The myth in the iron mask
Ned Kelly died on the gallows 125 years ago but remains on first-name terms with today's Australians. We may, however, know rather less about our Ned than we might think, writes Simon Caterson
July 30, 2005
source: theage.com.au

American Novelist E. L. Doctorow writes that "history is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth." In the case of Ned Kelly, the historical facts are exceptionally difficult to disentangle from the folklore.

I can't deny taking Ned personally. For as long as I can remember, I have felt the force of tragedy in his story, and there is always a feeling of sadness in contemplating the end of his short, turbulent, colonial life.

Others too have claimed to see in Ned's armour an image of their own ideas and prejudices. Admirers and detractors alike continue to project themselves onto his existence, as they did while he was alive.

When he was alive, Kelly was condemned by the mainstream media, clergy and politicians, yet thousands of supporters gathered outside the Old Melbourne Gaol on the day of his execution, and 30,000 signatures were gathered for a petition that he be spared the death penalty. Since then, the debate over whether he was a hero or a villain has been intense.

Some of Ned's attackers share with his idolaters an extraordinary capacity for hyperbole. In the bestselling Down Under, visiting American travel writer Bill Bryson dismisses him out of hand: "The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was." Bryson is unsparing in his attack on Kelly's character: "Like most bushrangers he was at pains to present himself as a champion of the oppressed, though in fact there wasn't a shred of nobility in his character or his deeds."

Yet those aware that in 1866 Ned saved a young boy from drowning at Avenel, a deed for which he received his famous sash, could hardly accept such an assessment, no matter what else is alleged against him.

Columnist Frank Devine is even more condemnatory. In 2000, he said Kelly was "the Pol Pot of north-eastern Victoria", a bizarre analogy given that the Khmer Rouge leader was responsible for the deaths of about 1.7 million people.

Also fanciful are the attempts to mythologise Ned as a latter-day Robin Hood. Artefacts associated with the Kelly outbreak, whether genuine or not, have been treated as if they were splinters of the true cross. What passes for Kellyana is often no more than what could be termed Nedolatry.

Novelist Peter Carey said to a British journalist that Kelly was a "symbol of national pride and freedom. He's our Thomas Jefferson." With such a comparison, Carey is as outlandish as Devine.

Ned's memory is widely appropriated for commercial as well as cultural purposes. The scene of the Kelly gang's last stand, Glenrowan, has become a tourist trap boasting an eight-metre-tall fibreglass "Big Ned" and an animatronics show that historian Graeme Davison has described as "as far away, as inconsequential and yet as seductive as the world of Nintendo and Star Wars".

Even the most knowledgeable and experienced Kelly historians have been known to see things that simply aren't there. The problem was demonstrated in March 2002 when a photograph purporting to be of Ned was sold at auction by Christie's for almost $20,000.

The undated portrait had been authenticated by two of the best-known Kelly historians, Ian Jones and Keith McMenomy. The previous year the picture had been reproduced in McMenomy's illustrated history of Ned Kelly with a caption assigning it a significant role in the biographical narrative.

A subsequent investigation by Age journalist Andrew Rule revealed that the photograph, though a relic of the relevant time and place, could not be of Ned Kelly. The buyer was reimbursed and the identity of the man in the picture left unresolved. If acknowledged experts can be fooled so easily, what hope is there for the rest of us?

The factual record of Ned's life is incomplete. To begin with, it is not known exactly when or where he was born. His last words on the scaffold - widely assumed to be "such is life" - are a matter of attribution, since it is not clear whether he uttered these or any other coherent last words.

The journalists sent to cover the execution produced three different versions - "Such is life", "Ah, well, I suppose it has come to this", or simply an audible sigh - but none was corroborated. They may have been standing too far away to hear anything.

In the narrative between Ned's birth and death, much takes place that is a matter of rumour, hearsay, conjecture and informed speculation.
Though compelling, the theory that the siege at Glenrowan was the start of a campaign to create a republic of North-Eastern Victoria tantalisingly remains just that, a theory. Attempts over many decades to track down documentary evidence in support of the republican struggle idea so far have proved unsuccessful.

Another source of vagueness is Ned's status as a stereotypical Irish rebel. He wasn't born in Ireland and never went there, though a disproportionate number of people with a key role in the story, whether friend or foe, were of Irish birth or descent.

It could be that Ned is both more and less Irish than is generally thought. Ned's circumstances and his responses were conditioned by Irish cultural and historical factors. The Irish historian Conor Cruise O'Brien has defined this state of affairs: "Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it is a condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it."

It is a mental condition recognised in the Irish constitution, which acknowledges the nation's "special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage".

Being Irish is a matter of conscious choice as well as a question of genes. In one Irish historian's recent ranking of the 100 most important Irish lives, Ned was number 95, well below former US president John Kennedy (4), who was not born in Ireland, but above Oscar Wilde (97), who was.

He carried with him an Ireland of the mind, but Ned's life and deeds are also inseparable from the physical and social reality of the remote region of Victoria in which he lived. As Sidney Nolan (who, incidentally, was of Irish descent) put it, Ned was part of "the great purity and implacability of the Australian landscape".

The geographical dimension to the Kelly story has been explored in The Kelly Outbreak and Kelly Country by John McQuilton, a historian who grew up in the district where it took place. It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of the sheer physical distance between the Kelly country and Melbourne as well as that between colonial Australia and colonising Europe.

The Kelly outbreak originated at the limits of European settlement and the gang was safest when located beyond the range of modern technologies such as the telegraph and the railway.

As another Kelly historian, Alex McDermott, has commented in relation to Stringybark Creek: "Even visiting the place today, one is still struck by the solitude of the shallow gully, its remoteness from the world, and the eerie wildness that surrounds this bushland."

