This article examines the complex and powerful relationship between the internet and public history. It explores how public history is being experienced and practiced in a digital world where ‘you’ – both public historians and laypeople – are made powerful through using the world wide web. Web 2.0 is a dynamic terrain that provides both opportunities and challenges to the creation of history. While it may facilitate more open, democratic history making, the internet simultaneously raises questions about gatekeeping, authority and who has the right to speak for the past. Though the web provides new avenues for distributing historical information, how these are used and by whom remain pressing questions.

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During the 1830s, the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act were crafted to prevent crime, revolt and insurrection in the colony of New South Wales. These statutes contained exceptional methods to police and control colonial populations and suspended legal safeguards designed to protect the population from abuses of power. Supporters of the laws argued that extreme measures were necessary due to the emergency of the occasion. Understanding the Bushranging Act and the Vagrancy Act’s enactment and operation, as well as the purposes they were designed to serve and the liberties they infringed to achieve these ends requires attention to local circumstance. A fine-grained analysis, rooted in the peculiarities of life in colonial New South Wales and anchored by the law’s operation on the ground is needed to understand the malleability of British law at this place and at this time. In this article, I argue that rather than a select criminal contingent, the New South Wales’ authorities increasingly feared that the composition of the colony threatened their colonial enterprise. The Bushranging Act of 1830 and the Vagrancy Act of 1835 contained wide coercive and discretionary powers to mitigate the extent of this threat.

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