Ned Kelly Australian Ironoutlaw

She peers out at us from the long past. Years of tragedy and privation have taken their toll but, even at 79, Ellen Kelly looks strong and resourceful as she always was. The story of Ned Kelly's mother was as dramatic and even more eventful than his and now, after 125 years, she is in the public eye again.

Ned Kelly's mother, Ellen, then 79, with two of her grandchildren.

A collection of early photographs she compiled of her wild brood, their relatives, friends and comrades-in-arms will go for auction at Christie's saleroom in South Yarra on Tuesday. Some of the photos date from the 1870s. They pull back time's curtain to provide a glimpse of legendary people who have become part of our history.

Christie's head of rare books and manuscripts, Michael Ludgrove, estimates the 100 or so photos could fetch up to $200,000. They contain previously unknown pictures of Ned, his mother and members of the Kelly gang likely to create new saleroom records. The highest auction price for a Ned Kelly photo was set in 1987 at Sotheby's in Melbourne when a tattered, full-length shot of Ned in fighting pose fetched $19,800.

Christie's catalogue cover, though, shows Ned "in his respectable years".

With a $20,000 estimated price, it is the most highly valued and is also the only known image from the "honest, hard-working period" of his life.

Yet it is the tiny, sepia-toned pictures of Ellen Kelly that capture the imagination. In one, taken to celebrate her release from prison in 1881, we see her with some of her children, the family dog and friends outside the slab and bark-roofed Kelly homestead, built by Ned four years earlier.

Another shows her at the age of 79 in 1911 with two grand-daughters, sitting outside the last house she occupied, while a third, a 1917 portrait, was taken at Benalla railway station as she waited for the Melbourne train.

Nell Kelly lived through the days of the Victorian goldrushes, the pioneering horse-and-buggy, candles and kerosene-lamp era. She was still alive when the first steam trains puffed their way north to the Murray River at Echuca, when the first motor cars coughed their way across the dirt roads, when the first planes spluttered across the sky, when electricity replaced gas lamps and ghostly voices could be heard coming from the wireless.

Nell, who was born in 1832 in County Antrim, Ireland, married twice in Australia, and in October, 1878, the widowed mother of 11 was sentenced to three years' hard labour for a crime she did not commit.

She lived to tell her great-grandchildren of her exploits right up to her death in 1923.

"People blame my boys for all that has happened," she recalled. "They should blame the police. They were at the bottom of it all ... We were not getting too rich but were doing all right. It was a lonely life but we were all together and we all loved each other so dearly.

"The trouble began over a young constable named Fitzpatrick ... He tried to kiss my daughter, Kate, and the boys tried to stop him. They were only trying to protect their sister but his story was believed ... After that, nothing but misery. And it has been nothing but misery ever since."

Fitzpatrick had gone to the house to arrest Ned's brother Dan. Photos of them will be sold on Tuesday. The policeman was a liar, perjurer and drunkard and soon after was sacked. But not before Justice Sir Redmond Barry the man who later sentenced Ned to hang sent Ellen away for three years, even though she had a baby at the breast.

In his Jerilderie letter, a copy of which sold at Christie's last August for $58,750, Ned wrote bitterly of Fitzpatrick and the other police who persecuted the family: "They kept them six months awaiting trial and then convicted them on the evidence of the meanest article that ever the sun shone on ... [Fitzpatrick] has the wrong appearance of a manly heart the deceit and cowardice is too plain to be seen in that puny cabbage hearted looking face ..."

On November 10, 1880, Nell visited her first-born son the night before he went to the gallows. Her last words were: "Mind you die like a Kelly, Ned."

Legend has it that as the noose was tightened around his neck, Ned murmured philosophically, "Such is life." He was 25.

THE FAMILY TREE
Ellen Kelly (nee Quinn): sailed with her family from Ireland to Australia. Eloped at 18 with an Irish ex-convict, John "Red" Kelly, and married him in 1850. They had eight children before Red died in 1866.
George King: A Californian married Ellen in 1874 and they had three children. King disappeared after becoming involved with Ned Kelly in 1878.
Ned Kelly: Ellen's third child and first son. Born June, 1855, hanged at Melbourne in November, 1880.
Dan Kelly: Sixth son of Ellen and the last of the three boys born to Red Kelly. Died in the shootout at Glenrowan in June, 1880.
Joe Byrne and Steve Hart: Kelly gang members who also died in the battle at Glenrowan.