The Ribbon Boys' rebellion 1830
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2015
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There is a surprising silence in the historical record about Irish convict insurrection from the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804 until the emergence of Ned Kelly in 1869. Robert Hughes suggests that the Castle Hill rebellion was ‘the only concerted uprising of convicts ever to take place on the Australian mainland’ (Hughes 1987, p. 194). However, in October 1830 Governor Darling ordered Captain Walpole to lead a forced march to Bathurst to suppress a convict insurrection of reportedly over eighty government servants from twenty five farms led by a gang of Irish Ribbon Boys. The Governor deployed troops to the stations and ordered detachments to guard the iron and road gangs ‘as should these people rise, who are 1500 in number, the Consequences might prove of the most serious nature’ (Ward & Robertson 1978, p. 228). The insurrection resulted in a public execution of ten Ribbon Boys and the deaths of three mounted police, an overseer and nine convict associates. This exegesis will argue that the Bathurst insurrection has been overlooked due to the way in which the narrative was constructed and passed down. The settlers and officials who first recorded the rebellion preferred to downplay the social and political causes of insurrection and nullified the impact by attributing the revolt to a single convict ‘bushranger’ seeking revenge. No previous accounts have examined the political significance of the ribbons the leader wore in his hat, the sites of insurrection and the patterns of criminal association that flourished in lands beyond the limits of location. The archival research contests Hughes notion that, ‘scattered in threes and fours through the immense bush, living in outback isolation, political prisoners had no social resonance: they were neutralized by geography as much as by law’ (Hughes 1987, p. 194). The narrative research critiques cultural representations of ‘bushrangers’ in print and screen in order to discover ways in which narrative techniques and structures can be used to stimulate the public imagination and disrupt accepted cultural understandings of these events. The creative work is conceptualized as an historic hypothesis that engages the emotions and intellect to evoke an historic sensibility in the reader.
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