that, oh,

00:45:25.760 she's trying to completely distance herself from her Aboriginality. But once again, we need to look

00:45:32.820 at context. We need to look at what's happening at that time. So on the one hand, Maori had always

00:45:38.700 been viewed in higher esteem in white colonist eyes in Australia than Aboriginal people. So

00:45:45.700 although obviously Maori was still colonized by the British, they're seen to be a warlike people.

00:45:52.040 They had forms of agriculture that the British could easily identify. They had forms of hierarchy

00:45:56.480 and group structure that mapped onto more closely what the British were expecting when it came to

00:46:02.040 those types of things. They were designated kind of chiefs, for example. And so Maori had always

00:46:07.540 been viewed in higher esteem than Aboriginal people who were seen to be the kind of the lowest

00:46:12.100 of the low. And that's also later in the 1860s, when we get into more heavy racial discourse,

00:46:19.180 they're seen as the lowest rung on the evolutionary ladder, the closest to primordial man

00:46:23.840 as existence. This is obviously incredibly racist and not true. So one reason she may have claimed

00:46:29.840 Mary ancestry is to try to have that higher esteem to kind of use the pigmentation of her skin that

00:46:36.780 you can't deny, but to shape that, to change that and tap into this broader understanding of Maori

00:46:42.100 is higher. But more importantly, I argue, is actually what's happening to Aboriginal people

00:46:48.940 at this time in terms of government intervention. So the longer colonisation goes on, the more

00:46:57.420 the colonial government intervenes into Aboriginal people's lives. They try to control them. And at 0.91

00:47:03.540 the end of Miriam Bug's life, we have the beginning of what would be known as the Stolen

00:47:08.060 Generations, where white authorities basically gave themselves the power to tear Aboriginal

00:47:15.160 children from their families, especially if they were of mixed ancestry, and to put them

00:47:20.780 in institutions under the guise of civilising them and lifting them up. 0.98

00:47:25.120 But of course, they were only ever educated to be domestic servants if you're a girl or

00:47:30.560 kind of farmhands if you're a boy. And these institutions are now widely recognized to have

00:47:35.300 been places of immense abuse, both physical, sexual, psychological abuse. And so by actually

00:47:41.480 shifting the narrative around her own ancestry in her own lifetime and claiming to be Mary,

00:47:48.460 Mary Ann Bug actually protected her family from being stolen. She protected them from that level

00:47:53.400 of surveillance and intervention that other Aboriginal people had at this time. And this

00:47:58.540 wasn't something that was Marianne alone there were other Aboriginal people especially if they

00:48:03.980 had lighter skin or had mixed ancestry who would make similar claims to not have Aboriginal

00:48:09.240 ancestry and to kind of to put that ancestry somewhere else in order to try to protect their

00:48:14.600 their freedom essentially their independence and their humanity from being eroded or compromised

00:48:20.360 by the colonial state that was all i didn't know about the the different status of maori people

00:48:28.880 versus the various aboriginal groups in australia and that's so fascinating and so weird and it

00:48:34.420 really shows how artificial these constructs are completely yeah it's anyway so again like as you 0.95

00:48:42.360 were saying like everything she's done like it's just such a savviness like she really kind of

00:48:47.220 sees what's going on and she knows how to, it's like, I'm going to present myself as a married

00:48:51.500 woman or I'm going to like, she's kind of knows how to survive and how to do right by her children

00:48:56.660 and her descendants. And she was successful in that. Like she lived for considering everything 1.00

00:49:01.800 going on in her life, like to a pretty decent older, old adjacent age, I would say.

00:49:07.620 Completely, completely. And I mean, I think her story really encourages us to rethink how we

00:49:14.900 imagine success because especially when we think of banditry success is you know you get away with

00:49:20.980 the booty you get away with the goods or there are even these legends about people like Thunderbolt

00:49:26.320 and not meant to have been killed he was killed in 1870 but there's a group of people today who

00:49:31.940 believe that Frederick Ward Captain Thunderbolt escaped and he kind of he got away to America and

00:49:37.980 started this new life and there's no evidence for that but here you've got Marianne Bug who

00:49:43.000 did get away from that life, who did live to the end of her long days, but in, in a kind of

00:49:49.760 obscurity and anonymity that actually speaks to the success of her life and her incredible survival

00:49:55.080 skills. And I think we really need to rethink how we define success because actually by flying under

00:50:01.900 the radar, that's how she was able to truly live. I think it's, it's admirable just for the people

00:50:08.380 who profile on this podcast, I've talked about a lot of criminals and whatever, and it's rare and 0.60

00:50:14.180 kind of nice when you hear about somebody, there was the Chinese female pirate, often called Ching 0.82

00:50:20.300 Shi. And she just like, she took a deal with the government and retired. And allegedly she like 1.00

00:50:25.220 ran, I forget, like a brothel or something into her old age. And she was just like, I'm good.

