Here’s a special treat for all Kelly buffs, but especially those of the hard-core variety. Here we have, in full, an exclusive, in-depth interview with the man who knows more about the Kelly Gang than any other living soul. His name is Ian Jones. During the hour-long interview, Jones reveals, among other things:

• Ned Kelly would have been a great country policeman.
• Aussie actor Hugh Jackman would make a perfect Ned.
• He enjoyed Peter Carey’s book, True History of the Kelly Gang.
• He likes Aaron Sherritt more than Joe Byrne.
• The Kelly legend might not have persisted if Ned lived out his days in prison.
• His favourite Kelly photographs, sites and relics.
• He is hoping to locate Ned’s skull-cap, his pouch and a little-known photograph of Ned, Joe Byrne and Tom Lloyd.
• All this and many more intimate details about the Kelly saga come to light in this campfire chat with Ian Jones.

What does Ned mean to you? Above all, Ned Kelly has fascinated me since childhood. He’s a man of enormous importance to Australians of every age, increasingly as the quality of being Australian becomes more unfocused. It’s becoming increasingly hard to recognise our national identity. Some people would say that’s a good thing. But Ned is one of those extraordinary figures who says something about Australians. We respond to him in a unique way. That appeal is very hard to define. You come up with a series of cliches like he was a champion of the underdog, he was an incredibly brave man, chivalrous towards women, a fine horseman, a fine shot, a great bushman. You could go on and on. But Ned Kelly is far greater than the sum of his parts. You could rattle on about Ned forever and not even come close to what he means. It has given me enormous pleasure studying his life – I’ve been at it for 61 years now – and I hope I have been able to communicate something of my fascination to my readers and the people I talk to.

What do you think Ned would have made of all the fuss, especially during the past couple of years? I think he would have been rather surprised, but I hope he’d be delighted by the fact that so many people still respect him for what he stood for.

You’ve often said your fascination with Ned started when you were 10 when an old gardener named Tom Maine leant you a copy of J. J. Kenneally’s The Inner History of the Kelly Gang? What do you remember about that introduction to Ned? Old Tom used to come to our place one day a week to do some work for my parents. When he had a ‘smoko’, he’d yarn to me. It was quite magical. He was a rather old man, but probably a lot younger than I am now. He seemed as old as a tree at the time. Old Tom was a hard worker but if there was a hint of rain in the air he’d knock off and go into the tool shed. He’d pack his pipe with tobacco and yarn. One day he yarned about Ned Kelly and I was intrigued. I knew the name but I knew nothing about him. I came from a middle-class Protestant family – Ned Kelly was not a respectable subject. Old Tom leant me the book about Ned. What stands out to me is the fact that my mother frequently asked my father if it was all right for me to borrow the book, which showed Ned as the hero, a real Robin Hood-type character, and the police were the villains. It was all clear-cut. Only a month or so later I saw another book, Chomley’s True Story of the Kelly Gang. I confronted a very different figure. The roles were reversed. So at the age of 10, I decided that I would find out for myself. And I’m still going.

Did you ever imagine it would become a life-long obsession? Not at all. One thing just led to another and I had the most incredible luck all through my Kelly research. Over the years, I’ve had a lot of fun and shared many precious times with marvellous people and in marvellous country. People would literally give me things. They would present me with pieces of information and suggest that I speak with a certain person. At times, it was almost as though the material was seeking me out.

Maybe Ned was helping you beyond the grave. It would be nice to think he was. I’m dead-sure that my Irish great-great-grandfather was helping. I didn’t know of his existence until 1988. His name was John Daly, and he was transported to Australia for life in 1826 for cow-stealing. I swear he was helping me. Back in 1960, a mate of mine by the name of Tony Doogood and myself got a couple of horses from a distant relative of Tony’s in Barjarg (14km north-west of Mansfield). The relative was actually the son of a Kelly sympathiser; a fellow named Bernie Clancy. We just packed our stuff on the horses and rode up to Tolmie and camped there. We rode over and had afternoon tea with Jack Walsh, who was the son-in-law of Johnny Byrne. We didn’t know it at the time, but we hung up our horses probably at the very spot where Joe Byrne and Ned Kelly hung up their horses on the day they discovered the tracks of the police going to Stringybark Creek. We hung the horses up to a fence at the side of the hut that Johnny Byrne lived in at that time.

