Reading Rape in Colonial Australia: Barbara Baynton's 'The Tramp', The Bulletin and Cultural Criticism

[...]consider the following elaboration of this point in Archibald's unpublished essay titled 'An Appeal to Caesar'-his own private, hectic account of the Mount Rennie case-in which he attacked Lord Carrington's support for the death penalty of the defendants: [Y]ou may search the records of Australia for the last 20 years without finding more than three authentic cases where even in the lonely bush a really virtuous woman has been successfully assailed by a satyr. The idea that the particular conditions of the country rendered women in the bush exceptionally vulnerable to rape was one of the principle rhetorical arguments that worked to secure the continuation of the death penalty for rape in New South Wales, long after Great Britain had abolished this sentence for the crime in 1841. Through the long period of heated parliamentary debates that preceded the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1883), this story was regularly invoked.15 For example, in the Legislative Council debate of 1877, W. B. Dalley argued that the proposal to remove the death penalty from the law of rape was unadvisable. For analysis of what happened to aboriginal women who tried to prosecute rape through the colonial courts when the perpetrator was white, see Philips and Bavin-Mizzi. 15 In the Legislative Council debates of 1877, Sir Alfred Stephens summarised the arguments against retaining the death penalty for rape.