00:50:29.640 And I thought that's the goal, you know, not to just keep being thrown into jail time after time

00:50:34.840 your whole life just to be able to kind of fade into the background that shows how good

00:50:39.040 like Marianne Bug how talented she was completely yeah to be so notorious and then to just kind of

00:50:45.080 like fade away seemingly yeah exactly and make it appear to be fading away but actually make 1.00

00:50:51.120 very active steps to carve a space and a life for herself and her family that she wanted

00:50:55.980 and maybe it doesn't make as exciting you know a movie or something but it makes a much more

00:51:01.780 satisfying life story, I would say. I agree. I didn't warn you about this at all, but because

00:51:08.660 we've really talked about Marianne Bug so much, I think we need to have a scale that I judge people

00:51:13.580 on for my podcast. And I'd love to have your input to just to include her in that. So there's

00:51:19.540 four categories and they're all judged from zero to 10 of how much you think this is represented

00:51:24.500 in her story. And the first category is scandalousness. How scandalous.

00:51:32.100 Her life story or her story on the run? I think the most scandalousness she had was when she was 1.00

00:51:40.440 on the run. So I think on the run in court, like the highest level she would have reached at all

00:51:45.100 would have been what do you think? Oh, I mean, she was pretty notorious. So nine and a half.

00:51:54.500 Nine and a half, sure. A half is always fine. The next category is her scheminess. And so that's

00:52:01.800 not just like, haha, I'm making a scheme, but just like resourcefulness, like cleverness,

00:52:06.060 like being able to pivot. Yeah. 11. 11 out of 10.

00:52:11.280 More if possible. Yeah. The next one might be more challenging. And so the reason that I have

00:52:16.700 this scale, and they're all measuring different sorts of things, because especially in women's

00:52:20.320 history, there's different people who are remarkable in different ways. So the next one

00:52:24.540 is significance. And so I'll let you interpret that as you will. Like she was, there's some

00:52:31.000 people who are so scandalous for a time and then they're forgotten about when you're looking at

00:52:36.080 somebody who Cleopatra or somebody who like, you know, to world history, like the very great

00:52:40.860 significance. But I also look at people where it's like, well, you know, her descendants turned

00:52:44.920 out to be this important prime minister or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, that's

00:52:51.940 interesting. I would say that she has not had her due when it comes to actually looking at

00:52:57.580 the significance of her life and even significance when it comes to descendants. So she has so many

00:53:02.560 descendants today because she had so many children. But also in terms of, I think you

00:53:08.140 can actually use her story to understand so much about Aboriginal people and settler colonization

00:53:14.900 and banditry and crime. And I, in that sense, I think she's incredibly significant. And so

00:53:22.680 in terms of that rationale, I would give her a 10 and also noting my personal bias,

00:53:29.220 because I think she's incredible. Yeah. No. And that's, I think that's really important too. Like 0.98

00:53:33.260 the more, the longer I do this podcast, like I always do the scale because I set up the scale

00:53:37.780 and you have, you can't change the scale part way through, but yeah, things like significance are

00:53:41.700 hard to quantify for somebody who's not a queen of, you know, whatever. It's like,

00:53:47.960 well, what is the significance of a person? And I think I like how you described it. Like

00:53:51.880 she has so much significance that is yet to be fully celebrated, I think.

00:53:56.620 And significance doesn't mean universal recognition. If anything, you can be significant

00:54:01.740 and like bringing back hidden figures, like the ones I do in my book is part of being like,

00:54:07.720 actually these people are significant and they were significant. And the reason they've been

00:54:12.520 forgotten is not because they weren't important, quite the contrary. Um, and so, yeah, that's kind

00:54:19.160 of where I sit in relation to that point. So the next one, and in the context of her story,

00:54:23.900 I'm curious what you're going to say. I'll give you some, so the last category is what I call

00:54:28.180 the sexism bonus. And so this is like when I'm telling a story about someone who is a queen of