We rode up into the Wombat Ranges, roughly following the route taken by the police to Stringybark Creek. We were both working in television and it was just a marvellous break from the absolute hysteria of television in those early days. That weekend we both got very close to it. We slept on the ground with our heads in the crutch of our saddles. All that corny stuff. Even though it was summer, it was quite nippy out there. We had our little bottles of Bundy (Bundaberg) Rum to warm us up before we went to sleep. It was just a fabulous time and it had a fascinating influence on a phase of my research. A marvellous old fellow named Jack Healy, who knew that country like the back of his hand, took us in to Bullock Creek / Stringybark Creek. Scarcely a month later, Tony was fatally injured in a riding accident. But the coincidences that happened after his death were absolutely staggering. It sounds weird, but I have absolutely no doubt that Tony steered me towards some of my discoveries. In fact, in the strangest one of all, he played a role in steering the ‘Jerilderie Letter’ to me back in 1969. The man who went to a lot of trouble to make contact with me and overcame quite a few funny little barriers along the way had actually been a workmate of Tony’s many years before. I dedicated The Friendship (ie. The Friendship That Destroyed Ned Kelly: Joe Byrne and Aaron Sherritt) to Tony.

Was it difficult in those early days to break into the inner sanctum, as in descendants and confederates of the Kellys? I didn’t try to, because I believed all of this rubbish that if you tried to talk about the Kellys in the Kelly country, they’d attack you with shotguns. This was absolute rubbish. I could have gone up and talked to Jim Kelly, for heaven’s sake. He died in 1946, five years after I started my research. Gwen Griffiths, who was a relative (of the Kellys) and became a very dear friend of mine, said “oh, you should have come and talked to Jim. He would have loved to have talked to you”. And there we were, standing in the ruins of the Kelly homestead. My heart almost sank through the ground. I used to take a long vacation and go up and work as a jackaroo. I was a jackaroo at a station outside Seymour and the cook, a Mrs White, had seen Dan Kelly. No one else there took her seriously. We didn’t have electric light at the station, so I sat down and had a chat with her one night, by kerosene lamp, and took notes. Sure as hell, she saw Dan Kelly. Her father rowed Dan across the Goulburn River. When I pressed her about what he looked like, she said “he looked like and ordinary young bushman”. What was he wearing? “Ordinary bush clothes”. I tried to take her right back through the experience.

Her father was running Dan across in the stern of the boat. The father started to row and drew the horse down into the water and the horse started to swim behind the boat. As she came up with that mental picture, suddenly she said “oh, I remember! Slung across his back, he had an overcoat wrapped around a rifle.” I thought ‘what a funny detail’. Years later, I read (Francis) Hare’s The Last of the Bushrangers where he said that the only swag Ned Kelly would let the gang carry was an overcoat and a rifle. And here, Mrs White, the one person who remembered seeing the Kelly swag. The was the detail that did it for me; the real clincher. You could say it wasn’t a terribly exciting detail but that was the first time some amazing little facet of the story emerged. Trying to retrieve oral history is like saving something from a whirlpool before it disappears; before it goes down the gurgler. That has been an exciting part of my work. You talk to someone like Mrs White or Joe Byrne’s sister, Ellie. I spoke with Ellie in the last months of her life. In fact, I spoke with her the day before she died. In total, I spent about eight hours with her, which was just precious time. It was phenomenal. I sent her a telegram for her 94th birthday and it was returned undelivered because she’d died. The last time I saw her I gave her a bottle of cologne. I’d like to think she used it.

What types of things did Ellie Byrne shed light on? She gave me a wonderful picture of the sort of childhood Joe shared and what life was like in the Woolshed. The way Mrs Byrne loved the kids to recite poetry, the type of games they played. She helped me pinpoint the layout of the two Byrne homesteads, which I didn’t have fixed at all. I’d been told by Bill Knowles, the grandson of Anton Wick, the site of the Byrne homestead on the banks of the creek that his mother had pointed out. What I didn’t know was that there had been another homestead about 100 yards up the slope. There was the ‘new’ homestead on the other side of the mining race that Joe used to creep along when he visited his mum. That helped me work out how Aaron was making fools of the police, knowing perfectly well that Joe was visiting his mum. Meanwhile, Aaron was watching the other side of the house with the police watch party who, of course, thought they were on a very important stakeout. The most amazing part of the discussions with Ellie Byrne was that she remembered Aaron very well. She said “Aaron was always coming to our place doing jobs for Mum, cutting wood”. But she could hardly remember Joe at all because she barely saw him.

Tell us about the movie Ned Kelly, which starred Mick Jagger and you co-wrote with the director, Tony Richardson. All I can really say is that I wrote the first draft of the script. I could only go to London for three weeks because I was flat out at Crawfords (production company). The company loaned me to Woodfall Pictures for three weeks. Tony was doing rehearsals for his production of Hamlet, which he later filmed with Marianne Faithfull and Nicole Williamson. Tony and I plotted it for a week. Then I spent each day writing at my hotel, which was only about a block from Tony’s house. After each day’s rehearsal we would get together to discuss what I had written. I managed to put together a screenplay in the space of two weeks because that was the only way I thought I could have any influence over the film.

