It is unlikely that Jimmy Governor will be familiar to more than a small number of the Anglophone readers of this journal and fewer still of the non-Anglophone remainder. He lives on more recognizably as the fictional “Jimmie Blacksmith,” the central character of Thomas Keneally’s novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), and of Fred Schepisi’s movie of the same name, released six years later. Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith was a mixed-race Aboriginal man—“half-caste” in the language of British colonialism—caught between Indigenous roots that he rejects and the white settlers for whom he works, who cheat and exploit him and treat him with contempt. Eventually, Jimmy “snaps” and declares murderous war on the whites who have tormented him. There are faint echoes here of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968), both in characterization and in the presumption of the (white) novelist in assuming the persona of the (black) figure.

Katherine Biber brings her skills in criminology and history to a thorough and definitive recapitulation of the life and crimes of Jimmy Governor and of his brother Joe. Those lives and crimes correspond approximately with Keneally’s novel, but only in bare outline. Jimmy and Joe were Wiradjuri and Wonnarua men in late nineteenth-century New South Wales who worked as itinerant rural laborers. They encountered habitual white racism and cheating employers and eventually retaliated by murdering nine settlers. They were proclaimed outlaws and hunted. Separated, Joe was shot dead; Jimmy was captured, tried, and hanged. Biber’s book does the Governors justice, reconstructing with a vivid eye their lives and experiences and their resourcefulness.

One might observe that there is not much in my description of The Last Outlaws, so far, that would distinguish it from what is, after all, the all-too-familiar tale of the fate of Indigenous subjects of White Anglo-Saxon empires—spurned and insulted whilst alive and condemned as wretched and savage banditti as soon as they resist. But although the Governors are the spine of her book and its reason for being, they are not its only purpose and not the only reason for reading it. What Biber offers us all, in addition, is a lesson in the art of storytelling, the art of sharing experience and passing it on. The experience she shares is that of White Australia at its signal moment of coming-to-be, the federation of the six original self-governing British colonies as states in the new Commonwealth of Australia, a process that coincided with the Governors’ rampage during the second half of 1900 and climaxed on 1 January 1901, when the Australian Constitution took hold just two weeks before Jimmy Governor was hanged. The experience is also that of Australia as it is now. The style of storytelling she has embraced I would describe as “purposeful meandering,” and lest I be misunderstood, I mean this as a major compliment. It is a style that is extraordinarily inclusive of her readers, not least those who might have little knowledge of Australia and its history. It is a style that brings together in one place disparate observations that might not otherwise be found alongside each other but yet belong together. It includes as part of the stories being told the sources of those stories, whether material or verbal—vital elements in the experience that is being passed on. In its very meandering nonlinearity, it repudiates the mechanical temporality that imbues the positivist assumptions that have fashioned the modern Australia to which the book’s title nods, and, in doing so, it recognizes and includes those whose experience that temporality has ignored. Just as the Governors were, involuntarily, made part of the original becoming of White Australia, so Australia’s Indigenous people remain part of the country’s continued becoming and desire to be heard on the matter.

Biber’s stories inhabit the temporal abyss between then and now. They are her means to conduct us from now till then and back again. There are many of them. Stories of Retta Dixon, young white missionary and determined visitor to Jimmy’s jail cell, who would become for half a century a self-appointed Christian savior to First Nations people—whether they liked it or not. Stories of Edmund Fosbery, prominent in the ranks over many years of those to whom Aboriginal “protection” meant enforced assimilation under the authority of police-supervised orderliness—an Australian expression of the “good government” found throughout the Anglophone settler colonial world. Stories of the leading lights of New South Wales’ political and legal establishments, a cozy group, in whose hands “bureaucracy and law” were to replace frontier brutality as the “sharp tools for enacting colonial authority” (47). Stories of Alistair Bowman, a government medical officer who used his own sharp tools to cut into Joe Governor’s head and remove his brain, which was forwarded to James Thomas Wilson, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Sydney, as a “specimen” for the purpose of research into race and inferiority. Science, Biber observes, was crucial in the making of modern Australia, not least because of the “tight links” its communities of inquiry maintained with “the Empire.” Australia’s “distinctive flora, fauna, and peoples” birthed a lively traffic in specimens. “Australia was seen as the Empire’s laboratory” (119–20).

