“The documentary really upset me. This is the third miss in succession. The Heat Ledger film missed showing us anything significant about Ned Kelly. Greg Miller’s documentary missed. It was a slap-dash exercise. The re-enactments were so hokey. Then this comes along. I had high hopes for it. It’ll be years before you can justify doing another major Kelly film/television project. That is the saddest thing of all.

“My daughter, Elizabeth, tells me that someone was asking the Ironoutlaw website about when (my late wife) Bronnie’s documentary, Ned Kelly Unmasked, was going to be produced. I can’t see it becoming a reality for quite some time though after all that. Bronnie’s doco tells the Kelly story from top to bottom. It doesn’t start at the beginning; it starts at the end. But it simply tells the story in a totally factual way. It has some talking heads, which to tell the story properly is inescapable because you’ve got to background things and put things into context. Bronnie’s thesis was, very much as mine was in writing A Short Life, if you tell the story accurately, everything falls into place. People will understand what it’s all about. You don’t have to have people ranting and raving against Ned or for Ned. Just give the facts.

“It’s like when people say, ‘How on earth has Ned Kelly become a folk hero?’
You say to them, ‘Well, do you know the story?’
‘No, not really.’
So you say, ‘Get to know the story and you’ll understand’.
If they still come back to after they find out the story, it’s like jazz: if you have to ask, you’ll never know.

“I confess that I did a terribly naughty thing once. I was at a soiree at a girls’ college in Adelaide. I was there because a friend of mine, Wal Cherry, who was then a professor of drama at Flinders University, was speaking and I’d been talking to an editor who was interested in doing a Kelly book. She told me about the soiree, so I said, ‘Can I come along? I haven’t seen Wal in years’.

I went along and the headmistress was a little bit miffed that I was such a good friend of Wal’s. He mentioned something about my interest in Ned Kelly. The headmistress, showing off in front of her senior pupils, said, ‘How on earth can you justify this adulation of Ned Kelly?’

I said, ‘I don’t think it’s adulation; I’m merely fascinated by him’.

She started sounding off about Ned and it was pretty obvious that she wouldn’t know Ned if he popped his head out of her Muesli in the morning.

I said, ‘We’ve got to make some allowance here. You’ve got a man who’s born in Ireland, comes to Australia at a very early age, he grows up in the shadow of a dominating father, he grows up to be rather small, rather ugly, black-haired, black-bearded…’

The headmistress was nodding, saying ‘Yes, yes’.

I continued, ‘So eventually he goes on to kill six policeman and rob eight banks’.

She was still nodding her head, ‘Yes, yes’.

I said, ‘Hang on, who are we talking about?’

She smiled and said, ‘Well, your friend, Ned Kelly, of course’.

I said, ‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t born in Ireland; he was born in Australia. He didn’t grow up with a dominating father; he didn’t shoot six policemen, etc., etc.’ I said, ‘Are you still sure we’re talking about Ned Kelly?’

Wal said later, ‘Jonesy, you’re a bastard. It’s all right to take a headmistress’ knickers off, but not in front of her pupils’.

“It all springs from a desperate need to label a man. It’s the Bantick thing. I get asked so often, ‘Was Ned Kelly a hero or a villain?’

“I always say, ‘He was neither. He was a human being. People aren’t heroes or villains. People, at some stage in their life, can do something heroic; at others, they can do something villainous. But it isn’t a way of life. You don’t wake up in the morning and be heroic over breakfast. You don’t be villainous in the toilet.’

“Ned Kelly did things in his life that were heroic. He also did things in his life which I can understand why people would classify as villainous.

“Every time I get into this, I hammer it home like driving in a nail. Jesus was an executed rebel who doesn’t seem to have gotten on terribly well with his mum; Lord Nelson was a one-eyed, one-armed able officer who pinched another man’s wife; Adolf Hitler was an extremely brave soldier who loved children, dogs and Western novels. All of this is true, but what the hell does it tell you about these men and their significance in history. Absolutely nothing. That’s the fallacy of what Bantick and Lewis try to come up with.

“A lot of people were terribly upset with me coming down on the side of Ned having fired the shot that wounded Fitzpatrick. I said, ‘Why are you angry?’ They said, ‘Well, it shows Ned in a bad light’. I said, ‘Look, it doesn’t show Ned in a bad light; it shows that he’s human and he did something very silly. He made a lot of mistakes in his life and that’s what makes him human’.