00:54:33.460 whatever. And then her husband locked her up in a tower for 25 years because he thought she had

00:54:38.380 an affair or something like that would be a 10 on the sexism scale. It's like that got in her way

00:54:43.380 in a real way. Like how much did sexism hold her back? And I feel like, well, there's a, 1.00

00:54:48.580 and with her story, there's so much like there's racism and there's classism, but I feel like not

00:54:52.600 a lot held her back actually. I feel like. Yeah. I think if anything, she uses the sexist

00:54:59.060 standards of the time to her own advantage when it suits her yeah leaning into ideas of like oh 1.00

00:55:05.080 fragile femininity or i need to be provided or protected or whatever or like oh no i'm giving 1.00

00:55:10.980 birth exactly exactly she actually uses that as a weapon where otherwise it could have been an

00:55:16.340 obstacle so yeah yeah the evidence we have i would say yeah pretty pretty low not because there

00:55:24.620 wasn't sexism, but because she actually repurposes it. Yeah. Which people do. And that's always fun 0.79

00:55:30.400 when they do. So maybe a four. Sure. So let me just add this up real quickly. So 33.5 is her

00:55:41.660 total score. Okay. Which I mean, I don't know. I'm just seeing where she lands on the score. That's

00:55:49.940 just outside the top 10 of people I've ever done.

00:55:52.920 So like anything above 30 is always respectable.

00:55:56.640 I'm trying to see if there's anyone. 1.00

00:55:59.540 Oh, I mentioned the Chinese pirate, 0.97

00:56:01.660 Zhang Yi Cao, aka Ching Shi. 0.99

00:56:03.460 She has a 35. 1.00

00:56:05.000 So Marion Bug, just slightly below her. 0.90

00:56:06.860 And I like two people who like

00:56:08.740 had a comfortable retirement.

00:56:11.260 I love this for her.

00:56:12.420 I love this high score.

00:56:14.460 Because yeah, honestly,

00:56:15.980 and thank you so much for going through that with me.

00:56:18.340 Because I read your book and I was like,

00:56:19.580 oh, I really want to talk about her on the podcast, but I'm not personally able to.

00:56:25.180 No, thank you. Thank you for letting me share her story. As many people as I can, I think,

00:56:30.480 should hear it. So can you quickly, I mean, you know, everyone should read your book,

00:56:34.960 obviously, but just who are the other three people who you profile in your book?

00:56:39.200 Yeah. So the book opens with the life of a man named, I mean, known as Black Douglas.

00:56:44.600 his real name was William Douglas but he's actually African-American but yeah I won't

00:56:50.160 give too much away about his story and we have Sam Poo who's a Chinese bushranger from the Fujian

00:56:54.960 province of China and then finally apart from Marianne we also have another First Nations

00:57:00.360 bushranger called Jimmy Governor who's operating around 1900 so as we know from the context he's

00:57:06.160 operating at a time when bushranging is meant to have ended and when the national bushranging

00:57:11.780 legend is starting to really come about. So his story is very interesting for the fact that kind

00:57:17.560 of messes up those really nice, neat periodizations I was talking about before. Well, and also I do

00:57:23.400 want to clarify, you mentioned that William Douglas was African-American and I want to

00:57:28.120 contextualize, like you're not just saying he was black, like he was from Philadelphia. He was

00:57:32.740 literally American. Yeah. I just want to clarify so people know that like, that's literally what

00:57:37.700 you mean yeah yeah yeah so there's yeah a bit of american history in the book as well um but once

00:57:43.620 again interesting so i start from the australian perspective and he's known as this colonial

00:57:47.820 boogeyman in the 1850s in victoria um no one cares about where he came from no one cares about his

00:57:54.180 origins he's just known as black and that's enough but obviously there's a very specific heritage

00:58:00.300 that he has and a very specific journey he went on to even get to the australian colonies to begin

00:58:05.060 with. So yeah, shameless plug, read my book to find out. No, exactly. And I do also want to

00:58:10.340 mention Sam Poo, who's from China. Like I was just like, Oh, like, of course people would have

00:58:15.640 gone from China or any Asian country to Australia. Like it's in terms of proximity, like that makes

00:58:20.440 sense. But I've just never heard of a historical Chinese person in Australia. Like that's not

00:58:25.680 something I've ever encountered. Yeah. I mean, that also goes around the whole white Australia

00:58:30.000 myth as well the colonists did not want these people from Asia coming to Australia they actively 0.96

