User:Aemilius Adolphin/Ned Kelly draft

Aftermath and lessons

In March 1881, the Victorian Government approved a Royal Commission into the conduct of the Victoria Police during the Kelly Outbreak. Over the next six months, the commission, chaired by Francis Longmore, held 66 meetings, examined 62 witnesses, and visited towns throughout "Kelly Country". While its report found that the police had acted properly in relation to the criminality of the Kellys, it exposed widespread corruption and shattered a number of police careers in addition to that of Chief Commissioner Frederick Standish. Numerous other officers, including senior staff, were reprimanded, demoted or suspended. It concluded with a list of 36 recommendations for reform. Kelly hoped that his death would lead to an investigation into police conduct, and although the report did not exonerate him or his gang, its findings were said to strip the authorities "of what scanty rags of reputation the Kellys had left them."

The £8,000 reward money was divided among various claimants with £6,000 going to members of the Victoria Police, Superintendent Hare receiving the lion's share of £800. Curnow complained about his payout of £550, and the following year it was upgraded to £1,000. Seven Aboriginal trackers involved in the siege were each awarded £50, but their money was given to the Victorian and Queensland governments for safekeeping, the Reward Board's argument being, "It would not be desirable to place any considerable sum of money in the hands of persons unable to use it."

There was media and police speculation that there would be further outbreaks of violence in north-eastern Victoria following Kelly's execution. Jones and Dawson argue that changes in policing methods reduced this threat. The police held informal discussions with the Kelly family to ensure them that they would be treated fairly if they kept the peace. The police no longer pursued a policy of dispersing the Kelly family and sympathisers by denying them land in north-eastern Victoria, but rather explicitly tied access to land to lawful behaviour. During the Longmore Royal Commission there were threats of violence and intimidation against people who had assisted the police. Nevertheless, the police reported a reduction in horse and cattle theft and crime in general in the region following the end of the Kelly outbreak.

Legacy

The Kelly myth

The Ned Kelly myth has become pervasive in Australian culture and Kelly is one of Australia's most recognised national symbols. Academic and folklorist Graham Seal writes:

Ned Kelly has progressed from outlaw to national hero in a century, and to international icon in a further 20 years. The still-enigmatic, slightly saturnine and ever-ambivalent bushranger is the undisputed, if not universally admired, national symbol of Australia.

Seal argues that the Ned Kelly story taps into a number of myths including the Robin Hood tradition of the outlaw hero and the myth of the Australian bush as a place of freedom from oppressive authority. Kelly is often seen as the embodiment of characteristics thought to be typically Australian such as defying authority, siding with the underdog and fighting bravely for one's beliefs. According to Ian Jones, after Kelly's death, "a Robin Hood-like figure survived: good-looking, brave, a fine horseman and bushman and a crack shot, devoted to his mother and sisters, a man who treated all women with courtesy, who stole from the rich to give to the poor, who dressed himself in his enemy's uniform to outwit him. Most of all a man who stood against the police persecutors of his family and was driven to outlawry when he defended his sister against a drunken constable. Such was Ned Kelly the myth[.]"

Seal states that Kelly was aware of the tradition of the bushranger-hero and attempted to live up to the myth. The Euroa and Jerilderie raids were partly public performances where the Kelly gang acted courteously to women, burned mortgage documents and entertained their hostages.

By the time Kelly was outlawed, the bushranger was an anachronism. Australia was highly urbanised, the telegraph and the railway were rapidly connecting the bush to the city, and Kelly was already an icon for a romanticised past. For Seal, the failure of the Kelly gang to derail the train at Glenrowan was a symbol of the triumph of modern civilisation. Macintyre states that Kelly turning agricultural equipment into defensive armour was an irresistible symbol of a passing era.

Seal concludes, "[T]he figure of Ned Kelly has led to the creation of a national image that bears some relation to the man himself — perhaps about the same resemblance as Ned Kelly's armour had to the plough mouldboards from which it was beaten....He is different things to different people — a murderer, an Australian Robin Hood, a social bandit, a revolutionary leader, even a commercial commodity. But to most of us he is somehow essentially Australian".

