Living in Bathurst in the late 1990s, she heard that the bodies of members of the "Ribbon Gang" were buried at the intersection of George and Lambert streets - the site of Bathurst Public, where her children were going to school.

Ms Thompson didn't know it then, but this initial introduction to the story of convict Ralph Entwistle and the rebellion of 1830 in Bathurst would lead to her publishing a book, Bone And Beauty, more than 20 years later.

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Ms Thompson (pictured) said she initially started researching the bushrangers of the period because she was thinking about writing a children's story, but the tale grew ever more complex.

"It became an engrossing research project for me to find out why some things in the story that I had heard were not ringing true," she said.

"Was Ralph Entwistle a criminal?

"Was there any evidence that he was a revolutionary or member of a secret society?

"What might have led him to be in that place at that time?"

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One of her best sources, she said, was former Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal editor Charles White, who wrote the book - literally - on Australian bushrangers.

"He did not identify Entwistle as the leader," she said. "He identified the event as an uprising."

And then there were the ribbons of the Ribbon Gang.

"I thought it was just about what they were wearing, but I looked into the significance of ribbon men and ribbon boys," she said.

"There were a number of Irish prisoners who were coming out [to Australia].

"I looked at the profiles of the other men hanged alongside the Ribbon Gang. I looked for court cases and newspaper reports."

Ms Thompson said she was a bit like a police detective.

"I was looking for criminal associations, patterns of behaviour.

"Why would they have run in that direction? Why did they change direction?"

Ms Thompson hopes Bone And Beauty - which she describes as "a fusion of literature and history" - reaches a different audience than those who are normally drawn to the bushranger genre.

"A lot of times women don't read these swashbuckling tales of the frontier," she said.

"But I'm approaching it not as a bushranger story, but as a human interest story.

"I wanted to make it live in present times - make connections with our own lives and make it relevant to contemporary readers."

She said a new perspective is needed on the more simplistic bushranger story.

"The ways that we have told stories about rebellion have favoured this bushranger myth, but that stops us really engaging all our critical faculties on that history."

Ms Thompson - who is an historian and former television writer - had plans to travel from her home in Tasmania to Bathurst for a local launch of her book, but that has been curtailed by the various coronavirus restrictions.

She still has plans to come to Bathurst in the future, however, and would like to do a road trip - across the same ground that the historical figures of Bone And Beauty once traversed.