00:58:36.940 one of the reasons we federated like to the great shame of our nation is because Australians wanted

00:58:42.360 to control immigration to make it white because the British kept saying that people from India

00:58:47.300 and China in particular should be allowed in and white colonists were like nope we need to federate 0.70

00:58:52.320 so we can actually one of our first laws was an immigration restriction act and so that's something

00:58:58.420 that a lot of Australians today think, oh, Chinese miners came over in the gold rush,

00:59:03.360 like that was kind of it. But there was a longer history of Chinese immigration. And Sam Pooh's

00:59:08.060 story really taps into that as well. There's an indentured labor story. There's a story that

00:59:12.000 links to the end of the convict period. And that's something that I hope to kind of bring

00:59:16.520 into the mainstream discussion about Australia's relationship to Asia.

00:59:21.780 And so your book, Boundary Crossers, The Hidden History of Australia's Other Bushrangers. I want

00:59:26.180 to say I was able to get a copy of it in Canada so clearly it's been published in other countries

00:59:30.240 not just in Australia yes yeah so there are world distribution rights so every country I mean on

00:59:36.160 paper at least every country should have a distributor and they make some copies to order

00:59:40.440 as well in places where there isn't a direct kind of license so yeah should be accessible

00:59:46.000 which is good and so for me like I've not I know everything I know about Australian history is

00:59:51.440 largely from this slash the Heath Ledger movie about Ned Kelly. So I mean, I was going to bring

00:59:59.080 that up before. I feel like that's what a lot of Australians know about Australian history in terms

01:00:02.960 of, um, Bush ranging history. They think Ned Kelly, Heath Ledger or Mick Jagger actually

01:00:07.800 played Ned Kelly in the seventies. So there's yeah, a longer history of hotties playing Ned

01:00:13.000 Kelly, but I think that's an extra podcast. Oh, I already did that podcast. I did a movie review

01:00:19.420 of ned kelly on my patreon but um and i think i read when i was watching that movie that like one

01:00:25.760 of the first movies made in australia like a silent movie like a silent short was about ned

01:00:30.180 kelly i think like in the early it was the first major motion picture it was actually the first

01:00:36.020 major motion picture in the world so it's not just australia it's globally it was the first

01:00:41.740 like full like major motion picture was the true history um of the kelly gang so like that's so

01:00:48.600 to me so recent to when they were running around to be like actually these guys were heroes

01:00:53.800 is the turnaround was just really shockingly quickly from like executing him to being like

01:00:59.320 actually he's a hero yeah i mean there were very quickly attempts to censor material though as well

01:01:06.040 so there's a very um big concern on the part of the authorities to be like well we don't want to

01:01:12.220 celebrate these guys and condone crime and make out like everything's fine we don't want the

01:01:17.780 common people to relate to this. And so there are attempts to shut that down very quickly after

01:01:23.400 Ned Kelly was executed. His sister actually creates a play about the gang and their life,

01:01:28.900 and she plays herself, surprisingly. That gets shut down for censorship reasons to try to stop

01:01:34.820 celebrating crimes. There are definite government attempts to intervene and to kind of quash that

01:01:40.640 sentiment, but it obviously endured into the present day. This is mentioned in your book,

01:01:47.340 and i love it as a detail the um the sydney olympics opening ceremonies there's a bunch

01:01:51.940 of people in costume as ned kelly like dancing or something with guns blazing yeah basically

01:01:58.320 fireworks coming out of these huge guns um so yeah this is another very interesting element

01:02:05.540 of the whole bush ranger mythology is for something that was previously an anti-authoritarianism

01:02:11.380 like grassroots underground like hero cultural product it's now been legitimized and chosen by

01:02:20.120 the authorities by the government to represent the entire nation to the world in something like

01:02:25.260 an olympic games opening ceremony so you could say it's come full circle from being decidedly

01:02:30.800 criminal and the authorities are aghast to being wholly accepted and embraced as a symbol of the

01:02:35.960 nation writ large i have one more question for you that's an australia-based question

01:02:40.180 um this episode is going to be coming out on or around Halloween which I believe is not a major

01:02:46.840 holiday in Australia but you do have various fancy dress things and people wear costumes to

01:02:51.580 school for various reasons is it true that children would dress as Ned Kelly with just

01:02:57.160 cardboard paper armor helmets has is that something you've seen oh definitely people

01:03:03.420 dress as Ned Kelly all the time for all sorts of reasons including incredibly obscure ones like

