Ned Kelly

Edward "Ned" Kelly (c. 1855 – 11 November 1880) is Australia's most famous bushranger, and, to some, a folk hero for his defiance of the colonial authorities. He was known as the Man in the Iron Mask (after the Alexandre Dumas book) because of how he was armoured, when captured.

Early life

Ned was born in Beveridge, Victoria just north of Melbourne, probably in January 1855 (perhaps December 1854) the oldest son of eight children born to Irish Catholic parents John Kelly and Ellen Quinn; the latter was a member of the notorious Quinn extended family, or "clan". He was baptized by Augustinian priest Charles O'Hea. As a boy he attended school and risked his life to save another boy who was drowning. As a reward he was given a green sash by the boy's family, which he would wear under his armour during his final showdown with police.

Ned's father died at Beveridge via Avenel, north eastern Victoria on 27th Dec 1866 when Ned was only 12, and according to custom he was forced to leave school to become head of the family. It was at this time that the Kelly family moved to the Glenrowan area of Victoria, which to this day is known as Kelly Country. Ned grew up in poverty in some of the harshest conditions in Australia, and folk tales tell of his sleeping on the ground in the bush during the Victorian winter.

Rise to notoriety

John "Red" Kelly, the father of Edward "Ned" Kelly, was convicted of 'stealing 2 pigs the property of Mr. Quainy'. He was sentenced to 7 years transportation to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and arrived in 1842.

In all, 18 charges were brought against members of Ned's immediate family before he was declared an outlaw, while only half that number resulted in guilty verdicts. This is a highly unusual ratio for the time, and is one of the reasons that has caused many to posit that Ned's family was unfairly targeted from the time they moved to North-East Victoria due to Ellen Quinn's bad family name. Indeed, Ellen was eventually wrongfully convicted of aiding and abetting an attempted murderer, and was in prison at the time of Ned's execution. Ellen later remarried, and died 27 March 1923.

In 1869, 14-year-old Ned was arrested for assaulting a Chinese pig farmer named Ah Fook.http://www.glenrowan1880.com/ah_fook.htm He spent ten days in custody before the charges were dismissed.

The following year he was arrested and accused of being an accomplice of bushranger Harry Power. No convincing evidence was produced in court and he was released after a month. Historians tend to disagree over this episode: some see it as evidence of police harassment; others believe that Kelly’s relatives intimidated the witnesses, making them reluctant to give evidence.

In October 1870 Ned was arrested again for assaulting a hawker, Jeremiah McCormick, and for his part in sending McCormick's wife an indecent note that had calves' testicles enclosed with it. Ned did not write the note, but passed it to one of his cousins to give to the lady. He was sentenced to three months' hard labour on each charge.

Three weeks after his release, he was arrested again for being in possession of a stolen horse. After attempting to flee, 16-year-old Ned was held down and threatened by Senior Constable Hall, and later sentenced to three years' hard labour. The actual thief, Isaiah 'Wild' Wright, got 18 months.

After his release Ned became involved in a cattle rustling operation with his brother Dan, which attracted the attention of the local police. The Kelly family claimed that Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick assaulted Ned's sister Kate Kelly on a visit to the Kelly home in April 1878. Fitzpatrick accused Ned of attempted murder, and Ned went into hiding. He claimed that at the time he was actually in New South Wales. In October, when the police eventually found him in Stringybark Creek, he and his accomplices killed three of the policemen and escaped once more. Kelly then formed the Kelly Gang consisting of himself, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart.

He robbed two banks at Euroa and Jerilderie in February, 1879, as he needed money to make suits of armour which he believed would protect him from the police.

The raid on Jerilderie is particularly noteworthy. The gang arrived in the town in early February 1879. They broke into the local police station and imprisoned police officers Richards and Devine in their own cell. The outlaws then changed into the police uniforms and mixed with the locals, claiming to be reinforcements from Sydney. On Monday the gang rounded up various people and got them into the back parlour of the Royal Mail Hotel. While Dan and Steve Hart kept the prisoners busy, Ned and Joe Byrne raided the local bank of about two thousand pounds.

At this time, Ned dictated a lengthy letter for publication describing his view of his activities and the treatment of his family and, more generally, the treatment of Irish Catholics by the police and the English and Irish Protestant squatters. The Jerilderie Letter, as it is called, discusses the possibility of an uprising, not only in Australia but in the United States and Ireland itself, against what he regarded as a gross injustice. Some accounts of the Kelly story see Ned as ultimately planning armed rebellion (some even assert that he aimed to declare the north-east of Victoria an independent republic), but his actions give little indication of such a plan.