What’s your opinion of the final result? Oh (sighs). A bit of a fizzer. But there were some beaut things. The feel of the film was terrific. The landscape was quite nice. It was beautifully photographed. Elements of the Kelly story came through very well; other elements were completely lost. It was a bit of a shambles. Bits and pieces of story; bits and pieces of character. It was almost inevitable because when Tony could give all his time to a film, he had second and third thoughts about what he wanted to do. He rewrote some of it and had help from a few other people. He ended up with a four-hour film, as usual, which he cut back to an hour and 20 minutes. You just can’t do that. You can’t make movies up as you go along.

Mick Jagger was about 15cm shorter than Ned and about 20kg lighter. What did you think of his portrayal of Ned? He was young and he had an Irish accent, which was refreshing in many ways. Previously, Ned had always been a burly, 40-something, ocker character – a real AFL footballer type of fellow with a beard. Ned wasn’t like that at all. At least Mick was young. When I was talking to Tony about Ned Kelly, he said (in a high-pitched voice) “when you see Ned Kelly, what do you see?” I said “I see a big, bearded man sitting on a horse”. He said “ah, but you’re wrong. The fact he was big is no more important than the colour of his eyes.” I should have realised at that very point that Tony simply hadn’t got it. The fact that Ned was a very powerful man with a lot of physical and charismatic impact was a key element of his tragedy. You couldn’t ignore him. People saw Ned and said “look out, here’s trouble” or “mate, I’m on your side”. Mick packs a wallop, and he was a very nice fellow and I enjoyed talking with him. He worked very hard on the set and showed a lot of guts – he got shot in the hand. But he couldn’t be Ned Kelly.

But who can be Ned Kelly? John Jarratt gave us the most physically accurate Ned (in the eight-hour mini-series The Last Outlaw, which Jones produced and co-wrote with his wife Bronwyn Binns) and did a damn good job. But still John couldn’t capture the essence of Ned. But there’s no shame in that either. You’ve got to get a unique blend – a man who is 25 but with the maturity and impact of a man in his 40s. That’s why the role was given to older men. Godfrey Cass, the son of the Governor of the Melbourne Gaol, last played Ned Kelly when he was 57! He still captured some very valid Kelly qualities, having met Ned the day before his execution. As for Heath Ledger (who has been signed to play Ned in a screen adaptation of Robert Drewe’s novel Our Sunshine), I don’t know. I haven’t seen enough of him to comment. A man who would have been a terrific Ned Kelly was Gerard Kennedy. But even when I first met Gerard in the early days of Homicide, he was already too old to play Ned Kelly. I remember when Tony Richardson was knocking back actors like Warren Beatty, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris and Sean Connery (for the role of Ned), he said “a whole generation failed to produce a great actor”.

Is there anyone among the current crop of actors that would make an ideal Ned Kelly? A fellow who physically says Ned to me, and Bronnie agrees, is Hugh Jackman. People say “oh, but he does comedy”. But Ned was a very funny guy. Look at some of the stunts he pulled. He accused the hunting party at Euroa of being the Kelly Gang. There was a lot of comedy, wit and Irish sparkle in Ned, and I think Hugh Jackman would be able to pull it off quite well.

Who was bigger: Jesse James or Ned Kelly? The legend of Jesse James was constructed by some imaginative minds. His story has been moulded, wrongly, into the template of the highwayman hero; the rebel whose family was wronged. There are elements of that there, but there are also elements of sheer, flat-out criminality and some pretty mean-spirited stuff. Ned towers over Jesse James in stature. But if you look at all the romantic bandits throughout history, going back to Robin Hood and Rob Roy, Dick Turpin, Michael Dwyer, Jesse James, Captain Lightfoot. You could go on and on. But there’s only one that really fits the mould, and that’s Ned Kelly. All the others have been tweaked into it, so the resultant character wasn’t them anyway.

The more you know about Ned, the more perfectly he fits that mould. He was good-looking, he was big, he was powerful, unbelievably so. Almost superhuman. What he did at Glenrowan was virtually impossible. He really was a crack shot and a wonderful horseman. He treated his enemies with chivalry. The way he treated the police at Jerilderie was absolutely extraordinary. He looked after their self-respect and gave (Constable) Richards back his dignity. He could have humiliated the police, but he made them look as good as he possibly could. He really did spread money around – the equivalent of about $1 million today. They spread it around the north-east in the space of a year. He dressed up in his enemy’s uniform to deceive. All those things Robin Hood is supposed to have done. Sure, he killed some policemen. But how many of the Sherriff’s men did Robin Hood kill?

