Tigg and the Bandicoot Bushranger by Jackie French

Title: Tigg and the Bandicoot Bushranger

Author: Jackie French

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: HarperCollins Australia

Published: 4^th December 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

Price: $17.99

Synopsis: The year is 1859 and the goldfields are filled with diggers — and danger!

Orphaned twelve-year-old Tigg is the Bandicoot Bushranger, the youngest bushranger on the Ballarat goldfields in 1859.

When a robbery goes wrong, Tigg must flee in disguise as one of the tens of thousands of Chinese men and boys braving heat, thirst, starvation and murderous attacks on the long road from Robe in South Australia to the goldfields in Victoria.

But even further danger threatens. Who has offered a large sum of money for Tigg’s capture? And is the mysterious Henry Lau a friend or enemy?

To be safe, Tigg must solve the greatest mystery of all.

Who is Tigg?

~*~

Ma Murphy is the only mother twelve-year-old orphan Tigg knows. She’s grown up in a shanty around the goldfields of Ballarat, and is the youngest bushranger around – but a robbery goes wrong one day, and Tigg flees, disguised as a Chinese boy. Tigg’s searching for safety in Victoria as she travels from Robe to Victoria.

When Tigg becomes aware someone has offered money for her capture – or rather, the capture of someone known as the Bandicoot Bushranger as she travels with Henry Lau. But Tigg is unsure whether Henry is a friend or an enemy – and unsure of whether he can be trusted.

To stay safe, Tigg needs to answer a question that has played on her mind for years: her true identity.

Jackie French’s latest middle grade historical fiction about orphan Tigg takes readers back to the days of the gold fields, Gold Rush and the days when racism was rife and people were more forward, or at least not always as subtle about their views. Tigg’s life of poverty means she is thrust into doing things she might not ordinarily do if her life was different. If her parents were still around, and if she hadn’t been abandoned. Tigg is determined to find out who she is and escape from the people trying to capture her – she’s sure they want to throw her in jail, and she uses all her wits, everything she has and her cleverness to make her way through the country to find a new life.

New lives and new beginnings are key themes within this book, which feed into Tigg’s search for her identity. It’s made clear in the early chapters that Tigg is a girl who has been trying to disguise herself as a boy, but as she grows and becomes aware of the world, she is forced to hide, and then adopt her feminine identity. It is Tigg’s journey of self-discovery in the Australian bush, and around smaller towns that gives the novel its heart as she learns who she can trust, and who she can’t trust, and why this is the case. Tigg lives in a world fraught with dangers from strange people, from the bush, the gold fields, and disease. A world where trust needs to be earnt, and is in some cases bought or expected. And a world of great division based on class, gender and race. But it is the people Tigg meets on her journey who appear to defy societal expectations who make the novel sing and bring this nineteenth century world to life.

Jackie French manages to take complex ideas, issues that affect people in a myriad of ways, and characters whose voices that are often left out of the history books, and pulls them together to create evocative stories. These stories are well-researched, where the details and background behind the stories are explained in author notes at the back to give the story context, allowing readers of all ages to understand what is behind the story. A novel like Tigg and the Bandicoot Bushranger takes several well-known aspects of Australian history like the Gold Rush and bushrangers, and digs deep to tell a story that needed to be told. This is a story of inclusion as well, showing that whilst the dominant attitudes at the time were ones of exclusion and discrimination, there were people who stood apart from society, and did not accept these attitudes or the predetermined pathways laid out for them.

This is what Jackie French does well with her books – celebrates the little-known stories and the champions for diversity who fought for the rights of marginalised people throughout Australian history. She has always positioned their fight within the context of her setting as well, whilst creating a commentary on society at the time that could also apply to today.

Another great novel from Jackie French.