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Edward "Ned" Kelly (approx 1854-5 (DOB uncertain) – November 11, 1880) is Australia's most famous bushranger, and, to some, a folk hero for his defiance of colonial authorities.

Early life

Ned was born in Beveridge, Victoria just north of Melbourne, probably in December, 1854. As a boy he attended school and risked his life to save another boy who was drowning. As a reward he was given a sash, which he would wear under his armour during his final show down with police.

Ned's father died when Ned was only 12, and he was forced to leave school to help take care of his family. It was at this time that the Kelly family moved to the Glenrowan area of Victoria, which to this day is known as Kelly Country. Ned grew up in poverty in some of the harshest conditions in Australia, and folk tales tell of his sleeping on the ground in the bush during the Victorian winter.

Rise to notoriety

In 1869, when he was 14, Ned was arrested for assaulting a Chinese pig farmer named Ah Fook and for being an accomplice of bushranger Harry Power. He was found not guilty for both charges, but in 1870 he was arrested again for assault and sentenced to six months of hard labour. Three weeks after his release, he was arrested again for being in possession of a stolen horse. This time he was sentenced to three years of hard labour.

After his release he became involved in a cattle rustling operation with his brother Dan, which attracted the attention of the local police. Ned's sister Ellen also attracted the attention of Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick, who assaulted her on a visit to the Kelly home in 1878. Fitzpatrick accused Ned of attempted murder, and Ned went into hiding; in October, when the police eventually found him, he and his accomplices killed three of the policemen and escaped once more.

He robbed two banks at Euroa and Jerilderie in February, 1879, as he needed money to make suits of armour which he believed would protect him from the police.

At this time, he dictated a lengthy letter for publication describing his view of his activities and the treatment of his family and, more generally, the treatment of Irish Catholics by English and Irish Protestant police. The Jerilderie Letter, as it is called, discusses the possibility of an uprising, not only in Australia but in the United States and Ireland itself, against what he regarded as a gross injustice. Some accounts of the Kelly story see Ned as ultimately planning armed rebellion (some even assert that he aimed to declare the north-east of Victoria an independent republic), but his actions give little indication of such a role.

Capture and execution

The police caught onto his trail again in June, 1880. The Kelly Gang arrived in Glenrowan on June 27 and held about 60 hostages at the Glenrowan Inn, owned by the Jones family. The gang members brought with them armour that they had made themselves from the stolen iron mould boards of ploughs, earlier that year in a hideout in the Greta Swamps. Each man's armour weighed about 80 pounds; only Ned had a helmet, weighing about 15 pounds, as the other youths were not strong enough to carry the extra weight.

While holed up in the Glenrowan Inn, Ned and his gang's attempt to derail a special police train from Melbourne failed when a released hostage, schoolmaster Thomas Curnow, gave the alert, at great risk to his own life, by standing on the railway line near sunrise, waving a red scarf illuminated by a candle.

At about dawn on Monday, June 28 in the subsequent shootout with the police, Ned Kelly was shot twenty-eight times in the legs (sources vary, some saying six times), as his limbs were left unprotected by his armour. The other Kelly Gang members also died in the hotel, Joe Byrne allegedly by loss of blood due to a gunshot wound that severed his femoral artery, and Dan Kelly and Steve Hart by self-ingestion of poison (autopsies were not performed).

Ned Kelly survived to stand trial, and was sentenced to death by Judge Redmond Barry who had tried him on previous occasions for lesser crimes. When the judge uttered the customary words "may God have mercy on your soul", Ned is reported to have replied "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go". He was hanged on November 11 at the Melbourne Gaol, his last words being "Ah well I suppose it has come to this... Such is life".

More than sixty thousand Victorians signed a petition against Kelly's sentencing, and an inquiry was held in which all the police officers involved in Ned's exploits were either made redundant or demoted.

Cultural impact

One of the jails in which he was incarcerated has become the Ned Kelly Museum in Australia, and many weapons and artifacts used by him and his gang are in exhibit there. Some people have referred to him as the Billy the Kid of Australia.

Since his death Kelly has become part of Australian folklore, and the subject of a large number of books and several films. To some, he is a folk hero, to others a common thug whose crimes were brutal and entirely for personal gain. The distinctive homemade armour he wore for his final unsuccessful stand against the police was the subject of a famous series of paintings by Sydney Nolan.

Books

The Last of the Bushrangers, by F. A. Hare was published in London in 1892. A. Bertram Chandler's novel Kelly Country (1983) is an alternate history in which Kelly leads a successful revolution; the result is that Australia becomes a world power. Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang was published in 2000, and was awarded the 2001 Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Films

One of the world's first feature length films was The Story of the Kelly Gang released in 1906, with a then-unprecented running time of 70 minutes. Mick Jagger starred in a 1970 film (see 1970 in film), directed by Tony Richardson, running 1 hour, 43 minutes.

In 2003, Ned Kelly, a $30 million budget movie about Kelly's life was released. Directed by Gregor Jordan, it starred Heath Ledger (as Kelly), Orlando Bloom, Geoffrey Rush, and Naomi Watts. Based on Robert Drewe's book Our Sunshine, the film covers the period from Kelly's arrest for horse theft as a teenager, to the Kelly gang's armour-clad battle at Glenrowan, and attempts to portray the events from the perspectives of Kelly, and also of the authorities responsible for his capture and prosecution.

External links

• Images and transcript of the Jerilderie Letter at the State Library of Victoria.
• Iron Outlaw
• Convict Creations page on Ned Kelly
• IMDb: Ned Kelly (2003)

• Australian people