The way the gang behaved at Stringybark Creek was extraordinary. Their bush telegraph was so good that they probably knew the police were carrying body-straps, and they knew of the boasts like “I’ll carry two revolvers and put one on the body and say he died in a fair fight”. Despite all that, they really did try to get those police to surrender. They didn’t want to shoot them. None of those police died until he had a gun in his hand and were either shooting at, or about to shoot at, Ned or one of his party. (Constable Thomas) Lonigan was probably about to shoot Ned when Ned shot him. It wasn’t even self-defence (on Lonigan’s part).

If Ned was on trial today, do you think there would have been a different outcome? He would have received a much fairer trial. (Jones pauses and takes on a distinctly sombre tone.) I think he would have been found guilty, and he probably would have got a life sentence. He was probably guilty of murder. If Ned had got off for shooting Lonigan, they wouldn’t have got him for (Constable Michael) Scanlon. The penny would have dropped eventually that it was Joe that shot Scanlon, though Ned was one of the party, so he would still be implicated. You could get away with self-defence for the shooting of Lonigan. But you wouldn’t get away with self-defence for the shooting of Kennedy. I think Ned would have been found guilty of murder and there really was no alternative but to hang him. When a man had claimed time and time again that he had shot those three policemen, you could not let that man live. Especially in a frontier society. The utterly stupid thing they (the Crown) did was give Ned a hurried, unfair trial. This one of the many things contributing to the legend. If they could have locked him up for life, in hindsight, it would have been a much smarter move. They could have let the legend moulder away in prison; let the legend become an old, sad man by eking out his life in a cell.

If Ned copped a life sentence instead, what do you think would be the perception of him today? He’d still be remembered as an extraordinary bushranger. But if you kill a man, you create a martyr. He became immortal as a 25-year-old in his prime. He effectively lived on. But as a sad, old convict who died in his 70s or 80s, he would have become a very different figure.

McIntyre perjured himself a couple of times in relation to what happened at Stringybark Creek and there were other examples of corrupt police work. How crooked were the police back then? Some were completely crooked. (Constable Ernest) Flood was a horse thief. His police record implies that. One of the interesting things is that Ned was a very truthful man. If he’s talking about himself, he invariably speaks the truth. When he tells lies, he’s invariably protecting someone. Ned’s lies were like an old maternity smock – they were meant to hide the pregnancy, but they actually advertised it. His lies reveal and advertise the very thing he sets out to hide.

If things had been different and Ned lived today, what role would you foresee him having in society? It’s hard to say. I don’t see present-day society producing a man of Ned Kelly’s qualities. He probably could have gone into local government, but he certainly would have been a leader of some kind. As one of his former friends said, “he was a natural-born leader”. The perfect job for Ned Kelly would have been as a policeman. If Robert Graham, the policeman who was put in charge of Greta after the destruction of the gang, had been in charge after the Harry Power episode, Ned could have ended up a policeman. He would have been a brilliant country policeman. The Herald said after the Euroa hold-up, “this is the man that could solve the problems of stock theft”. And indeed he would have. A man with his physical abilities, his enormous sense of human dignity and a great sense of justice. A one-man police station is a very tricky proposition and men can make an awful mess of it, or play a very important role in the community. I think Ned would have gained enormous respect from the entire community in that role.

Has Ned got a modern-day equivalent? No. Ned was a one-off. I don’t think Australia or any other country has produced a man quite like Ned.

You are a supporter of Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang. Yes, I enjoyed it very much. I first read the manuscript before it was published, back in the days when it was to be called The Secret History of the Kelly Gang, which I think is a much better title. I think it was silly calling it True History because it has unnecessarily alienated and confused quite a few people. But having said that, it’s a great read. If I’d seen some passages of the book on old paper in what looked like Joe or Ned’s handwriting, I would have said “it’s an autobiographical fragment” – in other words, the real thing. I have great respect for Peter Carey as a writer and he has done a superb job with painting a picture of the times and what Ned might have thought at different stages of his life. I argue with some people about it who say “Mrs Kelly didn’t sleep around like that”…

What about the references to transvestism? He plays that off rather cleverly. The whole transvestism thing is a myth anyway. When we played with it in The Last Outlaw, we had Steve (Hart) dressing up for a reconnaissance at Euroa, simply because it’s a fun thing to introduce. There isn’t a shred of evidence that he actually did dress up as a woman. The only ‘evidence’ was the woman’s hat among the clothes the gang burnt at Faithfull’s Creek. But it wasn’t a woman’s hat at all. It was a man’s cabbage-tree hat, a straw hat, with a fly-veil. It looked like a woman’s hat to people who didn’t know what they were looking at. We’ve got a description of Ned wearing that article, or something very similar. In the Lydecker case, where Ned takes the horse from Lydecker with the ‘JQ’ brands which Ned thought had been knocked off from one of his uncles. But unbeknowns to him, Lydecker had bought the horse. Ned and Tom (Lloyd) pinched it back with its foal. There is a description of Ned wearing a cabbage-tree hat with a fly veil.