Cultural impact

Further information: Cultural depictions of Ned Kelly

Thanks to the telegraph, the siege at Glenrowan became a national and international media event. Songs, poems, popular entertainments, fiction, books, and newspaper and magazine articles about the Kelly gang proliferated in the decades after Kelly's death. By 1943 there were 42 major published works about Kelly.

Kelly has figured prominently in Australian cinema since the 1906 release of The Story of the Kelly Gang, the world's first dramatic feature-length film. Among those who have portrayed him on screen are Australian rules football player Bob Chitty (The Glenrowan Affair, 1951), rock musician Mick Jagger (Ned Kelly, 1970) and Heath Ledger (Ned Kelly, 2003). A comic film, Reckless Kelly (1993), drew on the Kelly legend.

In the visual arts, Sidney Nolan's 1946–47 Kelly series is considered "one of the greatest sequences of Australian painting of the twentieth century". His stylised depiction of Kelly's helmet has become an iconic Australian image. Hundreds of performers dressed as "Nolanesque Kellys" starred in the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

In literature, Douglas Stewart's verse drama Ned Kelly was first performed in 1942. Robert Drewe's Our Sunshine (1991) is a fictionalised account of the Glenrowan siege. In 2001, Peter Carey won the Man Booker Prize for his novel True History of the Kelly Gang, written from Kelly's perspective, which resulted in a 2019 film of the same name with the Anglo-Australian actor George MacKay portraying Kelly. The Ned Kelly Awards are Australia's premier prizes for crime fiction and true crime writing.

The first ballads about the Kelly gang were published in 1879 and it quickly became a popular genre. In 1939 Tex Morton recorded a country and western-style ballad about Kelly, and singers including Slim Dusty, Smoky Dawson and Buddy Williams followed. Non-Australian artists who have recorded songs about Kelly include Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash.

The term "Kelly tourism" describes towns such as Glenrowan which sustain themselves economically "almost entirely through Ned's memory", while "Kellyana" refers to the collecting of Kelly memorabilia, merchandise, and other paraphernalia. The phrase "such is life", Kelly's perhaps apocryphal final words, has become an oft-quoted part of the legend. "As game as Ned Kelly" is an expression for bravery, and the term "Ned Kelly beard" is used to describe a trend in "hipster" fashion. The rural districts of north-eastern Victoria are collectively known as "Kelly Country".

Controversy over political legacy

In 1969, Hobsbawm argued that Ned Kelly was in the tradition of the social bandit, a type of peasant outlaw and symbol of social rebellion with significant community support. Writing in 1979, McQuilton expanded on the social bandit thesis, arguing that the Kelly outbreak should be seen in the context of deteriorating economic conditions in rural Victoria in the 1870s and a conflict over land between selectors (mostly small farmers) and squatters (mostly wealthier pastoralists who had initially acquired their runs by "squatting" on Crown land). Jones, Moloney and others argue that Ned Kelly was a political rebel with considerable support among selectors and labourers in north-eastern Victoria. Jones claims that Kelly intended to derail the train at Glenrowan to incite a rebellion of disaffected selectors and declare a "Republic of North-eastern Victoria".

Others have disputed these claims. Morrissey argues that McQuilton and Jones have exaggerated the degree of economic distress and support for Kelly among local selectors. Dawson argues that Kelly did not draw up a republican declaration or plan a political rebellion, writing: "there is no mention of any such document, plan or intention in any record of Kelly’s day, nor in the numerous interviews and memoirs of those connected with the gang, or its prisoners who listened to Kelly’s speeches while held up, nor in the work of early historians of the outbreak who knew the Kellys, their gang, their sympathisers, or the pursuing police."

Seal states that Kelly proposed "a basic form of wealth distribution" in his Jerilderie Letter, when the outlaw suggested that the wealthy squatters of the district should establish a charitable fund for the local poor, orphans and widows. Morrissey sees the social justice element of the letter as a traditional call for the rich to help the poor with an additional argument that it is in their own interest to do so. While Kelly frequently complained of oppression by the police and squatters, and evoked historical Irish grievances against the English, his response was expressed in terms of a violent reckoning rather than a political program.