Ned Kelly

This paper challenges the traditional ideas of villainy through its exploration of Ned Kelly. In 1878, Ned Kelly led an ambush that saw the killing of three police officers. Two years - and several crimes - later he was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol. There is, however, an historical amnesia concerning Kelly that
has allowed him to be rewritten, in popular history at least, as a noble villain. Cinematic interpretations of Kelly’s life have contributed to this amnesia. This paper also presents Ned Kelly’s own voice, as heard in the Jerilderie Letter, which
was once suppressed and censored by the printed press.

A core component of the popular Ned Kelly myth is that he had never taken innocent life. Against this, there is a documented case in which he directly caused a quarryman's death. George Metcalf was one of the persons made prisoner by Ned Kelly in Ann Jones' Glenrowan Inn during the siege of 27-28 June 1880, and it has been widely held that he was injured, and later died, in consequence of a police bullet fired during the siege. Metcalf, who could not afford medical treatment, stated that his injury occurred while he was sheltering in a fireplace during the shooting, and his surgical and related costs were paid by the police. However, subsequent enquiries by a detective found that the injury was caused by Ned Kelly on the afternoon before the siege, when he accidentally shot Metcalf in the face while fiddling with a revolver he had taken from a gravel contractor that morning. The Metcalf story was effectively forgotten for a hundred years after Ned Kelly's death. When it was rediscovered, following a series of Kelly histories critical of the police, evidence concerning Kelly's responsibility for Metcalf's injury was typically overlooked or disregarded by those who clung to a belief in Kelly as a heroic figure who was more victim than criminal. The case of Metcalf illustrates how ready pro-Kelly historians have been to blame the police for every misadventure in the Kelly saga. In fact, however, Metcalf's death must be laid squarely on Ned Kelly's hands. In a recent work, historian Doug Morrissey wrote of "a new generation of Kelly-philes, who unabashedly glorify Ned's memory and give a false legitimacy to the Kelly myth". 1 A core component of that myth-maintained to the end by Ned Kelly himself, in a letter written in his condemned cell-is that he had never taken innocent life. In this context, this was the life of anyone other than the police who  I wish to thank Sharon Hollingsworth, my two anonymous referees, and the editors for their valuable comments. Please forward any comments or queries to stuart.

One of the most perplexing claims of the modern Ned Kelly legend is that Kelly and his gang aspired to establish a Republic of North-Eastern Victoria, to be triggered by the destruction of a police train at Glenrowan in 1880. Yet there is no mention of republican aims in any record of Kelly’s day, nor in the numerous comments of those connected with or held prisoner by the gang, nor in the work of early historians of the outbreak who knew the Kellys, their gang, their sympathisers, or the pursuing police. This investigation provides a close historical analysis of the construction of a romantic myth of a Kelly-led republic in much popular Australian history. It systematically reviews the arguments advanced to support the narrative, and demonstrates that they are contradicted at every point by documented historical evidence. Kelly sympathisers were concerned with allegedly wronged relatives demanding justice from the system, together with land security, but never with the system’s overthrow. At no point in the entire Kelly outbreak down to his execution did Kelly concern himself with a republic or political change. It concludes that the “Kelly republic” has become Australia’s most extraordinary - if accidental - history hoax.
This free A4 PDF book is also available from http://www.ironicon.com.au/ned-kelly-republic-myth.htm

Peter Carey’s archives are a missing element, albeit a remarkably important one, in the critical literature about the productive mechanisms of his celebrity. This paper explores the archiving of Carey’s materials in the State Library of Victoria, a process commenced by the Library’s purchase of the documents relating to Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). This collection, catalogued as ‘The Papers and Drafts of Peter Carey’ marks the convergence of canonicity, the literary market, and the materiality of the cultural artefact. This archive adds a new facet to Carey’s image as an Australian author in the public domain, creating a sense of continuity of his relevance to the canon of Australian literature. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological paradigm, I demonstrate how the constitution of the archive is the result of the collective recognition of the economic and cultural capital of Carey’s manuscripts and paraphernalia. Through a case study of an agent in constructing the archive, I investigate the stakes invested in the ongoing dominant position of Carey in the Australian literary field into the twenty-first century. This section also examines the ways that agents augment their volume of literary and economic capital through engaging with, what I call, Carey’s archival capital.