Your latest book, the catalogue Ned: The Exhibition, which Brad and I put together, is on the shelves. Are you pleased with the result? Absolutely delighted, Ben. It’s well designed, well laid out, and you’ve managed to squeeze a lot of material into it. It would have been a great result if you had worked on it for six months or a year, but to pull it together in such a short amount of time – about two weeks – was a phenomenal achievement. Well done.

Thankyou. Now for the Kellyites that haven’t got the book yet (it’s 128 pages long), how would you sell it to them? It’s a summary of the story as told in the exhibition and it has been divided into 18 phases or chapters, with photographs and relics throughout. The Kelly story is a bit abstract and unreal for a lot of people, but this book and indeed the Exhibition follows Ned’s life from landmark to landmark and it becomes touchable.

Apart from Ned, who do you find to be the most intriguing character in the whole saga? Oh, Aaron Sherritt – every day of the week. The greatest single tragedy of the Kelly story was Detective Ward’s ruthless, amoral, appalling campaign to incriminate Aaron in the eyes of the gang. The fact that it worked was a tragedy, and it was a tragedy that destroyed the gang. I like Aaron. I always found him a very appealing character. He probably would have sent me right up the wall if I knew him, but I prefer him to Joe. I never quite liked Joe.

Really? Yeah. Ned brought the best out in Joe.

What did you find so unappealing about Joe? He had a lousy temper. He was very violent. He injured his sister quite badly one time. He was yarding some horses and she let some of the horses go, so he belted her across the face with a bridle. He didn’t treat his mum well either. His mum was a real battler with seven kids and 14 cows, trying to live with some dignity and yet Joe was swanning about town, dressing up to the nines, looking like a young squatter. This was very different from Ned. But Ned brought the absolute best out in him. Ned said “he’s my best man” who was “straight and true as steel”. That was true for when Joe was with Ned, but I would trust Aaron before I’d trust Joe. I like Aaron much more than I like Joe.

In a nutshell, why did Joe Byrne shoot Aaron Sherritt? Because everyone was telling him that Aaron had betrayed him and he was just worn down by the constant innuendo. And let’s not forget that it was an absolutely vicious campaign by (Detective) Ward to set Aaron up. It was virtually murder. The fact that Joe and Aaron had been such close mates – they were almost like brothers and, in fact, had been engaged to one another’s sisters – just shows how successful a campaign it was. So once Joe was convinced of the betrayal, Aaron had to die. Ned was reluctant to go along with it, but Aaron was Joe’s mate and Joe felt that that was the way it had to go. Even after Ned’s capture, Ned said to Armstrong, probably after he had learned that Armstrong had been one of the police in Aaron’s hut when Aaron was killed, he said “did you torture Aaron?” It’s an extraordinary question. He obviously wasn’t convinced that Aaron had betrayed them. He thought ‘how on earth did you get Aaron to betray us?’ He found it hard to believe.

Was Aaron a poor man’s Ned, in that he could at least compare physically to Ned when others weren’t even in the same ball park? That’s right. If Aaron had been there at Stringybark Creek and become a fully-fledged member of the gang, hell. Ned Kelly and Aaron Sherritt as a double act, that is spooky. And if you lined up Tom Lloyd and ‘Wild’ Wright, that would be a formidable group. That would be scary; a really frightening combination. Aaron and Ned were almost head-to-head in height. Aaron packed a punch as a bare-knuckle boxer and Ned was the only man he was ever scared of. Whether they actually came to blows I don’t know. I think Aaron was probably too smart for that and just let Ned have his own way. I think he would have said “no way, we won’t even try”. But Aaron died as loyal to the gang as he ever was.

Gary Dean (an author/historian who runs Glenrowan Cobb&Co) believes Ned might have been married and had a child. What’s your view? I’m open-minded. I’ll weight the evidence if and when I see it. All the evidence I have points to Ned virtually being engaged to (his cousin) Kate Lloyd. At the time of his capture, Kate was his sweetheart. Of all the women he had known, she was the one he had loved most deeply. I didn’t know when I wrote my book (Ned Kelly – A Short Life), that Ned had taught Kate to ride. Her grand-daughter told me that. They were very close. When the Kellys first moved up to Greta in 1867, Ned would have lived in the old shanty with Kate and some other cousins until Ellen Kelly and her brood got their own place. I’d be very surprised (if he married someone else and had a child). But let’s see the evidence.

