Bush ranger

Felt like warming up with a bush-ranger sketch. Bushrangers are perhaps one of the first truly Australian (post colonial) groups which really formed national identity. Firstly the term was for escaped convicts but soon came to encompass robbers who escaped authority by fleeing to the bush.  Though often ranging from murderous to insane, they captured public imagination and were able to brand themselves anti-authoritarians and even defenders of the common man versus the tyrannical British system (they we're often of Irish descent which came with a very specific hatred for the British at the time and beyond).

Bushranging also has a hidden  but robust history of same sex romance. Case in point, the "death of Bushranging" coincided with the execution of Ned Kelly and Andrew George Scott AKA Captain Moonlight. Captain Moonlite generally takes a back seat in Australian imagination, these days being relatively unknown but at the time he was really one of the top dogs right there with Kelly (both were executed within a year time frame). Moonlite was likely a less marketable entity with newspapers of the day making euphemistic passes at his EXTREMELY intense (even within the framework of mate ship which was developing in the day)  relationship with one of his gang's members James Nesbitt. (James died in his arms, and he made a ring out of his hair and demanded to be buried in the same grave as his beloved, the only man who could ever talk down his temper.

Still, even with Kelly, scholars suspect romantic involvement among his gang, with Joe Bryne and Andrew Sherrit being described as having "a love unbounded" and considering one another "more than a brother to each other".  Then of course there was the deeply romantic words of Sherrit to Joe's mother when Joe was found to have taken a pay off to police "I'll kill him and before he's cold, I'll fuck him!" How romantic.  Sydney J Baker (noted scholar of Australian English) put forward that the entire gang was, in fact "a group of homosexuals." cute.

Of course these tid bits seem to get neglected when the Kelly gang gets brought up by their general modern hyper masc DONT TOUCH ME BRO straight TM fan boy. 

Apologies for my ramshackle history bits, I get going and it's hard to stop. For a much more coherent look into Captain Moolite I suggest "moonlite" by Garry Linnell. He's done a fantastic job of weaving official documents into a captivating story documenting Mr Scott's life and death.