It has long been widely, even admiringly, held that Ned Kelly's last words before execution were "Such is life". This is a key part of a prevalent Kelly mythology that has been subject to little serious critique. Yet the attribution of the phrase 'Such is life' to Kelly is pure fiction. Analysis of the reportage of the day reveals Kelly's actual last words, and explains how they were transmuted by one journalist into the catchy expression quoted as fact by many historians. It shows that the image of Kelly standing tall and defiant, saying 'Such is life' as the rope was placed around his neck, is nothing but a highly romanticised myth. In fact, Kelly came to an ignominious, mumbling end on the scaffold, a far cry from popular legend.

Since his execution in 1880 there have been 12 stage plays, 30 books and 10 films, including what is thought to be the first feature film ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). Peter Carey's best-selling, prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is the most recent memorial to Kelly and has certainly solidified and revitalized Kelly's status as national icon. Clearly there is no doubt that Kelly is mythologized. What interests me specifically and will be the subject of this paper is the body of Ned Kelly. We are, it seems, not simply fascinated with the story of Ned, but I would argue with the body of Ned. Indeed all of the elements that contribute to a lasting interest in his legend--convict background, English/Irish relations, republican sentiment--get expressed through his embodiment.

Is it possible to fit the (secular) veneration of a local popular hero into the tradition of Christian iconography and its visual explorations of the nature of Jesus? What happens if when bringing the secular and the Christian tradition together, we also consider the various material elements associated with this figure as being deeply and actively interrelated to his ongoing significance and meaning? In the longstanding artistic and devotional tradition of the face and head of Christ, it is understood that to explore visually the incarnation is to open up a point of encounter between the human and the divine (the chief exemplar of this being the Orthodox icon). And so, in John 14:9 we read a critical passage that speaks to this theology of incarnation and the ability to represent the Father via the Son: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." But what does it mean to see Jesus, or to see God, particularly when we move beyond the traditional boundaries of the Christian tradition? And, with New Materialism in mind, what does it mean to consider a more dynamic relation between traditional divisions like matter and mind? This paper looks to the contribution New Materialism makes to a reading of John 14:9 and how it might demonstrate the capacity of John's text both to support and subvert traditional theological and cultural narratives around incarnation. Along the way, it considers traditions of Orthodox iconography, the art of Sydney Nolan, Julia Kristeva's interpretation of portraiture in terms of severed heads and the iconic iron helmet of Australian folk-hero and all-round larrikin Ned Kelly,

In a line-up of all the Australian criminals, who sparked fear in the community and generated business for the law and justice systems in the colonial era, no individual stands taller than Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly of Victoria. Of all the bushrangers, it is Kelly who maintains a prominent place within Australian history as a cultural and popular icon. This situates Kelly, and his Gang, alongside many other bushrangers – men who robbed, raped and murdered their way across the Australian outback in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – men who are now often seen as heroes of folklore. Men who have been celebrated in a wide variety of histories: in illustrations and paintings, in articles and books, in newspaper reportage as well as in traditional songs. The practice of celebrating Kelly across a range of creative outputs including art, crime fiction, true crime, film and song is not, however, undertaken without some criticism. There are certainly some who consider Kelly to be a hero, a young man rebelling against unwarranted police persecution and profiling. Yet many others, position Kelly as a villain, one who did not hesitate to engage in, and to lead others in, a diverse range of criminal activities from the stealing of livestock to the murdering of policemen. This research looks briefly at Edward Kelly’s story, not as a neat narrative but as a colloquium of voices, a suite of multiple truths that now surround Australia’s most famous bushranger.

