Were we a nation of rogues? Beyond recurrent images of convicts and bushrangers, what do we know about ordinary people's experience of crime and punishment in colonial Australia?Despite an abundance of sources, it is only recently that this question has been framed and answers sought. the impetus has come from concern with current issues such as relations between police and Aboriginal communities, and the significance of sex/gender in our social order.

These essays deal with the police and the criminal law in action. Their subjects include women under the convict system in New South Wales; the paradoxical relationship between race, justice and criminal law in north Queensland; and the regulation of the vagrant in late-nineteenth-century Melbourne. In telling individual stories, they point to patterns of common experience. This new and accessible social history makes a forceful contribution to contemporary debate.