Ned Kelly

Any Ned Kelly biography begins in Beveridge, a small settlement north of Melbourne, where Edward Kelly was born in 1854, most likely in June, though no birth certificate survives to fix the date ^[1]. His father, John 'Red' Kelly, was an Irish Catholic transported from Tipperary to Van Diemen's Land in 1841 for stealing two pigs. After serving his sentence, Red crossed to Victoria, where he married Ellen Quinn, the daughter of a struggling farming family, in 1850 ^[2]. Ned was their third child and eldest son in a household that eventually numbered eight children.

The family moved several times through central Victoria as Red Kelly's fortunes declined. At Avenel, young Ned rescued a boy named Richard Shelton from drowning in Hughes Creek, and the grateful Shelton family presented him with a green silk sash, which he was still wearing under his armour at Glenrowan years later ^[1]. In 1866 Red Kelly died shortly after serving a prison term connected to a stolen calf hide, leaving the twelve-year-old Ned as the male head of the family ^[2].

Ellen Kelly took her children north to a selection at Eleven Mile Creek, near Greta in what became known as Kelly Country. The district was marked by friction between poor selector families, many of them Irish, and the wealthier squatters who controlled the best grazing land, with police often acting on the squatters' behalf ^[3]. The Quinn and Kelly clans were watched closely by local constables, and court records show family members repeatedly charged, and often acquitted, over stock offences during Ned's adolescence ^[1].

Trouble with the law started early. At fourteen Kelly was arrested over an alleged assault on a Chinese pig farmer named Ah Fook, and though the charge was dismissed, he spent time in custody ^[1]. In 1870 he was tried as a suspected accomplice of the bushranger Harry Power and again walked free, but later that year he served a short sentence over an indecent letter dispute, and in 1871 he received three years' hard labour for receiving a stolen mare ^[2]. He served part of that term on the prison hulks in Port Phillip Bay before his release in 1874.

For roughly three years afterwards Kelly worked steadily, felling timber and labouring at a sawmill, and by his own later account he kept clear of serious crime ^[4]. He also became involved, with his stepfather George King, in large-scale horse and cattle theft across the Victoria and New South Wales border country, an enterprise he later defended as retaliation against squatters and police ^[4].

The turning point came on 15 April 1878, when Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick visited the Kelly homestead to arrest Ned's brother Dan over a horse-stealing warrant. Fitzpatrick claimed the family attacked him and that Ned shot him in the wrist; the Kellys insisted Ned was not even present. On the constable's testimony, Ellen Kelly was sentenced to three years in prison for aiding an attempted murder, a punishment widely regarded in the district as savage ^[3]. Ned and Dan fled into the Wombat Ranges, and a reward was posted for their capture ^[1].

In October 1878 two parties of armed police rode into the ranges hunting the brothers. On 26 October, at Stringybark Creek, Ned and Dan Kelly, along with companions Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, surprised one police camp. In the confrontation and pursuit that followed, Kelly shot dead Constable Thomas Lonigan, Constable Michael Scanlan, and Sergeant Michael Kennedy; a fourth officer, Constable Thomas McIntyre, escaped and raised the alarm ^[1]. Kelly always maintained he fired in self-defence against men who intended to kill him, an argument the courts and much of the press rejected ^[4].

The Victorian parliament responded by passing the Felons Apprehension Act, which declared the four men outlaws who could be shot on sight by any citizen, and rewards on their heads eventually climbed to 8,000 pounds, an enormous sum for the period ^[3]. Hundreds of police, black trackers from Queensland, and paid informers joined the hunt, yet the gang stayed at large for nearly two years, shielded by a network of sympathisers among the selector families of north-eastern Victoria ^[3].

The gang's method set them apart from earlier bushrangers. In December 1878 they took over the town of Euroa, locking hostages on a station homestead before robbing the National Bank of about 2,000 pounds without firing a shot ^[1]. In February 1879 they crossed into New South Wales and held the town of Jerilderie for two days, imprisoning the local police in their own cells, wearing the constables' uniforms, and robbing the Bank of New South Wales ^[2]. Witnesses at both raids described Kelly as courteous to hostages, a detail newspapers seized on and that fed his growing notoriety.

At Jerilderie, Kelly tried to arrange the printing of a roughly 7,400-word statement he had dictated to Joe Byrne, now known as the Jerilderie Letter ^[5]. The town's newspaper editor had fled, so Kelly left the manuscript with a bank employee, and it remained in private hands for more than a century before the State Library of Victoria acquired it in 2000 ^[5].