In 1880, in Melbourne, Victoria, the judge Sir Redmond Barry sentenced the outlaw Ned Kelly to death. Kelly would become an Australian icon. Drawing on research on the treatment of the Kelly trial in law, folklore, works of dramatic fiction and cinema, this chapter considers the textual and visual representations of the judge and his judgment – the changing characterization – in the decades following Kelly’s execution in 1880. It seeks to explain how and why Barry has become the villain of the modern Kelly myth and to show that Barry’s early representations were more favourable.

Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and Peter Corris's The Journal of Fletcher Christian are historical novels, which emerge from quite different Australian cultural fields (Literature and popular fiction), but reading them alongside each other reveals fundamental similarities in their politics of race, gender and sexuality. We argue that both novels use the symbolism of the male, colonizing body to grant legitimacy to their postcolonial settler audience. In both cases, this legitimacy takes the form of a fragment of "true and secret" history which opposes authorized accounts of famous historical lives and events (Australia's most famous bushranger, the British Empire's most famous mutineer). We focus, in particular, on the extent to which both novels imagine the voices of Kelly and Christian by exploiting the richly metaphorical relationship between the body as flesh and the body as text.

At the start of June 1880, Ann Jones was running a successful Inn at Glenrowan, but by the end of the month her home and business lay in ruins. The Kelly Gang had holed up in her bar in their attempt to fend off the Victoria Police, and ultimately Ann’s property was burnt to the ground. While Ann is in many ways a footnote to the Kelly story, the siege has left an interesting record of the ordinary life of an uneducated, Irish woman in 19th-century regional Victoria. She has received much more attention than others like her; both in the historical records and in having her home excavated by archaeologists. As such, the artefacts recovered from the site along with the historical record provide a rare opportunity to examine how material culture was used to establish a respectable business and personal position in society.

One of Australia's most notorious outlaws, bushranger Ned Kelly was captured in a spectacular gun-battle at Glenrowan in 1880. Immortalized in a series of onscreen productions, he has since become a resilient screen presence in the history of Australian cinema. Covering the nine feature films, three miniseries, and two TV movies that have been made about this controversial character, Stephen Gaunson illuminates a central irony: from novels to comics to the branding of the site where he was captured, most cultural representations of Kelly are decidedly lowbrow. But only the films have been condemned for not offering a more serious interpretation of this figure and his historical context. Asking what value we can place on such ‘bad’ historical cinema, Gaunson offers new insights about the textual characteristics of cinematic material and the conditions of film distribution, circulation, and reception.

Table of Contents
List of Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgements
The Kelly Films
Backstory
Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘Bandits on the margin of the margin’: 1906–1951
Chapter 2: The Hagiographic Bandit: 1960–2003
Chapter 3: New Age Ned: Social Banditry and Romance
Chapter 4: Outlawed: Stringybark and the Jerilderie Letter
Chapter 5: The Noble Bandit: Irish Sympathy and Other Sympathy
Chapter 6: ‘Die Like a Kelly, Son’: Glenrowan and Trial
Conclusion
Appendix: Cast and Crew
Works Cited
Index""

Edition 18 of the Monash postgraduate journal, ERAS, is now online . ERAS was founded in 2001 to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue amongst postgraduate and early career researchers working across all areas of history, archaeology, religious studies, international studies and philosophy. This eighteenth edition of ERAS fully reflects this vision for the journal, with articles relating to Danish rule in England, a marxist critique of Classical Athens, Ned Kelly, and ideological cynicism.

We hope you enjoy this edition of ERAS.

Caleb Hamilton

Managing Editor

ERAS was founded in 2001 to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue amongst postgraduate and early career researchers working across all areas of history, archaeology, religious studies, international studies and philosophy. The seventeenth edition of ERAS fully reflects this vision for the journal, with articles relating to heresy, art connoisseurship, Mormonism, Ned Kelly, and music in the military. Appended to this edition is a special themed issue of ERAS dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War.

We hope you enjoy this edition of ERAS.

Stephen Joyce
Managing Editor