Begorrah, Ned, or G'Day?
Philip Derriman
Sydney Morning Herald
22 March 2003
source: smh.com.au

While the actor Heath Ledger has made it clear he has no regrets about giving Ned Kelly an Irish accent in the movie which has its world premiere in Melbourne tonight, the matter may yet prove to be the film's most serious historical issue. Did Kelly really speak that way? It's a touchy question. By making Australia's No.1 folk hero sound like an Irishman, has the movie stripped him of much of his Australian identity?

Expert opinion is divided. The theory that Kelly spoke with an Irish accent is supported by two Kelly biographers, but opposing them are leading linguists who argue it is inconceivable that someone who was born and raised in Australia in the mid-19th century, and mixed as widely as Kelly did, would have spoken with anything but an Australian accent.

So what is the historical truth? Contrary to the movie's production notes which suggest that Kelly lived in a time "too early for an [Australian] accent to have settled", linguists say an Australian accent was long established by the time Kelly was born in 1854.

David Blair, a Macquarie University linguist who has made a special study of the Australian accent's development, found that native-born Australians were speaking with their own accent by 1830. "We have a lot of printed evidence around the 1830s and earlier which says quite categorically that children born here didn't speak with any trace of dialects from Britain and Ireland," he says.

Blair believes that Kelly's speech may, at most, have included a few Irishisms picked up from his Irish parents, but basically he would have spoken with the Australian accent common to all Australians of his generation. "It's conceivable but would be highly unusual that he had odd remnants of an Irish accent," Blair says. "It's not conceivable that he spoke with a brogue."

The opposing view is that Kelly grew up within an enclosed, mainly Irish community in north-eastern Victoria and he spoke the way people around him spoke. This view is advanced by Ian Jones, author of Ned Kelly: A Short Life and a recognised authority on the Kelly gang, who has evidence to support it.

One is the testimony of a local man, Tom Lloyd, whose father knew Kelly well. Lloyd told Jones that, according to his father, Kelly spoke with a "clear, ringing brogue". He remembered his father also saying that Kelly spoke "like a priest", again implying he had an Irish accent.

Jones also cites an English travel writer who visited north-eastern Victoria around 1870 and reported that local boys and girls had "voices singularly low and soft - their speech is characterised by a brogue decidedly Irish in its tone but softer and smoother than any brogue found in Ireland."

There are other clues, Jones says. Kelly is reported on at least one occasion to have said "ye" instead of "you", and certain phrases and spellings in a letter he composed with a fellow gang member suggest an Irish accent.

Another Kelly biographer, John Molony, leans to the view that kelly spoke with an Irish-influenced accent although not a full-on brogue. While admitting there is no clear documentary evidence on the subject, he believes Kelly's heavy exposure to Irish speech in his formative years must have shaped his own speech thereafter.

The linguists disagree. Bruce Moore, of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the ANU, whose own research points to an Australian accent as far back as the 1820s, says there have been only rare cases of dialects being preserved within enclosed immigrant communities - such as in the South Island of New Zealand, where recordings made in the early 1900s show older, locally born people speaking with a Scottish accent.

But Moore does not believe that Kelly grew up in a community anything like that. On the contrary: from his early boyhood (he spent most of his brief schooling at an Anglican school) he would have mixed with children of various British backgrounds. "When you look at all the reliable 19th-century evidence, it all says that the distinctive feature of the children of migrants is that they speak with an accent which is unmarked by dialects. I would have expected Ned Kelly to speak with an Australian accent, which we know was well established by then."

In 1978, after Mick Jagger had given Kelly an Irish accent in an earlier movie, a great-niece of the Kellys, who still lived near Glenrowan, was asked about Ned's brother Jim, who lived there until 1946. She said that "Uncle Jim", just five years younger than Ned, had spoken with a broad Australian accent: "It beats me why that Mick Jagger gave Ned an Irish brogue."