Elizabeth Hickman - Black Bunny's Bushrangers.

Elizabeth Jessie Hickman

The notorious cattle rustler from the wild, mountainous countryside around Rylstone and Kandos, west of the Putty Road.

The infamous bushranger's career to her lonely death at age 46 years and burial in a pauper's grave at the rear of Sandgate Cemetery, near Hexham.

There was no headstone to mark her passing, no mourners to grieve and no flowers left by her graveside. In a further indignity, she shared her grave with a child buried decades before and a man buried there a few weeks before her own death.

It revealed a colourful legend - of a gun-toting Jessie Hickman, nee Hunt, who ended up hiding from police in a remote cave on Nullo Mountain.

She was said to have gone bush dressed as a man after killing her abusive third husband "Fitzy" in the 1920s.

And while Jessie Hickman wasn't a conventional bushranger (she didn't stage any hold-ups) she did have five aliases, had a gang, stole and roamed the bush while being pursued by police.

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/2614913/the-hunters-lady-bushranger/

Bushrangers.

Over 2,000 bushrangers are estimated to have roamed the Australian countryside, beginning with the convict bolters and drawing to a close after Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan.

Bushrangers were originally escaped convicts who had the survival skills necessary to use the Australian bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term "bushranger" had evolved to refer to those who abandoned social rights and privileges to take up "robbery under arms" as a way of life, using the bush as their base.

Bushranging thrived during the gold rush years of the 1850s and 1860s when the likes of Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner and John Gilbert led notorious gangs in the country districts of New South Wales. These Wild Colonial Boys typically robbed small-town banks and coach services.

In other infamous cases, such as that of Dan Morgan, the Clarke brothers, and Australia's best-known bushranger, Ned Kelly, numerous policemen were murdered.

The number of bushrangers declined due to better policing and improvements in rail transport and communication technology, such as telegraphy. Kelly's capture and execution in 1880 effectively represented the end of the bushranging era.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushranger

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