95

Ned Kelly

1854–1880

 

To his contemporaries, the bushranger Edward Kelly was a criminal.  To modern Australians Ned Kelly is a national hero.  Such are the strange contrasts in the evolution of Irish feelings about Australia, and Australian feelings about the Irish.

      Ned Kelly was born in the state of Victoria at Wallan Wallan.  His father had been transported from Tipperary in Ireland as a convict.  His mother, also from Tipperary, was a Cody, a remote cousin of America's own Buffalo Bill.  As boys, Ned and his brothers were themselves always in trouble with the police because of charges of horse stealing.  Ned served three years in jail for this.

      In April 1878 the police attempted to arrest his brother Daniel on a horse-stealing charge.  The whole Kelly clan resisted, and Ned wounded one of the policemen.  Mrs Kelly and some of the family were detained, but Ned and Daniel escaped into the bush.  There they were joined by two other Irish bandits, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart.

      For the next two years, the 'Kelly Gang' haunted the states of Victoria and New South Wales.  Rewards were offered for their capture, but to no avail.  They held up towns, robbed two banks, and murdered three policemen and a civilian between October 1878 and June 1880.  But the police eventually caught up with them.

      On 29th June 1880, they were tracked to a wooden shanty at Glenrowan, near the town of Benalla.  They were surrounded by the police, and the little house was riddled with bullets and then set on fire.  Out of the flames and smoke emerged the almost phantom figure of Ned Kelly, clad in a suit of armour made from sheet iron.  But this did not protect his lower limbs.  He was shot and wounded in the leg, and was then captured when he fell over and could not rise.  He was taken to Beechworth, where he was tried and convicted of murdering a policeman.  The last of the bushrangers, he was hanged at Melbourne Old Gaol on 11th November 1880.  And very properly too, said respectable Australia.

      But Ned Kelly, his family, and the members of the Kelly Gang were Irish; they did not belong among respectable Australia.  When he was hanged, Ned's last words were, 'Such is life', but life for the poor Irish in Australia was cruel and hard.  The key feature of his life was not his bank robbing or horse stealing.  It was a semi-articulate message to the world, which has come to be called the Jerilderie Letter, his testament in which he attempted to explain what he was about, but it was basically an incoherent plea for social justice.  At the time (and later) there were rumours that he sought to create an outback republic, or a 'United States of Australia', but what Ned Kelly's political ideas really were is still much discussed.  Certainly an Irish hatred of all things English, imbibed from his parents, played a large part in them.

      The life he spoke of was an almost aboriginal one, nasty, brutish, and short.  Though he was branded a criminal, and still is by some who have adopted the police's view of his activities, to others he is something else: a bandit, or primitive rebel.  He is part of the remembered history of the people rather than the official history of the state, the history of ballads rather than the history of police reports.

      As concerns Ned Kelly, the Australians have 'printed the legend'.  He has become a part of the mythology of a young nation, their counterpart to Robin Hood, William Tell, or Davy Crockett.  This is due in part to the folklore of the early days, and in part to the extraordinary use to which Kelly's legend has been put by Australia's most important modern painter, Sir Sidney Nolan, himself of Irish extraction.  In a series of pictures, done at different times of the painter's career, the image of Ned Kelly in a black suit of armour is posed against the searing browns, reds, and yellows of the Outback.  This is an Australia of the imagination, the artist's Australia, where Ned Kelly has joined the immortals.  He has become an essential part of the Australian identity, the part belonging to the independent man, his own boss, the free man.

      As the historian Eric Hobsbawn explained: 'The bandit myth is also comprehensible in highly urbanized countries which still possess a few empty spaces of "outback" or "west" to remind them of a sometimes imaginary heroic past, and to provide concrete locus for nostalgia, a symbol of ancient and lost virtue, a spiritual Indian territory for which, like Huckleberry Finn, man can imagine himself "lighting out" when the constraints of civilization become too much for him.'

      He suggests that there is perhaps more than social documentation, or a longing for adventure to the literary or popular images of the bandit, to which Ned Kelly belongs: 'There is what remains when we strip away the local and social framework of brigandage: a permanent emotion and a permanent role.  There is freedom, heroism, and the dream of justice.'