Ned Kelly
An old axiom
of cultural history is, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
It might be true of Ned Kelly, the legendary Australian bushranger, that
what we know of him through art, literature and popular history is mostly
legend. What is the history and how
did Ned Kelly attain mythic status?
Edward (Ned)
Kelly was the son of Irish immigrants Ellen Quinn of Antrim and John “Red”
Kelly of Tipperary. His family story
is one of the thousands of stories of Irish who were transported from
Ned was
raised in an area of the state of
At age
sixteen, Ned was accused, falsely, he says, of striking a man named McCormack,
for which he served six months in jail. Subsequently,
Ned got into a scuffle with a constable who wanted to arrest him on another
charge Ned regarded as false. As Ned
says in his letter, “I had no idea he
wanted to arrest me or I would have quietly rode away”
but the officer seized Ned who defended himself by throwing the
constable and putting his foot on his neck and taking his revolver.
Ned was fearless and aggressive toward those who accosted him or any
member of his family. These traits
are part of his legend. Encounters
like this with the police led to more attention to the Kelly family by law
enforcement which led to more false, according to Kelly,
accusations, more arrests and more physical confrontations with the
police. In Kelly’s letter, he
says, “it is a credit to a Policeman to
convict an innocent man” and that perjury “is
no crime in the Police force.” It
was this environment of hostility toward the makers of the law (“there
was never such a thing as Justice in the English law”) and the enforcers
of the law (“big ugly fat-necked wombat
headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish
Bailiffs or english landlords which is
better known as Officers of Justice or Victoria Police”) which led to the
episodes which generated the Ned Kelly legend.
In 1878,
Kelly alleges that certain wealthy and powerful squatters harassed the poor
selectors by impounding their horses, causing economic hardship for the poor who
had to pay to get back their horses or forfeit them.
Furthermore, Kelly in his letter says that an officer Farrell stole one
of Ned’s step-father’s horses and placed the animal in the paddock of a
wealthy squatter. Ned’s
step-father, George King, a known horse thief, and Ned broke into the paddock,
stole all of the horses and sold them to an innocent party.
This innocent man was convicted of horse theft which outraged Ned Kelly,
another element in the Kelly legend– his sense of justice.
The angry Kelly, now twenty-four years old, was further provoked by the
behavior of the police when they went to the Kelly home to arrest his brother
Dan. The police, according to Kelly,
terrorized his mother and the children and arrested Ellen Kelly on trumped up
charges to get her to cooperate in the apprehension of Dan and Ned Kelly.
Ellen Kelly was sent to prison for three years, Ned’s actions toward
freeing his mother becoming another cause of the popularity of the Kelly legend.
What became
known as the Kelly Gang formed at the time of Ned’s mother’s imprisonment,
1878. Ned was to create his image as
a folk hero in less than two years as a bushranger evading the law and
supporting the poor who protected him. Ned’s
greatest crime was the slaying of three police officers who were in his pursuit.
Ned was convinced that the police were out to kill not to arrest him and
his gang (“they would shoot me first and
then cry surrender”). But when he was able to surprise the officers “to
take their fire-arms and ammunition and horses,” the police resisted,
resulting in the killing of three of four officers.
The Victoria
Police threw everything it had into the capture of the Kelly Gang but with
little success. The Gang lived among
and off the people. To support
themselves and to reward their supporters, the Kelly Gang became successful bank
robbers. Their generosity toward the
needy people in the bush has given Ned Kelly some Robin Hood credentials.
The Gang’s career as criminals came to an end in Glenrowan in June,
1880. The gang held the whole town
hostage in an attempt to lure the pursuing police into a trap.
The Gang ripped up a section of railroad track hoping to derail the train
being used by the police in its pursuit. A
teacher in town escaped from the Gang, hailed the train, and saved the officers
for a siege of the Kelly Gang. Ned
added to his legendary credentials by innovating armor for his confederates from
the steel of farm implements. Ned’s
armored gang members, far outnumbered by the police, were able to sustain a
ferocious exchange of gu fire before Dan Kelly, Steve Hart, and Joe Byrne were
killed. Ned, mythologized as a kind
of Knight in Agricultural Armor, launched a frontal assault on the police, was
wounded in the legs which were not protected by armor, ans was captured.
Ned was hanged in November 1880.
From this
history a legend emerged. Kelly’s
story is told in at least four talking movies: “When the Kellys Were Out,”
“The Glenrowan Affair,” “Ned Kelly” (1970 starring Mick Jagger), and
“Ned Kelly” (1993 starring Heath Ledger).
He is the subject of
Ned Kelly
cries out for comparison to the Australian-Irish folk song “The Wild Colonial
Boy.” The Australia of Kelly’s
time was redolent with the whiff of British colonial rule.
We can hear Kelly in the song’s words:”We’ll scour along the valleys/ And we’ll gallop o’er the
plains;/ And scorn to live in slavery,/ Bound down by iron chains.”
We can hear his defiance: “
‘I’ll fight but not surrender,’ cried the Wild Colonial Boy.”
Kelly was for the poor Irish another Fenian who stood up to the
greatest power on Earth. In his own
words, prisoners in ”those places of
tyrany and condemnation many a blooming Irishman rather than subdue to the Saxon
yoke Were flogged and bravely died in servile chains but true to the shamrock
and a credit to Paddy’s land.” Whether
of Irish extraction or not, many of us admire the fearlessness of those who
stand against the privileged and powerful. Another
David story.
Of
particular moment in the legend of Ned Kelly is his Jerilderie Letter.
The reader of this essay will have noticed that citations to a letter
written by Kelly have several mistakes in spelling, capitalization and
punctuation. These are exact quotes
from a letter dictated by Ned showing him to be very intelligent but with little
formal education. Ned letter is an
8000 word biography which he gave to a printer in
Ned’s
legend is also enhanced by his manifesto at the end of the Jerilderie Letter: I give fair warning to all who has reason to fear me to sell out and
give £10 out of every hundred towards
the widow and orphan fund and do not attempt to reside in Victoria but as short
a time as possible after reading this notice, neglect this and abide by the
consequences, which shall be worse than the rust in the wheat in Victoria or the
druth of a dry season to the grasshoppers in New South Wales I do not wish to
give the order full force without giving timely warning but I am a widows son
outlawed and my orders must be obeyed.
No wonder
that the Legend of Ned Kelly lives on. He
was loyal to his mother; he robbed from the rich to give to the poor; he was
David against Goliath; he had an OK Corral type of shoot out; and he left a
memoir for endless scrutiny. Above
all, not even Jesse James or Robin Hood left a nation building manifesto as a
comfort for the oppressed.
© Irish Cultural
Society of the Garden City Area
