Register

*ONLINE* Meg Foster - Boundary Crossers

Author In-conversation

The hidden history of Australia's 'other' bushrangers.

In Boundary Crossers, historian Meg Foster reveals the stories of bushrangers who didn’t fit the mould. African American man Black Douglas, who was seen as the terror of the Victorian goldfields, Sam Poo, known as Australia’s only Chinese bushranger, Aboriginal man Jimmy Governor, who was renowned as a mass murderer, and Captain Thunderbolt’s partner, Aboriginal woman Mary Ann Bugg, whose extraordinary exploits extended well beyond her time as ‘the Captain’s Lady’.

These bushrangers’ remarkable lives have been forgotten, obscured, misrepresented or erased from the national story for over a century, and this is no accident. All is not as it appears. There is far more to these bushrangers, and their histories, than immediately meets the eye.

MEG FOSTER is an award-winning historian of banditry, settler colonial and public history, and a Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She was awarded the 2018 Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of New South Wales, has published academically as well as in popular publications like Overland and Australian Book Review and has a passion for connecting history with the contemporary world.

Meg will be in conversation with ALEXANDRA ROGINSKI.  Alex is a research fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. Her work spans the history of science, anthropology and heritage studies, and she completed her PhD through the ANU in 2018 with a thesis examining the history of popular phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Upcoming events