Paula Jane Byrne
Dr Paula Jane Byrne is Adjunct in humanities at Western Sydney University. She has previously taught at UNSW, Macquarie University, Murdoch University and ANU, and held research positions at Sydney University, ANU, Australian National Library and University of New England. In 2024, she was was Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales. Paula’s interests are in colonising mentalities, law and the courts in the colonies, and she has published widely in these fields, including Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales 1810–1830 (1993) and Judge Advocate Ellis Bent: Letters and Diaries 1809–1811 (2012).
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2919-1061
Law in the New Democracy »
Authored by: Paula Jane Byrne
Publication date: September 2025
In the 1850s opposition to the Crown in New South Wales made for unsteady ground for the administration of criminal law. This study of skirmishes between magistrates, constables and the metropolis reveals just how far understandings of law could be stretched and warped by recalcitrant local populations. At Carcoar, the local population entirely controlled how law worked; on the South Coast, ‘the people’ influenced how law intervened in their lives; in the north west of the colony publicans dominated; on the north coast, violence against First Nations/Aboriginal people was forcibly meshed into the day to day working of the courts. This study shows a ‘frontier’ centred on the coasts and in the minds of legal officials of the metropolis, but elsewhere, there was some recognition of the Aboriginal polity and an early understanding of Aboriginal rights.
With right of reply by First Nations/Aboriginal people
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