But in research that has upset that myth, historian Cassandra Pybus says the country's first outlaw was an African-American, known as Black Caesar. He was shot dead in 1796 for the bounty price of five gallons of rum.

Nor was he alone - about 900 black Africans were transported to Australia and at least a dozen became bushrangers, living off the land and plundering huts and farms on the fringe of white settlements.

Dr Pybus, a senior research fellow at the University of Tasmania, said: 'Bushrangers are a cherished Australian icon, but they were not necessarily white.

'In many ways, Black Caesar is a much more heroic figure than Ned Kelly, who was a murderous horse rustler. Caesar never hurt anyone, never shot anyone, and was simply driven by a desire for freedom.'

Thousands of slaves fought for the British during the American War of Independence and were evacuated after Britain lost the war in 1781. These 'black loyalists', as they were known, settled in either Nova Scotia, in present-day Canada, or England, where some committed crimes and were transported as convicts to the fledgling penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land - now Tasmania.

Among the 480 convicts on the First Fleet, which sailed into Botany Bay in 1788, about a dozen were black.

They included Black Caesar, real name unknown, a former slave and loyalist soldier who was convicted of theft in Kent in 1787 and sentenced to transportation.

Although hard-working, he found it difficult to survive on the struggling colony's meagre rations and took to the bush with a musket and a cooking pot in May 1789. Weeks later, he was caught and confined in chains on an island in Sydney Harbour.

Once unshackled and taken back to Sydney, he fled again, taking with him a canoe and one week's supply of rations. He was captured once more, having been speared by Aborigines, and shipped to the feared penal settlement of Norfolk Island, off Australia's east coast. By 1793, he was back in Sydney and, undeterred, took to the bush a third time. He became the leader of a gang of highwaymen but was ambushed and killed by two bounty hunters in 1796.

At the time, Sydney's judge advocate, David Collins, wrote: 'Thus ended a man, who - certainly in life - could never have been estimated at more than one remove above the brute.'

Other black bushrangers included John Goff, the son of a black loyalist, who was transported to Australia in 1815. He was flogged repeatedly and escaped to lead a gang of outlaws. Robert Abbott, a former slave transported from the West Indies, was similarly engaged in 'robbery under arms' in 1838.

Several African-American men were convicted of being outlaws in Victoria in the 1860s - the heyday, Dr Pybus said, of the 'Afro-bushranger'.

The findings are a reminder of Australia's early racial melting pot, as today it debates immigration policy and whether to accept Afghan and Middle Eastern boat people.

'I would like people to realise we were a multi-cultural society from the very beginning of white settlement,' Dr Pybus said. 'Relations between black and white in Australia are not just about Europeans versus Aborigines.'

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