The three pre-eminent early novelists of Australia, Henry Kingsley, Marcus Clarke and Rolf Boldrewood, were intrigued by a mysterious series of bushranging events in Victoria involving the folk heroes Bogong Jack and the Tichborne claimant among others. But these stories had been reshaped by such constant retelling that the form in which we have received them bears only an attenuated relation to the original events themselves. Bogong Jack did not, for example, lead the Bogong Jack gang, and was an accomplice in a series of murders which belie his later romantic image. A considerable social...