The Last Outlaws
The crimes of Jimmy & Joe Governor and the birth of modern Australia
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The Last Outlaws
Narrated by:
Leroy Parsons
Buy Now for €17.99
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Narrated by:
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Leroy Parsons
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By:
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Katherine Biber
In the winter of 1900, Wiradjuri man Jimmy Governor and his brother Joe murdered nine people across New South Wales, in a rampage that caused panic in the colony on the cusp of nationhood. Triggered, it seems, by a racist incident, they killed men, women and children, evading a vast manhunt until they were eventually captured. Joe was shot in the open; Jimmy survived to be put on trial. Thus the last man to be outlawed in the colony was hanged in the new nation, meeting his end in Darlinghurst Gaol as the Federation decorations were taken down. The brothers’ names still resonate, partly due to Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Fred Schepisi’s subsequent film, but their story has remained distorted and obscure.
Undertaken with the co-operation of the Governors' descendants, Katherine Biber’s compelling reconstruction of events – from the murders themselves to Jimmy’s eventual execution – brings this extraordinary story back to life. In doing so it sheds fresh, vivid light on the country that inspired and reacted to the murders. Not only did many of the lawyers and politicians involved also play key roles in Federation, but the case revealed in microcosm the psychology of the nascent nation: its attitudes to land and race; its anxiety about a wider First Nations insurrection; its obsession with paperwork and the emerging ‘sciences’ of neuroanatomy and criminology; its nepotism, religiosity, sweeping police powers and sensationalist media. More powerfully than the story of Ned Kelly or the Anzacs, the fate of Jimmy Governor illuminates the origin story of the Australian nation.
Populated by a cast of extraordinary characters and compelling detail, The Last Outlaws brings the energy of true crime into the telling of history, offering an electric new understanding of both our past and our present.
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Reviews
‘I was lucky enough to read early Katherine Biber’s The Last Outlaws … It’s a story that encapsulates our complex national origins.’
‘an absorbing account of the crimes of Jimmy Governor’
‘Biber’s ability to slip seamlessly from past to present, from open wound to aching scar, gives The Last Outlaws a rare immediacy few writers of legal history can sustain'
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