In an apparent effort to widen its popular appeal, writers have embellished the life story in personal ways. In his play Ned Kelly, Douglas Stewart drew upon known facts, as did Nolan in his paintings, but novelists Peter Carey and Robert Drewe have sought to fill in gaps by, for instance, giving Ned an imaginary sex life. In True History of the Kelly Gang (a copy of which I recently saw in a Melbourne bookstore filed under non-fiction) Carey invents a daughter to whom Ned addresses his testimony. In Our Sunshine, Drewe has Ned carrying on an affair with a local squatter's wife.

The recent film adaptation of Drewe's novel provided a star vehicle for erstwhile celebrity couple Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts, but the relationship between their characters is mere Hollywood-style romantic fantasy, a kind of outback Lady Chatterley's Lover.

We can't be certain where Ned's sexual orientation lay, and perhaps, in those reticent, pre-Freudian times, it was a mystery even to him. In any case, Watts' character has no basis in reality, though at least leading man Ledger bears a closer physical resemblance to Ned than Leo McKern, who played the title role in the 1956 Sydney production of Stewart's play.

Ned's best known piece of writing, the Jerilderie letter, was not written in his own hand but transcribed by someone else, probably Joe Byrne, who is said to have co-written the text.

The "original" letter, which describes the shoot-out at Stringybark Creek and is an electrifying plea for justice, remained in private hands until 2001, when it was donated to the State Library. Its authenticity is not in dispute, but neither, given the circumstances of its creation, is its authorship absolutely certain.

Many of the uncontested facts about Ned are themselves contradictory or inconclusive, which of course accounts in part for our enduring fascination with him. His personality enveloped contradictions that account for his success as a bushranger and also his downfall.

It is readily apparent that Ned committed serious crimes, but that he was also the victim of injustice. He took human life, but he also had the capacity to spare life and even save it.

He bore grudges, but also remembered kindnesses. He was tough and impulsive, but could also display sensitivity, even chivalry. He received little formal education or paternal guidance, but proved remarkably imaginative, intelligent and articulate.

Ned was at home in the landscape in which he lived, but also regretted its isolation. He had an enormous sense of grievance and dreamed of a better life for his people, who were disadvantaged by property laws that favoured rich squatters over poor selectors, but was also, it seems to me, fatalistic to the point of harbouring a death wish.

The last stand could be interpreted as the kind of siege that is these days referred as to suicide by police. Had he wanted to, Ned and his friends might conceivably have avoided capture indefinitely.

Tragically for Ned, and frustratingly for history, the best opportunity to set the record straight during his lifetime was missed. In The Trial of Ned Kelly, former Chief Justice of Victoria John H. Phillips concludes that by the standards of the time Ned Kelly did not receive a fair trial on the charge of murdering Constable Lonigan at Stringybark Creek: "the conclusion is inescapable that Edward Kelly was not afforded a trial according to law. Whether the result would have been any different had the jury been correctly directed is, of course, entirely another matter."

According to Phillips, a plea of self-defence was, in the circumstances and given the evidence presented in earlier proceedings, at least arguable and it might well have succeeded at trial if properly submitted.

Even if the trial judge had not been in error, and the defence counsel had not been less than competent, Ned may well have been found guilty by the jury, but at least his version of events would have been fully presented and tested for the benefit of the court of history.

The electrifying exchange between Ned and Justice Redmond Barry after the jury's guilty verdict hints at how effective it might have been. Best known for Ned's ominous parting words "I will meet you there where I go", that brief dialogue contains much that is illuminating and perplexing about Ned Kelly.

Did Ned really decline to cross-examine the witnesses himself simply because he thought "it would look like bravado and flashness" or had some part of him already accepted that he was doomed? In some ways Ned was his own worst enemy, but was also the best advocate he could possibly have had, as confirmed by the final letters he dictated while waiting in the condemned cell.

Ned's extraordinary courtroom speech came all too late to influence the course of events or assist us now in fully understanding his thoughts and emotions.

When I was studying Irish poetry at university in Dublin, a professor said that in Ireland, words kill.

Of course they can have that effect anywhere, and the words Ned casually uttered during the Kelly outbreak were later used in court by the prosecution to ensure he would hang.

In the posthumously published Ned Kelly's Last Days: Setting the Record Straight on the Death of an Outlaw Alex C. Castles argues that because he was declared an outlaw, Ned could conceivably have avoided legal proceedings altogether. By entering a plea, Castles points out, Ned's legal counsel tacitly accepted the jurisdiction of the court to judge their client's fate.

The Kelly gang were declared outlaws who could be shot on sight, and the police interned a large group of people on suspicion of being Kelly sympathisers. Upon his capture Ned's civil rights were reinstated, but this happened in order so that he might be put on trial and then swiftly executed. One way or another, according to Castles, the police and the government wanted him dead.

Castles' innovative approach to the question of Ned's actual legal status prompted a furious outburst from prominent Kelly historian Ian Jones, who says that Ned Kelly's Last Days is "marked by persistent vilification of Ned Kelly - unbalanced to the point of psychosis".

A dispassionate reader can conclude that Castles' book is carefully researched and rigorously argued, and manifests a strenuous effort to achieve balance. At the very least, it carries a timely warning to politicians and lawmakers today who might too readily sacrifice our civil liberties in the face of a perceived terrorist threat.

Referring to the book's subtitle, Jones asserted that "if that is setting the record straight, then I am the Ayatollah Khomeini". Such language is not only disrespectful to the recently deceased author, who was one of Australia's leading legal historians, but does nothing to promote the mature discussion of the Kelly outbreak.

Over a century later, the subject of Ned Kelly still generates intense heat as well as light. He was a polarising figure in his lifetime, and even now it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to view him with detachment.

I can't imagine that if given the opportunity to turn him in I would have done so.