Among Australia's earliest convicts were several black American former slaves who went on to become the colony's first bushrangers, new research has found.
Traditionally, Australians have regarded bushrangers as having been whites, many of them Irish, forced into a life of crime by grinding poverty and the injustice of the penal system.
The most famous of them was Ned Kelly, the Irish-Australian son of a convict whose exploits were the subject of last year's Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey.
But in research that has upset that myth, historian Cassandra Pybus says the country's first outlaw was an African-American, known as Black Caesar. He was shot dead in 1796 for the bounty price of five gallons of rum.
Nor was he alone - about 900 black Africans were transported to Australia and at least a dozen became bushrangers, living off the land and plundering huts and farms on the fringe of white settlements.
Dr Pybus, a senior research fellow at the University of Tasmania, said: 'Bushrangers are a cherished Australian icon, but they were not necessarily white.