Thoughts Of Ned

from A History of Australia

Ned Kelly had a remarkable impact on the history of Australia. In his lifetime he left an impression on the minds of people such as John Monash, a bush boy in Jerilderie who rose to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, on J.B. Gribble, the missionary who achieved fame as \’the blackfellow\’s friend\’, on Dr Walter Richardson, the father of novelist Henry Handel Richardson, and on Isaac Isaacs, another bush boy who rose to the office of a High Court Judge and Governor-general of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Ned Kelly was a wild ass of a man, snarling, roaring and frothing like a ferocious beast when the tamer entered the cage. Mad Ireland had fashioned a man who consumed his vast gifts in an insensate war on property and on all the props of bourgeois civilisation – the police, the bankers, the squatters, the teachers, the preachers, the railway and the electric telegraph.

Ned Kelly became a legend during his own life, and a contributor to the mythology of the bush – the bush as a cradle of mateship, equality, the emphasis on the masculine virtues of strength, and the belief that the bush life was the cradle of much that was different from other lands, the cradle of the Australian, the cradle of the yearning for the life of the fearless, the free and the bold.

Because he was elevated by the bush people and the cultural nationalists to such an exalted role – and yet, paradoxically, was a man who had murdered three policemen – historians, biographers, poets, playwrights and film script writers have always had difficulty in sorting out the fact from the legend. They have also found it difficult not to take sides – some portraying Ned Kelly as a mad-dog bushranger, and others seeing him with the eye of pity as the victim of his harsh environment.