01:03:08.840 for athletics carnivals or like you know people might dress up in a gorilla costume for something

01:03:13.820 people dress up in their kelly costumes but there are also diehard fans who will get together and

01:03:18.920 dress up in the kelly costumes there i recently went to a regional museum in new south wales where

01:03:24.280 a local blacksmith had made his own replica ned kelly armor um so yeah all the way from school

01:03:31.100 children through to adults there are varying degrees of ned kelly armor so it's pretty

01:03:36.860 omnipresent. If you come to Australia, you will see that iconography, whether it be on a bumper

01:03:41.660 sticker, mailbox, someone dressing up the tourist trade, liquors place. Like, yeah, it's pretty

01:03:49.920 everywhere. Yeah. Which is anyway, that's a whole other discussion for another day. Like it is

01:03:55.860 but anyway, so your book is available. Um, and if people want to keep up with what you're doing,

01:04:00.220 are you on social media at all? Or do you have a website you want to share?

01:04:04.120 I'm not sure how much longer I'll be on Twitter slash X considering the way it's going, but I do

01:04:09.120 have a Twitter at the moment. It's mfoster underscore history. And I can be found by

01:04:16.540 Googling Meg Foster, but put in historian because there's an actor from the eighties who's also

01:04:21.420 called Meg Foster, who you might get confused by. That's not me. Yeah. And I'll try to keep

01:04:27.040 posted that way. I'm thinking of creating a website, but we'll see how that goes.

01:04:30.820 Perfect. Thank you so, so much for talking with me on this episode. I was really looking forward

01:04:36.220 to this and it lived up to all my expectations. Oh, thank you. It's very sweet. Thank you for

01:04:40.120 having me. So Meg's book, Boundary Crossers, The Hidden History of Australia's Other Bush

01:04:50.880 Rangers is available all over the place. I was able to get it in Canada. I'm sure you can get

01:04:55.000 it in other places as well. I have a little link in the show notes if you want to buy it from

01:04:59.700 bookshop.org, which when you buy stuff from there, then a little bit of money kicks back

01:05:03.840 to help support this podcast. I do also want to say, since we recorded this past summer,

01:05:10.640 so Meg is commencing a post as Chancellor's Research Fellow at the University of Technology

01:05:15.400 in Sydney in 2024. So she's just like killing it, going around talking about bandits all over

01:05:22.660 Australia, and you love to see it. As a foster, I just love to see other fosters just thriving

01:05:28.640 in this way. So other things to talk about that we usually talk about at the end of all the episodes.

01:05:35.440 As I mentioned, people in Australia have been reaching out, asking please to a person from

01:05:39.640 Australia. I'm so happy to finally have been able to do it in this comprehensive way. And I was

01:05:43.400 really happy also that it was an indigenous Australian person who we were able to talk

01:05:48.380 about. If you have suggestions of people who you'd like for me to talk about on this podcast,

01:05:52.240 or if you're from a country, because I said a long time ago, I want to do at least one episode

01:05:56.180 from each country where there's a member of the Tits Out Brigade. So if you're from a country that

01:06:00.120 has not yet had an episode, let me know that too. And you can reach out to me if you go to

01:06:04.160 vulgarhistory.com. There's a little message contact form, or you can also email me directly,

01:06:09.500 vulgarhistorypod at gmail.com. I'm also on Instagram and threads at vulgarhistorypod,

01:06:14.800 where my DMs are open. You can also message me that way. And if you want to support the podcast

01:06:19.360 with merch, you know, if you're thinking of holiday gift giving or whatever. So if you go

01:06:24.840 to vulgarhistory.com slash store, you can find all of our honestly iconic and also ridiculous

01:06:30.180 merch. We've got like John Knox saying whores. We've got the Renaissance Reformation Girl Squad, 0.98

01:06:37.420 Mary Shelley, goth queen, mom friend, just so many phrases from the show, basically all of which

01:06:43.420 were suggestions from you all that you would like to see as merch. So anyway, you can get that there

01:06:48.120 and there's sales going on constantly. If you go to that site and there's not a sale, like wait a

01:06:52.720 day, there's probably going to be another sale. But I always try to update in my Instagram stories

01:06:56.140 when there is a new sale. If you're outside the US, like if you're in Australia and you want to

01:07:01.580 get merch, a better option is at Redbubble. So if you go to vulgarhistory.redbubble.com,

01:07:06.420 just the shipping is a bit better from that site. You can also support this podcast on Patreon.

