The early Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37-100 CE) provides countless stories of bandits responding to the social and material upheavals in Palestine during the first century CE. In our forthcoming book Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (2023), James Crossley and I suggest that for a non-elite Jew like Jesus, banditry was one obvious option for expressing social, economic, and political discontent in an agrarian society.
Indeed, bandit-like figures can be identified across a range of pre-capitalist societies and cultures, which is what led the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his early work to look at how such forms of social agitation adapted (or not) with the arrival of capitalism in traditional societies.1 For Hobsbawm, the phenomenon of rural banditry was a notable form of (mostly peasant) resistance or rebellion which tended to emerge when the social conditions were just right.
Social bandits in particular—the ideal type embodied in the myth of Robin Hood—were those outlawed by the ruling classes, championed by the peasantry, regarded as upholders of traditional values and morality, and heralded as fighters against injustice. Their terror formed part of the public image. As Hobsbawm put it, ‘They are heroes not in spite of the fear and horror their actions inspire, but in some ways because of them.’2
Hobsbawm’s case studies were mostly drawn from southern Europe and Latin America, with limited and occasional discussion of other contexts. The only Australian example he discusses is the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly, and with perhaps one or two exceptions he tended not to discuss indigenous forms of resistance against European colonialism.
Nevertheless, I think we can observe a handful of interesting case studies of larger-than-life Indigenous Australian figures from the so-called frontier conflicts during the initial years of colonial expansion, who, with appropriate cross-cultural qualification, might fit the category of social bandit as developed by Hobsbawm. I recently became aware of an Aboriginal leader of the northern part of Western Australia by the name of Jandamarra (c. 1870-1897), whose band led a three-year armed campaign against the European settlers.
Another iconic Aboriginal ‘outlaw’ from the local area where I currently reside in Perth, Western Australia, was Yagan (c. 1795-1833). The lands on which the settlement of Perth was first established in 1829, as part of the Swan River Colony, had already been occupied for thousands of years by the Whadjuk Noongar people to which Yagan belonged. European settlers arrived quickly and in numbers, meaning the existing inhabitants experienced drastic changes to their traditional way of life.
It is within this shifting context of material upheaval and the antagonisms it generated that Yagan emerges as a notable social bandit. As the settlement of Perth grew, the Indigenous population was increasingly forced from their hunting grounds, depriving them of natural food sources. The new settlers, with no grasp of Aboriginal understandings of complex land arrangements and responsibility, simply thought the indigenous population might be free to roam further afield to seek food. The Noongar population, however, did not perceive animals or plants as private property in the same way as the settlers, and did not see agricultural produce being cultivated by the new inhabitants as off-limits.
Just two years into the establishment of the new settlement, blood was shed when a settler named Smedley witnessed Noongar people taking potatoes from the garden of another settler named Butler. Smedley shot at and killed one of them. In retaliation, a band of Noongar men including Yagan and led by his influential father Midgegooroo raided Butler’s house, killing his servant, Entwhistle, to avenge the death of the member of their own kin-group.
Over the next year or so, Yagan killed several other settlers with his spear, possibly one as retribution for the death of his brother. By 1832, Yagan and his father were declared outlaws by the authorities, and a bounty put on their heads. Midgegooroo was captured first and executed by firing squad in May 1833. In July, Yagan was shot and killed by an opportune teenager who had at first won his confidence. In the ensuing fight, the youth as well as another Noongar man travelling with Yagan were also killed. The teenager’s brother, also present, collected the bounty. In the aftermath of the killing, Yagan’s head was brutally hacked from his body and ended up being taken to England to be exhibited at the Liverpool Museum. It wasn’t repatriated until 1997.
The main written sources we have for the historical Yagan are a number of snippets in the Perth Gazette and some extracts from the writings of colonial administrators. Interestingly, our sources tend to discuss him in the most stereotypical ways as fitting classic definitions of (social) banditry developed later by Hobsbawm. Yagan is said to have traveled with a party, frequently hassled the locals, and was clearly both feared and admired by the European settlers. He is described as the ‘daring chief of the tribe’ but also as the ‘villain we have too frequently had occasion to notice’.
Of particular note is repeated interest in Yagan’s physical stature and presence: he is said to have possessed a ‘dignified bearing’ and stood at a ‘pre-eminent height…head and shoulders above his fellows, in mind as well as in body’. Such physical descriptions are reminscent of the way Josephus portrays several Jewish bandits from the first century. For instance, Simon of Perea, a former slave of Herod the King turned bandit, is cast by Josephus as ‘a handsome man, of a tall and robust body’ (Ant. 17.273). Meanwhile, Anthronges, the shepherd of Judea, was also ‘a tall man, and excelled others in the strength of his hands’ (Ant. 17.278).
While the New Testament contains no physical description of the earthly Jesus, scholars such as Joan Taylor have suggested that because Jesus’ occupation as a tekton (construction worker) was ‘an active job, requiring physical work’, Jesus likely ‘would have been reasonably strong; he would have had the physique of someone who did manual craft or building work'. While Taylor assumes that Jesus was probably of average height and somewhat slim given a likely calorie deficit, he nonetheless would have been ‘reasonably muscular’.3
But the similarities between Yagan and Jesus as bandit-like historical figures may begin and end there. Jesus would of course eventually come to stand as a symbol for the very European coloniaism Yagan was reacting against. It also would be somewhat misleading to label Yagan as an ‘organizer’ of a social movement as such, as we most certainly can do with Jesus. Jesus’ promise that the Twelve would sit on thrones judging Israel and the request of James and John to sit on Jesus’ right and left (Mark 10:35-40) constitute important and early evidence of such organization.4 Yagan’s group, however, offered no sustained or coordinated opposition to the European colonizers as fitting of a broader social movement.
Be that as it may, one settler contemporary of Yagan, who spent six weeks with him and two of his kinsmen, described him no less than ‘the Wallace of the age’, a reference to the thirteenth-century Scottish patriot. So the legacy of Yagan the ‘outlaw’ and as an enduring symbol of resistance in response to colonialism can be said to go back to his own lifetime, and it no doubt remains important today.
See especially Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959) and Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).
Bandits, p. 50.
Joan E. Taylor, What Did Jesus Look Like? (London: T&T Clark, 2018), pp. 167-8.
See James Crossley and Robert J. Myles, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2023), pp. 185-88.