N Uncommon Hangman

Hangman's Choice

Federal Deputy Sullivan Hart arrived too late to rescue his father. But the elder Hart managed to identify his killers before his death - by scrawling the phrase Los Pistoleros in his own blood. Since the end of the Civil War, this outlaw gang has been involved in everything from cattle rustling to running guns - without getting caught. Sullivan Hart aims to end that lucky streak. But Sullivan isn't the only man on the hunt. Quick Charlie Sims, gambler and con man, has his own debt to settle with Los Pistoleros. And he's got to do it without letting lawmen like Sullivan Hart get involved. Because Charlie Sims is a wanted man, too . . .

Shakspere's works [from the text of N. Delius].

The Last Outlaws

Brilliantly reconstructed from contemporary narratives, The Last Outlaws is both a gripping work of historical true crime and a richly revealing examination of our nation at its birth. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith meets Killing for Country. 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.