Is there any other evidence that he knocked around with any other young lasses? When Paddy and Charlie Griffiths (descendants) talked about Ned’s girlfriends, they said he was very close to Mary Miller, who was a cousin, Steve’s sister Ettie Hart… There was also a girl called Julie Martin, who I don’t know anything about. I suspect she was the daughter of Peter Martin, who ran the Star Hotel in Wangaratta, and / or a sister of Oakley and Peter Martin. Peter Martin worked with Ned at the sawmill and became the gang’s Gippsland spy. The gang spent time in Gippsland, so that may well be the case.

Gary Dean also has a theory that Dan Kelly and Steve Hart escaped from Glenrowan? Your thoughts? Again, if anyone can produce one shred of evidence, I’d be delighted to see it. But in 61 years of research, I’ve never seen the slightest hint of evidence that would remotely suggest they escaped.

Apart from your books of course, what do you rate as the top Kelly references? I have a profound respect for Keith McMenomy and John McQuilton. They’ve done wonderful work. But a lot of people have contributed. Dagmar Balcarek has done done great work. But I think Keith and John have made major contributions to the Kelly story and approached it with a passion and depth of scholarship which I greatly respect.

You first started researching Ned back in the 1940s, so why did it take until 1992 for you to complete your first book? I was actually asked a similar question at the Kelly seminar back in 1980. I said “because I don’t know enough yet to write a book”. It was quite embarrassing actually. Up on the platform with me were John McQuilton and John Molony, both of whom had written a book on Ned Kelly. It got a bit of a laugh, and fortunately they both laughed too. But it was absolutely true. The more you know about a subject, the more you realise you don’t know. Sometimes you say to yourself, ‘right, I’ve explored this avenue as much as I can’. But too often you know there is another bloody branch that you just can’t get to. There are times when you say ‘why didn’t I follow that up?’ But when you’ve done it, how much of it can you publish anyway? I mean, it would have been a lot easier not to hold back and cut stuff. But you’ll never tell the whole story.

People have been very flattering by saying “you’ve written the definitive biography on Ned Kelly”. The fact is that no one has written the definitive biography on anybody, least of all Ned Kelly. If you got three people together who had know someone who had died and someone said “tell us what he was really like”, they would agree on many things but, no matter how well they knew him, each person would differ in their opinions. Take ‘Red’ Kelly for instance. Someone might say ‘Red? Oh, he drank like a fish, fought like a thrashing machine; he was an absolute madman”. If you spoke to his widow she’d say “he was the loveliest, gentlest, kindest, quietest man you’d ever meet”, and you’d think ‘oh, come on’. It’s a bit like someone saying “I’m going to do a painting of Melbourne on March 20, 2002”. They choose the shady side of the street, every druggie and drunk, graffiti in the background, peeling posters – the bad side of the street. The same day, another artist could paint the sunny side of the street – all the pretty people on their way to the races. So which is the true picture? Neither of them is the true picture. It’s just what someone has selected, and that’s what history is like. You cannot say everything.

What did you think of Alex McDermott’s attempt at analysing The Jerilderie Letter? Alex McDermott wants to read into the Jerilderie Letter that “the true, murderous, implacable, brooding intent of Ned Kelly is revealed”. Bullshit. I know it’s bullshit. If I said to you “pull your head in while it’s still attached”, you wouldn’t run off to the police and say “Ian Jones said he was going to chop my head off”. It’s just childish. Just you watch, the next wave of Kelly scholarship is going to be revisionist. There will be people like this McDermott character falling over one another to say “all this is wrong, Ned Kelly was really a dreadful person, a cold-blooded killer and a coward”. Gradually, they will try to regain the ogre that was portrayed back in 1880. Just for the sake of saying something different, making a buck, making a reputation.

You must get frustrated when people peddle inaccuracies as fact? No, not really. I regard it as inevitable. It’s part of the measure of Ned’s stature and the fact that it has now become an orthodoxy to regard him as a major historical figure; a man of many admirable qualities. Certain people will continue to chip away at Ned and try to drag him down. But it’s like trying to destroy Uluru (Ayers Rock) by crashing a Tiger Moth into it. There might be a big bang and a great ball of flame, but there’s not going to be any Tiger Moth left. It’ll leave a little mark that will wither away in no time and Uluru will still be there. The legend of Ned Kelly is a bit like that.

What is the misconception about Ned that annoys you most? The one that got me most recently was silly, damn Edgar Penzig peddling this rubbish that Ned mutilated Kennedy’s body and cut his ear off. Edgar should have something cut off for that. I was disgusted with him. It came out last year, around the time of the ceremony at Stringybark Creek. It was the most totally untrue piece of mock history I have seen peddled in the past 20 years. I’d be prepared to respect Edgar’s contribution over the years, but he completely lost me. He sank to a pretty low ebb when he claimed that Mrs Kelly had prostituted herself. If you set out to prove something no matter what, you’re going to write bad history. That’s not the way to go about it.