Capture, trial and execution

The gang knew that an old friend of theirs, Aaron Sherritt, was a police informer. On the 26th June 1880 Dan Kelly and Joe Byrne went to Sherritt's house and killed him. The four policemen who were with him at the time hid under the bed and did not report the killing until late the following morning. This delay was to prove crucial since it upset Ned's timing for an ambush.

The Kelly Gang arrived in Glenrowan on 27 June and held about 70 hostages at the Glenrowan Inn, owned by the Jones family. They knew that a train loaded with police was on its way and ordered the rail tracks pulled up in order to cause a derailment.

The gang members had brought with them armour that they had made themselves from the stolen iron mould boards of ploughs, earlier that year in a hideout in the Greta Swamps. Each man's armour weighed about 80 pounds (36 kg); all four had helmets, and Joe Byrne was said to be the most well done, with the brow reaching down to the nose piece, forming two eye slits.

While holed up in the Glenrowan Inn, their attempt to derail the police train failed when a released hostage, schoolmaster Thomas Curnow, gave the alert, at great risk to his own life, by standing on the railway line near sunrise, waving a red scarf illuminated by a candle. The police then laid siege to the inn.

At about dawn on Monday 28 June Ned Kelly emerged from the inn in his suit of armour. He marched on to the police firing his gun at them, while their bullets bounced off his armour. His lower limbs however were unprotected and he was shot up to twenty-eight times in the legs (sources vary, some saying six times). The other Kelly Gang members died in the hotel, Joe Byrne allegedly by loss of blood due to a gunshot wound that severed his femoral artery, and Dan Kelly and Steve Hart by self-ingestion of poison (autopsies were not performed).

Ned Kelly survived to stand trial, and was sentenced to death by Judge Redmond Barry, who had tried him on previous occasions for lesser crimes. When the judge uttered the customary words "may God have mercy on your soul", Ned is reported to have replied "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go". He was hanged on 11 November at the Melbourne Jail, his last words being "Ah well I suppose it has come to this... Such is life". Although two newspapers (The Age and Herald Sun) reported Kelly's last words as "Such is life" and two other newspapers as "Ah well I suppose it has come to this... Such is life", another source - Ned Kelly's gaol warden, writes in his diary that when Kelly was prompted to say his last words that he (Ned Kelly) opened his mouth and mumbled something that he couldn't hear - and seeing that the warden's office is closer to the scene of the hanging than the witnesses' alotted space, it is curious as to what Ned Kelly's last words actually were. Sir Redmond Barry died of the effects of a carbuncle on his neck on 23 November, 1880, twelve days after Kelly.

Stories abounded of Ned's altruistic and gentlemanly behaviour, casting him as a modern-day Robin Hood. More than 30,000 Victorians signed a petition against Kelly's sentencing, and an inquiry was held in which all the police officers involved in Ned's exploits were either fired or demoted.

Cultural effect

One of the gaols in which he was incarcerated has become the Ned Kelly Museum in Glenrowan, Australia, and many weapons and artifacts used by him and his gang are in exhibit there. Since his death Kelly has become part of Australian folklore, and the subject of a large number of books and several films, including one with Mick Jagger in the title role. To some, he is a folk hero, to others a common thug whose crimes were brutal and entirely for personal gain. Ned Kelly is particularly a hero for the Australian Celtic community who view him as an anti-racist legend.

Ned Kelly as political icon

In the time since his execution, Ned Kelly has been mythologised among some into a Robin Hood figure of sorts, a political revolutionary and a figure of Irish Catholic and working-class resistance to the establishment and British colonial ties. It is claimed that Kelly's bank robberies were to fund the push for a "Republic of the North-East of Victoria", and that the police found a declaration of the republic in his pocket when he was captured, which has led to him being seen as an icon by some in the Australian Republican cause (itself including a lot of Australians of Irish descent, most notably former Prime Minister Paul Keating and author Thomas Kenneally). However, concrete evidence of the planning of such a republic or Kelly's involvement in such has not yet appeared.

Australian far-right organisations such as National Action have also adopted Ned Kelly (as well as other Australian rebel imagery such as the Eureka Flag).

Ned Kelly in iconography

The distinctive homemade armour he wore for his final unsuccessful stand against the police was the subject of a famous series of paintings by Sidney Nolan.

Ironically Jerilderie, one of the towns Ned Kelly robbed, has built its Police Station featuring no less than 19 stuctural components mimicking his distinctive face plate. Some examples include walls made of differently toned bricks making up his image to storm drains with holes cut in them to form it.

