The outlaw tradition, those who live ‘outside the law’, has a rich and vivid history. In Australia, such bandits are known as bushrangers, immortalised in popular culture, celebrated through folk tales and elevated to a legendary, even mythical status. Equal parts hero and villain, the Bushranger is heralded as a champion of freedom, generally a radical opponent to 19th-century British governance and the inequality of the early colonies, turning to violence and thievery to balance the scales. Often working in small gangs or as solitary rouges, the Bushranger lived on the periphery of society, banished to the harsh outback in isolation from the collective pulse of rapidly expanding cities. What first started as an investigation into the role these characters play within Australian culture quickly evolved into a more personal exploration of isolation and grief as I travelled Australia in search of the spirit of these long-lost but far-from-forgotten men.

Travelling to the far reaches of the Australian deserts and bush, to the opal mining towns of New South Wales and South Australia, this project undertook a radical shift as I tried to reconcile my own feelings and emotional responses to these remote and energised places. Living on the road for weeks on end, I began to imagine the isolation, the silence, and the spaciousness these outlawed convicts must have felt, exiled from regular life and condemned to survival by any means possible. At its core, Bushranger Blue makes no attempt to paint an accurate narrative of the history of the Australian Bushrangers; instead, it functions as an inquiry into more perennial themes of loneliness, isolation, and ideas around the concept of home. By tracking the spirit of the outcast ranger through historical regions and remote communities of the outback, the images speak of a yearning for deep connection in the face of isolation.

This project and exhibition was made possible through The Pool Grant. An initiative of The Pool Collective, The Pool Grant was launched in 2010 as a means to support the development of emerging talent in the region. Since then, it has provided funding to twelve individual artists, as well as the first joint project in 2019.