What things did you leave out of your books that you would have liked to share with your readers? An omission from my biography of Ned, which I would like to rectify in a revised edition sometime, was the role of the Chinese which I wish I had given proper emphasis. The Chinese played a very significant part in the Kelly story. Ned had great respect for the Chinese and Joe, of course, was virtually a member of Beechworth’s Chinese community.

Your wife, Bronwyn Binns, has helped your research enormously over the years; your son Darren was heavily involved in the making of a recent documentary The Story of Ned Kelly with Picture Pond. The Kelly story must be a real family affair. Yes, you could say that. Bronnie’s actually writing a feature-length documentary on the life of Ned which is going brilliantly. She’s keen to have John McQuilton and Keith McMenomy involved, and I’ll get my head on it somewhere too. My youngest daughter, Elizabeth, also produced a very good project on Ned while she was in primary school. She’s trying to make her own way and not get caught up in the Kelly thing too much, but she is doing some beaut historical work at Melbourne University. Who knows, she may straighten her old dad out on a few points in time.

Obviously, your knowledge on the Kellys has rubbed off on your children. It was almost inevitable, I suppose. For Darren, particularly – he’s the oldest of my children. Darren was crawling around on the gravel banks of Reidy Creek (in Beechworth) before he could walk. I can remember fishing a piece of alluvial gravel out of his mouth. (With a hearty laugh) He was eating a bit of the Woolshed. He grew up with a marvellous sense of that country. There are places that I’ve visited far more than what Darren has, but he can sometimes point out things with greater certainty than what I can. We were looking all day for Joe and Aaron’s bench where they hid all of the stolen horses. I’d taken Darren there when he was about four. We went back in 1992 to take some photos for Friendship. We tried to get to it from the top but we were unsuccessful. It was rugged country.

There were rocks as big as houses, thick scrub. We eventually tackled it from the bottom. We were going up this very steep slope and I said “we should have struck it by now”. Darren said “I think it’s further down Dad”. I said “why?” He said “the other side of the gully was closer”. He was recalling what he had seen when he was four. Then the penny dropped. I said “you’re dead right”. I’d just made a silly mistake. We kept going along the level we were on and just arrived at the bench. He’s pulled a couple of stunts like that. We were going up to the Kelly caves. Through all of the scrub, we missed them. I had been up there innumerable times but he picked it before I did. The landscape has just become a part of him. It’s crazy because it’s not as though he has lived there.

What’s your favourite Kelly photograph? The boxing photo is a favourite. The ‘respectable Ned’ photo is fascinating but it’s not as technical as the boxing photo. The photos taken the day before his execution are enormously valuable but that’s not Ned. That’s Ned after he’s nearly died, after he’s been leading a sedentary life for months, getting one hour a day of exercise, living indoors. There’s more flesh, less muscle. The fire is still there but it’s not Ned. The boxing photo is Ned – ready to take on the world.

What do you say to people who believe the boxing photo and the ‘respectable Ned’ photo aren’t actually Ned? Well, good luck to them.

Are you 100 percent sure yourself? A thousand percent. Even before we saw the original print of the ‘respectable Ned’, Keith (McMenomy) and I accepted it as genuine. Keith and I don’t always agree. He was a teenager when I first met him and he was steeped in the Kelly pictorial stuff then. We’ve both done a lot of work on that area of the Kelly story. When we do agree, I tend to think we are right. I don’t doubt either photo. People have got an idea of what Ned Kelly looks like. If you look at the photograph that was taken of him in Pentridge when he was 19 and compare that to the photograph taken of him at Kyneton when he was 15, do they look like the same man? Then compare both of those to the two that were taken on the day before his execution. Do they look like the same man? What image of Ned Kelly do you want?

When I saw the boxing photo, I said “this is the photo of Ned Kelly that I knew existed”. There had to be a photograph of Ned Kelly when he looked like that. Compare the boxing photo to Julian Ashton’s portrait of Ned in the dock at Beechworth, which is a magnificent piece of work, and you can see some striking similarities. That’s Ned. You could make a mistake and say “the respectable photo is not Ned”. If it’s not Ned, what is it doing in Tom Lloyd’s collection labelled ‘Ned Kelly’? It’s a man with all of Ned’s characteristics at that time. He’s respectable; he’s a mill overseer. If you look at the detail of it, you’ll see the lightweight riding boots he’s wearing and the strap he’s wearing around his waist – it’s just like a saddle-strap. Worn cuffs off the coat. It all adds up. I’m absolutely certain they are genuine.

