Armed Robbers: Identity and Cultural Mythscapes in the Lucky Country

Notoriously difficult to access, armed robbers have mostly eluded the attempts of authors to access their lives. Aside from biographies of the most infamous, the stories of armed robbers, as varied, bizarre, and captivating as they are, have rarely been told.

This has resulted in robbers being considered largely homogenous; their unique pathways to crime are ignored or lumped into ill-defined stereotypes. Yet their routes into one of the most serious violent crimes could not be more varied. Written by a leading female criminologist, Armed Robbers relays the powerful, sometimes amusing, often harrowing stories of 42 convicted criminals in Australia.

Their accounts are interwoven with historical events and national folk tales - colonial settlement, convict ancestry, gold rushes, and a sometimes-ferocious hyper-masculinity born of frustration and constructed in forgotten towns - each contributes threads that when sewn together produce a uniquely Australian criminal identity.