On a midsummer’s morning in 1901, a Wiradjuri and Wonnarua man was hanged for murder at Darlinghurst Gaol. What marked the end of Jimmy Governor’s life was the newly Federated nation’s first blood: an act which deepened routinised violence against Indigenous peoples and set the wheels of systemic racism in Federal law into its most extensive motion.

Katherine Biber’s The Last Outlaws, developed from her NSW Premier’s History Award-winning podcast of the same name, meticulously tracks Jimmy’s story through written and oral records to illuminate a far broader history of colonialism’s legal machinery. Jimmy and his brother Joe were the final two men in Australia proclaimed outlaws after the murders of Sarah Mawbey, three of her children and their schoolteacher Helena Kerz. Rather than examining Jimmy and Joe’s actions as isolated incidents, Biber maps how persistent humiliation, dispossession and brutality through the brothers’ and their family’s lives fostered circumstances capable of begetting further violence.

Biber’s ability to slip seamlessly from past to present, from open wound to aching scar, gives The Last Outlaws a rare immediacy few writers of legal history can sustain through a saga as far-reaching as the Governors’. In clearly articulating how the threads of Jimmy and Joe’s cases form the tapestries of our current judicial, political and cultural frameworks, Biber’s resolute and compassionate account provides much-needed context for understanding the full scope of the last two centuries of Australian history. With an eye to the future of reconciliation, The Last Outlaws unravels the legacies of injustice that continue to haunt courtrooms and Country, challenging us to look beyond the punitive and toward truth-telling.