Apart from the armour, do you have a favourite Kelly relic? Yeah. It’s a silly one. It’s Ned’s belt, which came to light only recently. I love that. It’s such an intimate thing. It’s quite spooky really. I got some digital copies made of the ‘respectable Ned’ photo and they have brought out detail that isn’t in the original, particularly the belt. The digitalised picture has gone into phase with the grain of the photo and boy, there’s the buckle with the little roller on it. It’s absolutely identical to the buckle and the width of the belt that’s on display at Ned: The Exhibition. I’ve examined it very carefully and you can’t see any wear on any of the holes. That’s because I’m sure it just broke off at the hole where it was fastened.

And the boot – that is absolutely stunning. I was handling it only the other day. It has the larrikin heel. He had such a small foot for a man of his size. Fascinating stuff. Although the leather has closed up considerably over time, you can see the split where the bullet would have entered. They put a knife in the bullet-hole and slit up from there. Very little of the leather was destroyed. It was bloody good leather, as you’d expect, and it has weathered incredibly well. The belt has too.

As the consultant for Ned: The Exhibition and after spending a lifetime studying Ned, it must have given you great pride when the exhibition finally came to fruition. I was thrilled, particularly for Brendan (Pearse). It’s been a real battle to make it happen. They’ve had some very bitter opposition and been bad-mouthed by people who should really know better. There has been some stupid, destructive behaviour. I’m thrilled to: a) see it come off, and b) go so well. I was happy to help because Brendan has had fire in his guts about Ned for years. When I first met him, he was mad-keen and passionate about it. He was the perfect fellow to do it as far as I was concerned.

What other Kelly relics are you hoping to find? Obviously, you’d love to locate the documents relating to the Republic of North-East Victoria before the exhibition ends. These days I’d settle for locating it before the end of my life. That’s the Holy Grail. I’d like to think Ned’s cap is out there somewhere. It’s a water-proof, silk skull cap that he wore under his helmet. It was padded with cotton wool. The police had it after his capture. I don’t know what’s become of it. The revolver he took from Lonigan that he used at his Last Stand must be around somewhere. I can’t believe that it’s just been thrown away. Ned Kelly’s pouch, which the police had quite recently, I think in the 1950s, has disappeared. All of these things are out there. It’s just a matter of tracking them down.

Isn’t there also a photo of Ned, Tom and Joe at the races during the outlaw days? Yes there is. I’ve known of it’s existence since the 1960s. Tom Lloyd junior told me about that; he had seen it. It’s quite remarkable actually. He didn’t know who the third man in the photo was until Keith (McMenomy) and I took him the photo of his father that was taken when he was arrested as a sympathiser, which is far and away the best photo of him as a young man. Tom (junior) said “now I know who the third man in the photo is”. It was his dad. We’re hoping it will turn up.

What’s your favourite Kelly site? Bullock Creek. When I reached the area that the boys cleared, where they had their horse paddock, I got a real sense of arrival. It’s eerie. I get a feeling that I’m in their territory now. That’s the country that they left their mark on. And it’s still there. I really feel Ned strongest at Bullock Creek, the site of the gunfight at Stringybark Creek and the Kelly homestead. You stand in the ruins of the Kelly homestead and you feel the sadness and the emotion. It’s a very sad place. It was extraordinary to stand in that homestead in 1959 when just one wall had collapsed. There were religious pictures on the walls, all the furniture was still there, a hurricane lamp hanging from the tie-beams. Outside, the bellows were still in the forge. You were just so close to it.

What gaps are left in the story? How deep is the barrel – are we getting close to the bottom? No, there’s still a lot to find out. The Republic, George King…

George King just disappeared off the face of the earth didn’t he? We don’t know enough about George. I’d love to know about his background and what happened to him afterwards.

Did Joe Byrne have a diary? Or was James Wallace just bulldusting the police about there being a diary? Gary Dean believes he has almost found it. Good luck if he does. There were about 50 letters of Joe’s in police hands. I’d love to know where all of those are.

Will the Kelly sites, particularly the lesser-known sites like Aaron Sherritt’s hut at the Devil’s Elbow, ever be sign-posted? Do you see a need for it, or do you think it would bastardise the sites? It’s a very delicate balance. I don’t think I’ve got all of the answers. You would totally destroy places like Stringybark Creek and Bullock Creek (if you sign-posted them). I think it’s best left as it is now. That might be selfish, I’m not sure. It’s like marking graves. If a grave is unmarked, it is unmarked for a reason. I don’t think you should mark them. Aaron’s family didn’t want his grave marked. His father was buried next to him, also in an unmarked grave. Let them have their peace. Dan and Steve were buried side by side. Let them lie there, don’t identify them. The families didn’t want people to know exactly where they were. I think things are in pretty good shape at the moment. The sites are there if people take the trouble to find them.