Biber has many other stories to tell—of documents and inquests, of outlawry and trials, of convictions and appeals, of the routines of the condemned cell and of execution. In every case there was a procedure to follow—let no one say it was not followed attentively, even laboriously. As she tells her stories, she takes us by the hand. She does not hide herself behind a screen of scholarship; we accompany her on her journeys of discovery—into the New South Wales state archives, into the museum of the old Dubbo Gaol. These journeys are part of her experience as the storyteller, who passes on what she finds and what others have found before: “Clippings and photographs, gathered or discovered over the years by volunteers and enthusiasts … handwritten notes left by earlier researchers—sometimes signed and sometimes anonymous—offering signals to be interpreted by future visitors” (58). At the end she takes us with her to the Rookwood Necropolis, where Jimmy Governor is buried, out beyond the boundary, among the old colony’s paupers. None of them have headstones. There’s a map of sorts, but no markers. It is a bleak and unforgettable moment. The graves are in a strange, wild, overgrown zone “of dense weeds and skinny gum trees.” It is not a place where one can feel anything, because it is “unexplorable. Unvisited and uninviting.” Impenetrable. “It’s a sunny day but here it is dark and cold.” It is a place of indifference and rejection—one more insult: “exactly where you would bury a condemned man” (236). Her journeys are just as important as the stories she tells.

Biber’s purposeful meandering in the abyss between then and now is essential if she is to capture a fragment, at least, of the other stories without which her book would have no meaning: the stories of First Nations people. They are the stories of people who have had to live their lives in the abyss, down amongst “the injustices, the removal of children, the shooting on sight, the removal of heads, putting them in chains”; the everlasting ever same of Aboriginal deaths in custody (6, 234). These stories will not be found in archives. “For contemporary First Nations people, colonial archives are places of ambivalence and cruelty. The Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane calls them ‘time bombs’, compressing decades of trauma and pain and the most intimate family secrets” (48). One might anticipate a preponderance of stories of the “bucket loads of extinguishment” that have been hurled into the abyss to smother 1992’s tentative recognition, in Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2), of a desperately fragile form of Native title to the land or waters held by Indigenous owners.Footnote ¹ But that is not the case. Rather, they are stories of connection, told by people such as Aunty Loretta Parsley, Walbunja elder and knowledge holder, and Jimmy Governor’s great-granddaughter; stories of her own connection to Jimmy, stories of how his frightened eighteen-year-old white wife, Ethel Page, “had gone on to become the strong, respected leader of a large and proud First Nations family” (6, 175). These are stories of connection within families, but also of the possibility of connection between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Biber says they are stories that carry with them “an immense responsibility” on her part (13). Ours too. The responsibility is one of proper remembrance, of living in our real history and allowing it to guide us. One might say, with her, that is what History is for.

Thomas Keneally meant no harm when he wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. His sensibility was empathic, formed in his own Australian Anglo-Celtic identity of Irish antagonism to “the Empire” and what it had done to his forebears. He would later admit that empathy was not enough to enable him to transform himself into Jimmy Governor. Why not? Because before it can be enough, there is another intervening sensibility that Australians must first confront. It is summed up best by the Sydney-based artist Abdul Abdullah, Perth-born, seventh-generation on his father’s side. “They think they’re the swagman,” he wrote in 2020, referring to the vice-like grip that “Waltzing Matilda” has had for so long on the White Australian imagination. “But they’re all squatters and cops” (79).

Waltzing Matilda was written in 1895 by a Sydney solicitor, Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson. The song glories in the rebel spirit of the swagman, an itinerant rural laborer, who steals a sheep and is hounded to a defiant death by the sheep-owning squatter and the craven police troopers who serve at the squatter’s beck and call. It aptly expresses White Australia’s central myth about itself.

Jimmy and Joe Governor were swagmen. But they were not the sunburnt bush rovers that Waltzing Matilda has in mind. Australia still has to reimagine itself otherwise. In a 2023 referendum, when asked by First Nations people “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future” (239-40), most of the rest of the Australian people voted no.