Ned Kelly, based on Sidney Nolan's imagery, appeared in the "Tin Symphony" segment of the opening ceremony for the year 2000 Olympic GamesSydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, The who's who and what's what of the Opening Ceremnony, GamesInfo.com.auDavid Fickling, Ned Kelly, the legend that still torments Australia, The Observer, November 30, 2003.

Books

The Last of the Bushrangers, by F. A. Hare was published in London in 1892. A. Bertram Chandler's novel Kelly Country (1983) is an alternate history in which Kelly leads a successful revolution; the result is that Australia becomes a world power. Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang was published in 2000, and was awarded the 2001 Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Ian Jones has produced several books concerning the Kelly Gang, including The Fatal Friendship and Ned Kelly; A short life. Keith Dunstan's Saint Ned (1980) chronicles lesser known aspects of Ned Kelly's life, whilst discussing the rise of the 'Kellyana' industry.

Films and television

The Story of the Kelly Gang is considered the world's first feature length film, it was released in 1906, with a then-unprecedented running time of 70 minutes. Ned Kelly's actual suit of armour was borrowed from the Victorian Museum and worn in the film.

Harry Southwell wrote, directed and produced three films, The Kelly Gang (1920), When the Kellys Were Out (1923) and When the Kellys Rode (1934), and began work on a fourth, A Message to Kelly (1947).

The Glenrowan Affair was produced by Rupert Kathner in 1951, featuring the exploits of Ned Kelly and his "wild colonial boys" on their journey of treachery, violence, murder and terror, told from the perspective of an ageing Dan Kelly. It starred the famous, tough Carlton footballer Bob Chitty as Ned Kelly.

In 1967, independent filmmaker Garry Shead directed and produced Stringybark Massacre, an avant garde re-creation of the murder of the three police officers at Stringybark.

The next major film version of the Kelly story was Ned Kelly, starring Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, directed by Tony Richardson, running 1 hour, 43 minutes. It was poorly received and during its making it led to a protest by Australian Actors Equity over the importation of Jagger, and there were complaints from Kelly family descendants and others over the film being shot in New South Wales, rather than in the Victoria locations where the events actually took place.

Kelly expert and author Ian Jones worked with Tony Richardson on the script for Ned Kelly, and went on to present his own take on Ned Kelly in his 1980 television mini-series The Last Outlaw, which he co-wrote and produced with Bronwyn Binns. The series premiered on the centenary of the day that Kelly was hanged and its detailed historical accuracy distinguished it from many other films.

Yahoo Serious wrote, directed and starred in the 1993 satire film Reckless Kelly as a descendant of Ned Kelly. It was considered a disappointment when compared to his first film, Young Einstein.

In 2003, Ned Kelly, a $30 million budget movie about Kelly's life was released. Directed by Gregor Jordan, and written by John M. McDonagh, it starred Heath Ledger (as Kelly), Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, and Naomi Watts. Based on Robert Drewe's book Our Sunshine, the film covers the period from Kelly's arrest for horse theft as a teenager, to the Kelly gang's armour-clad battle at Glenrowan, and attempts to portray the events from the perspectives of Kelly, and also of the authorities responsible for his capture and prosecution. That same year a low budget satire movie called Ned was released. Written, directed and starring Abe Forsythe, it depicted the Kelly gang wearing fake beards and tin buckets on their heads.

Songs

In 1971 US country singer Johnny Cash wrote and recorded the song "Ned Kelly" for his album The Man In Black. Other songs about Ned Kelly include those by Slim Dusty ("Game As Ned Kelly"), Ashley Davies ("Ned Kelly" (2001)), Waylon Jennings ("Ned Kelly" (1970)), Redgum ("Poor Ned" (1978)), Midnight Oil ("If Ned Kelly Was King" (1983)), The Whitlams ("Kate Kelly", from the album "Torch the Moon"), and Trevor Lucas ("Ballad of Ned Kelly", performed by Fotheringay on their eponymous album). He was also referred to in the Midnight Oil song "Mountains Of Burma" (1990) ("The heart of Kelly's country cleared"). The Australian band The Kelly Gang consists of Jack Nolan, Rick Grossman and Rob Hirst."Shelter for my Soul" was written and recorded by Powderfinger's Bernard Fanning for the 2003 film "Ned Kelly".It was written from Kelly's perspective,on death row and played over the movie's closing credits.

References

External links

Images and transcript of the Jerilderie Letter at the State Library of Victoria.
Images, transcript and audio of John Hanlon's transcript of the Jerilderie Letter at the National Museum of Australia
Iron Outlaw
Convict Creations page on Ned Kelly
IMDb: Ned Kelly (2003)
A collection of traditional ballads about Ned Kelly
Crime Library's account of Kelly's life and death

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