Ned Kelly - Bushranger
Ned Kelly is perhaps one of the most infamous of Australian bushrangers.
The legend, however, is more romantic than the reality.
The legend, however, is more romantic than the reality.
Ned Kelly was the Australian-born son of a convict father transported from Ireland, his mother a Co. Armagh immigrant. The Kelly family, which became an extended clan, gained a reputation for petty criminality in back-country Victoria. In 1873 seven Kelly menfolk were in prison at the same time. Inter-clan disputes made matters worse - an uncle was reprieved after receiving a death sentence for arson because he had set fire to a sister-in-law's house. Ned Kelly and his brother, Dan, became leaders of their clan and gang, and under their leadership, the violence escalated. Increased banditry led to closer police attention. The gang resorted to bank-robbery and murder. Interestingly, the three policemen murdered by them in 1878 were Irish, although the Kellys later tried to represent their fight against authority as a continuation of Irish conflicts. Irish policemen in their eyes were national and class traitors. However, according to T.N. McIntyre, the trooper who was in part responsible for bringing Kelly to justice, Kelly, 'like a great many other young bushmen, … prided himself more upon his Australian birth than … upon his extraction from any particular race.'
![Sketch purporting to show Ned Kelly at bay [unknown artist].](ned_kelly.jpg)
Sketch purporting to show Ned Kelly at bay [unknown artist].
Eventually, the Kelly gang was cornered at the Glenrowan Hotel. In the shoot-out that ensued, Ned was the only surviving gang member. He was tried before the Anglo-Irish Sir Redmond Barry, a harsh judge, determined to root out the tradition of Irish lawlessness in Australia. Kelly was sentenced to death and hanged in November 1880. In legend he was transformed from brutal villain to mythical Robin Hood. His own naive attempts at self-justification, his public letters, his speech from the dock - were enhanced by reports such as the following:
'Except frequent threats of shooting Kelly never treated his male prisoners with indignity and put them to no further inconvenience than his own safety demanded. His female prisoners he treated with uniform deference and by these means he got much sympathy which he would not otherwise have received. One of Kelly's female prisoners on this occasion described the gang as perfect gentlemen and this struck the key note of a morbid feeling of sympathy for them which spread through all classes more particularly as Kelly had said that he had shot the police in revenge for many acts of a brutal nature upon himself and his female relatives.' (pp53-4)
'… Kelly … also seized a number of securities , his object being to get the deeds of township allotments. He brought two men from the hotel to burn a number of stock mortgages and their securities held by the bank, stating he wanted to relieve poor men of their liabilities.' (pp55-6)*
Kelly, a natural self-propagandist, had a fine sense of the dramatic. His crude body armour made him perfect visual legendary material, and his comment, after sentence, to Judge Barry that 'I will see you where I am going' was also the perfect touch of drama from the dock - compounded of course by Barry's death twelve days after Kelly's drop from the gallows into eternity and legend.
Police Station and Court House in Beningong, Victoria, very much as it would have been when Ned Kelly's gang roamed the area.
