AustLit

'On 20 July 1900, an Aboriginal man named Jimmy Governor murdered two white women and three white children at Breelong in northwest New South Wales. Despite the plethora of information on Governor, there is a story that remains to be told: how did the Breelong murders affect Governor’s Aboriginal family at Wollar? This article pieces together the experiences of the Aboriginal people of Wollar alongside settler responses to Governor’s crimes. It demonstrates not only that the law proved malleable in the fall-out of the murders, but the profound fear of warfare that overshadowed the push towards Federation. By tracing the lives of this group of Aboriginal people as well as settler Australians, we can see the interface of settler colonialism, nation-building and protection at a crucial moment in Australian history, as well as the precariousness of white Australia at a time when it was meant to have been triumphant.'  (Publication abstract)

'This chapter explores how colonial Australians used folklore to deal with the threat that Jimmy Governor posed to their ideas about race, gender, class, and sexuality. Three years after the Breelong murders, a "bush ballad" about the crimes began circulating throughout the areas that Jimmy had operated in. The chapter argues that The Ballad of the Breelong Blacks was created in an attempt to restore white settler-colonial power. It focuses on an Australian incident, its central concern with the complex ways that frontier settlers made sense of their world resonates with settler societies elsewhere. The chapter looks into the discursive inconsistencies, and this is a relatively new but urgently needed approach to settler colonialism. In Governor's case, hybridity is manifested in Jimmy's ambiguous position as a part of the working-class struggle and an aberrant threat to white society. To overcome the ambivalence, the poem focuses on the murders to re-establish firm boundaries between the "Breelong Blacks" and white society.' (Introduction)