The letter is the main reason Kelly is recorded as a writer as well as a bushranger. In it he gave his own version of the Fitzpatrick incident and the Stringybark Creek killings, denounced the Victorian police as persecutors of poor Irish settlers, and demanded justice for his imprisoned mother ^[4]. Its language swings between legal self-defence, dark humour, and open threat, and historians treat it both as a primary source on the outbreak and as a rare voice of the rural poor in colonial Australia ^[5].

Scholars have long debated whether the letter shows a genuine political program. Some, including biographer Ian Jones, argued that Kelly and his sympathisers contemplated a rebellion aimed at a republic of north-eastern Victoria, though no proclamation survives and the claim remains contested among historians ^[1].

By mid-1880 the gang had prepared four suits of armour, each hammered from stolen plough mouldboards and weighing around 40 kilograms, capable of stopping bullets at range ^[6]. Their plan centred on Glenrowan. After Joe Byrne shot dead the informer Aaron Sherritt on 26 June 1880, the gang expected a special police train from Melbourne and forced railway workers to tear up the tracks outside Glenrowan so the train would derail ^[1].

The gang held some sixty townspeople hostage in Ann Jones's Glenrowan Inn through 27 June. That night Kelly allowed the schoolteacher Thomas Curnow to leave, and Curnow flagged down the approaching train with a candle behind a red scarf, foiling the derailment ^[1]. Police surrounded the inn and a siege began before dawn on 28 June. In the opening exchanges Kelly was wounded but escaped into the bush, then returned at first light, advancing on the police lines in his armour through the mist. Officers brought him down with shotgun blasts to his unprotected legs, and he was captured alive with some 28 wounds ^[6].

Joe Byrne bled to death inside the inn after a bullet struck his groin. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart died before the police burned the building that afternoon; their bodies were recovered charred, and the exact cause of their deaths was never formally established ^[2]. Three civilians caught in the crossfire also died of their wounds, among them the young hostage Jack Jones ^[3].

Kelly recovered from his wounds in custody and stood trial in Melbourne in October 1880 for the murder of Constable Lonigan at Stringybark Creek. The presiding judge was Sir Redmond Barry, the same judge who had sentenced Ellen Kelly in 1878 ^[2]. The jury took little time to convict, and Barry sentenced Kelly to death. In a celebrated exchange from the dock, Kelly told the judge he would meet him where they were both going; Barry died of natural causes twelve days after the hanging, a coincidence that entered folklore ^[1].

A public campaign for a reprieve gathered tens of thousands of signatures and drew large crowds to Melbourne meetings, but the Executive Council refused to intervene ^[3]. Kelly was hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol on the morning of 11 November 1880, aged about 25. Reports differ on his final words; the phrase 'such is life', long attributed to him, may be a journalist's invention, and contemporary accounts suggest he murmured something less quotable ^[2].

His body was buried in unmarked ground at the gaol and later moved to Pentridge Prison. In 2011 forensic scientists at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine identified his skeleton, minus the skull, using DNA from a descendant, and in 2013 his remains were finally buried in consecrated ground at Greta, near his family ^[7]. A royal commission held in 1881 into the police handling of the outbreak criticised senior officers and led to demotions and reforms in the Victorian force ^[3].

Few figures divide Australians like Kelly. To answer the question of who was Ned Kelly is to choose between a police killer who took hostages and a poor selector's son driven to rebellion by a corrupt constabulary, and serious historians continue to argue both readings ^[3]. The phrase 'as game as Ned Kelly' entered Australian English as a byword for reckless courage, and his helmeted silhouette is one of the country's most recognisable images.

Among the more unusual Ned Kelly facts is his afterlife in art and cinema. The Story of the Kelly Gang, released in 1906, is regarded as the world's first feature-length narrative film ^[6]. Sidney Nolan's Kelly series of paintings, begun in 1946 and centred on the black square of the helmet, became landmarks of Australian modernism, and Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang won the Booker Prize in 2001 ^[6]. Actors from Mick Jagger to Heath Ledger and George MacKay have played him on screen.

If the list of Ned Kelly achievements is short in conventional terms, one bank robber's manifesto, two audacious raids, and a suit of armour, his cultural weight is not. The armour is displayed at the State Library of Victoria, the Jerilderie Letter is inscribed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register, and Glenrowan and the Old Melbourne Gaol draw visitors from around the world ^[5]. More than 140 years after his execution, Kelly remains the figure through whom Australians argue about class, policing, Irishness, and what resistance to authority should cost ^[3].