01:07:11.120 I mentioned before that Alison and I did an episode just gushing about how much you love

01:07:15.760 Bushrangers. Alison ranked all their names. So if you want to support the Patreon, you can get

01:07:19.640 access to these bonus episodes. If you pledge at least $5 or more a month, or honestly, if you just

01:07:24.900 want to listen to that episode, you can just log on for the episode and just do like a seven week

01:07:29.120 free trial and you can hear it anyway. So you can support the podcast for as little as $1 a month.

01:07:34.740 And for $1 a month, you get early ad free access to all episodes. It's at that $5 or more per month

01:07:40.240 where you get the bonus content, the after show. So this asshole vulgar piece theater where we have 0.99

01:07:45.580 discussed because Allison and I just really had a Bushrangers era this summer. We got Lana also 1.00

01:07:52.340 to listen to or to watch the movie Ned Kelly starring Heath Ledger. And what else do I say?

01:07:59.020 Yeah. And also if you want to join the Patreon, you can also join for free. There's a free

01:08:03.860 membership option now. And what you can do with that is you can join the book club, which is where

01:08:08.640 we've been talking about Let the Dead Bury the Dead by Allison Epstein, which there's no Bushrangers

01:08:14.460 in that book but it's a great book and this week actually I was just double checking when you're

01:08:19.200 listening to this because you know got to make sure that I'm seeing the right dates so you're

01:08:23.120 listening to this middle of November this upcoming Saturday I'm going to be recording live with

01:08:29.200 Allison where I'm going to be talking with her about the book and asking questions my own

01:08:33.860 questions but also your questions so there's a post there in the vulgarhistory.com book club

01:08:38.660 where you can leave your questions for Ask Allison Anything, A-A-A, AAA. And yeah,

01:08:45.060 and the discussions are still, I don't know, they're going to always be open. If you want

01:08:48.060 to come in and look at any of the book club posts and talk about this amazing book,

01:08:50.980 Let the Dead Bury the Dead by Allison Epstein. Yeah. Join the book club at vulgarhistory.com

01:08:55.600 slash book club. There are transcripts available of this podcast available at vulgarhistory.com.

01:09:02.080 And they're kind of going from the newest ones backwards. So if you like to

01:09:05.100 read your podcast. If you want to cite this podcast in your history university course or

01:09:11.100 whatever, that's where you can find them. And these are done by Aveline Malek from The Wordery.

01:09:14.900 Thank you so much to Aveline and to The Wordery for providing these transcripts.

01:09:18.420 And I do also just want to remind you about our brand partner, Common Era Jewelry,

01:09:22.880 which is a 100% woman-owned small business using recycled gold and makes her pieces made to order.

01:09:29.520 And why I partnered up with them is because they have a collection called the Difficult

01:09:33.580 women collection, which is basically tits out people like Boudicca, Cleopatra, Agrippina and

01:09:39.240 Anne Boleyn, as well as mythological figures like Medusa, which I have the Medusa necklace and

01:09:45.280 Aphrodite. So their pieces are available in like gold and silver and also in gold vermeil, which

01:09:50.920 is a more affordable option. Anyway, the Anne Boleyn pendant, I've been waiting and I will let

01:09:56.280 you know the instant I know that it's ready, but later this month, Anne Boleyn is going to be

01:10:00.060 available in gold for May. And if you want to get some of the pieces from Common Era Jewelry,

01:10:04.680 just go to commonera.com slash vulgar or use code vulgar at checkout for 15% off. And honestly,

01:10:13.000 I'm so excited. I got to talk about Bushrangers finally. Marianne Bug, iconic. We stan. And I'm

01:10:19.160 really happy to have this connection now with the Australian listeners who've been waiting for a

01:10:23.700 long time for an Australia-based episode. I want to say to people of other countries,

01:10:27.100 i do have stuff on the way coming up in the next little while like new zealand i see you

01:10:34.160 ireland anyway lots of other places so if you're if you have a suggestion or a request or who you'd

01:10:40.360 like to hear talked about on this podcast let me know and until next time everybody uh keep your 0.94

01:10:44.620 pants on and your tits out vulgar history is hosted written and researched by ann foster 0.97

01:10:52.580 and edited by Cristina Lumagi. 0.98

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Vulgar History - November 15, 2023

Aboriginal Australian Criminal Heroine, Mary Ann Bugg

Episode Stats

Transcript