February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
They hanged Ned Kelly 125 years ago this week in Melbourne jail.
That might have been the end of it but the death of the man gave birth to a legend.
In another 125 years Kelly might be the recipient of a catch-up Nobel Prize.
In the meantime, he continues to prompt furious debate over the true nature of his life and legacy.
Was Ned Kelly just a bandit?
Or was he a founding father of modern Australia.
Kelly’s bearded face looked like millions of others of his day but it’s his improvised iron mask and breastplate that have become iconic symbols of an Australia that was just beginning to throw off the shackles of colonialism.
Ned Kelly’s life and story, regardless of how they are judged, have evolved into a mini-industry.
There are books and websites galore, documentaries and two big screen movies.
The opening ceremony at the 2000 Sydney Olympics was choreographed around a Ned Kelly theme.
Kelly, the ironclad bushranger, has been elevated to a high art form by the renowned Australian painter Sidney Nolan.
Shoppers in U.S. liquor stores can even purchase an Australian wine, the label of which is made to look like the man in iron.
“Kelly’s Revenge” is a more palatable potion than the appellation suggests.
So who was Edward “Ned” Kelly?
He was, first and foremost, the third child of John “Red” Kelly and Ellen Quinn, born in the town of Beveridge, Victoria either in Dec., 1854 or June, 1855.
Red Kelly had been born in County Tipperary in 1820. He was sentenced to seven years and transported to Tasmania in 1841 for stealing two pigs.
The Kellys would ultimately have eight children, five daughters and three sons.
Ned was the eldest of the boys, but he was destined not to grow into old age.
The reason was to be found all around, in the land and the politics that decided its ownership and exploitation.
The Australia of the mid-nineteenth century was no paradise.
Indeed, for the poorer farming families the vista looked depressingly Irish. Less than sympathetic landlords and corrupt civil authorities frequently combined to make life a lot harder than even fickle nature had intended.
Turning for help to the police, or “traps,” was always dicey, not least when your family carried an Irish name just a few years removed from a penal colony.
Ned Kelly grew into a strong and spirited young man who wasn’t lacking in physical courage. He was given an award for saving another boy from drowning.
But by the age of 15 the traps were beginning to take notice of Kelly. He was hauled up for assault and for allegedly aiding a notorious bushranger named Harry Power.
Kelly was found not guilty but was soon in trouble again due to a prank carried out by a friend.
His first jail term was six months for assault. Then it was three years hard labor for receiving a stolen horse. Ned denied knowing the nag was nicked. Before his teens were out, Kelly was a worldly-wise ex-con, his boyhood innocence just a distant memory.
In April 1878, the advances of a Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick were rebuffed by Kelly’s sister Kate. Fitzpatrick allegedly assaulted the young woman, an act that spurred Ned into action. Fitzpatrick brought an attempted murder charge.
A bid to arrest Ned and his brother Dan ended up with three policemen getting killed. Thus the Kelly gang was born. For almost two years Ned, Dan, and their friends Steve Hart and Joe Byrne, took to the outlaw life in Victoria and New South Wales.
Along the way, however, Ned Kelly did something rather different than the usual bushranger. He started to think and write about justice, politics and even independence for Australia. The most significant result was the 8000 word “Jerilderie Letter.”
This tract was the inspiration for New York-based Australian author Peter Carey’s 2001 Booker Prize winning novel, “True History of the Kelly Gang.”
The novel ends with the events of Nov. 11, 1880.
On June 27 of that year the Kelly gang took hostages and holed up in a hotel in the town of Glenrowan. The police laid siege in what would become known as Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.
The hotel was set ablaze and three members of the gang were killed.
Kelly, in his suit of armor, took on the police in a blazing gunfight but the constables were able to shoot him in his unprotected lower legs.
When he had recovered sufficiently, Kelly was tried, convicted and sentenced.
At 10 a.m. on November 11th 1880, he spoke his last words on the scaffold: “Such is life.”
But they were far from being the last words about Ned Kelly, the Wild Colonial Boy.
As Carey’s book was tearing up the bestseller lists, the commissioner of police in New South Wales sparked uproar when he said “adoration of Kelly reflects the black heart of nothingness that lies at the center of the Australian character.”
An opinion poll revealed a starkly different view. More than nine out of ten thought Kelly a national hero.
“I do believe Ned Kelly was really decent,” Peter Carey told the Echo after the publication of his novel.
“But he was incredibly naive. He kept on trusting people he shouldn’t have trusted. When you talk about him being a violent criminal, there isn’t a lot of violence at all. When you look at any of the robberies, did anyone get pistol whipped or beat up? No.
“And he had such fantastic character witnesses from bank managers and policemen’s wives who called him Mr. Kelly. So here is a person with considerable dignity and force of character. He does not seem to me to have been a violent man.
“There is a sense of shame over the convict seed, the convict stain. But it’s not a question of whether Ned Kelly is worthy of being a national hero. We are who we are. He is our national hero.”
“And I haven’t changed my views since,” Carey said this week.