Ned Kellys Letters reveal the pathetic truth about him

On November 3^rd, 5^th and 10^th 1880 in the Condemned Cell at Melbourne Gaol, Ned Kelly dictated three more letters, his last. They were addressed  to the Governor  of Victoria and contain Kelly’s final attempts at defending his actions and pleading his case.

In the first, dated November 3^rd, he mostly concentrates on the Fitzpatrick affair, and he repeats his claim to have been “a great many miles from the place at the time” something which even Ian Jones accepts is a lie. He also briefly discusses the events at Stringybark Creek.  McIntyre’s testimony undermined Ned’s claim that he killed Lonigan in self defence , so Ned has a go at McIntyres testimony, writing “You will see, if McIntyres statements are compared, the disparity, without me making further mention”.  One of the disparities Ned points out is that in his statement about the original bail up at SBC, McIntyre claimed that the man “on the extreme right (was) armed with two guns” but Ned claims that in Court he said that the man on the extreme right had “only one gun and a revolver” . Ned was clearly clutching at straws if he thought identifying such a trivial semantic discrepancy would make a difference to anything. 

He also blames the death of the other two Policemen on McIntyre, and writes in the letter that McIntyre “told a falsehood” when Kennedy and Scanlan returned to the camp because he told them they were surrounded and should dismount and surrender. According to Ned, because of this “falsehood” Kennedy and Scanlan reacted in such a way that they ended up being shot. What McIntyre should have said, according to Ned, was that he (McIntyre) “was covered by Ned Kelly and three other armed men and not to move or they would be shot as Lonigan had got shot, and have pointed to the fact, then his companions would have understood their position…” 

This is what nowadays we call ‘blaming the victim’, wherein the person who actually did the crime says it was the victims fault, not his. The reality is that nobody knows how Scanlan and Kennedy might have responded to a different form of words, or how events would have unfolded if they had surrendered. My feeling is they would have been shot with the slightest of excuses, but its a moot point.

The next letter, quite a long one, was dictated on November 5^th and contains nearly 2000 words. It begins “I now take the liberty of bringing under your notice a statement of the facts of the Glenrowan affair”   Ned Kelly then provides in detail his version of  the entire episode from start to finish. At the end of the letter he states “ I don’t wish to trouble you any further with my case but if it was looked into in a proper manner, if witnesses were examined and which many of the Police force at Glenrowan at the time could prove, what I say is correct”

In fact, if Neds statements in this letter are looked into “in a proper manner” as he asks, they are quickly found to be very far from “correct”. More bluntly stated, this letter is full of very obviously self-serving lies, as he attempts to recast the events at Glenrowan in a wholly different light, a light makes Ned look a whole lot less sinister. 

I think that among Kelly buffs of all persuasions there is general agreement that Kelly planned to cause a catastrophic derailment of the Special Police train by secretly tearing up the tracks just past Glenrowan, and then, with the armour to protect them, the Gang would engage any survivors in a gun battle and hopefully kill them off. However, on the night in question Ned and Steve Hart were unable to rip up the tracks on their own, and were forced to find people who could – at gunpoint of course -  and thus it became necessary to bail them up at the Hotel afterwards to preserve the cloak of secrecy about the fate that was intended for the train. That is the established sequence of events.

However, the narrative supplied by Ned in this letter contradicts the known facts and offers a completely different sequence of events. In the first few lines of Neds “statement of the facts of the Glenrowan affair”, he asserts that his plan was not to wreck the train at all, but to get the Stationmaster simply to stop it at the Station. He writes that because Stanistreet wouldn’t guarantee that he could, Ned was forced to bail up various people and order them to tear up the railway tracks. This is the reverse of the order in which these things actually took place.  Ned deliberately conceals the fact that he at first tried but failed to lift the tracks himself, and that he intended the train to be stopped by a derailment at speed with the inevitable result that it would crash off the line into a gully and kill many of the people on board.

“The first thing I waited for was the last passenger train to pass at nine o’clock. I then bailed up a lot of men in tents around the stationmaster’s house as I suspected there were detectives amongst them. I then bailed up Mrs Jones’ Hotel, then Mr Stanistreet the stationmaster, and asked him if he could stop a special train with police and black trackers on. He said he could stop a passenger train, but would not guarantee to stop a special train with police and blacktrackers exactly where I wanted it. So then I bailed up the platelayers and overseer and ordered them to pull up the line a quarter of a mile past the station, so as the train could not go any further. My intention was to have the stationmaster to flash the danger light on the platform so as the stop the train, and he was to tell the police to leave their firearms and horses in the train and walk out with their hands over their heads, and their lives would be spared.”

Another outright lie that he attempts to pass off as a “statement of fact” is this remarkable claim:

“Then I let a man go to stop the train about a mile below the railway station and opposite the police barracks and to tell them that they were in the barracks. He had a double-barrel fowling piece and cartridges to fire as a signal for me if the police got out and surrounded the barracks….”

Here of course he is referring to Thomas Curnow, the brave man who stopped the train and saved many lives after he tricked Ned into letting him go free from the Ann Jones Inn. Here Ned tries to cover his embarrassment by claiming that rather than being tricked by Curnow, it was Neds idea all along to have someone go back and stop the train, and it was he who sent Curnow to do it. This is simply nonsense. These statements are either deliberate lies, or else they are coming from a man who is seriously out of touch with reality.

Kelly writes in this letter that his original plan had been to capture senior Police and hold them hostage until his mother was released from Prison. But then he writes that he decided instead to take possession of the train and head back up the line to rob banks. You will never believe the reason he gives for deciding to abandon his plan to attempt to free his mother and rob banks instead:

“The reason I differed from the first plan is I wanted the man that stopped the train to have the reward, as I heard it was to be done away with in three days.”

The idea that Ned would have changed the entire plan from hostage taking to bank robbing to help Thomas Curnow in preference to helping his own mother is simply preposterous. Does ANYONE believe this?  If Ned Kelly did then we would have to seriously reconsider the notion that Ned was fanatically devoted to his mother.  The kindest interpretation of this sort of bizarre nonsense is to say that it reflects the desperation of a condemned man with less than a week to live, making a last frantic attempt to spin a tale that might excuse him and thereby almost miraculously save him from the inevitable gallows.

Ian Jones mentions the November 5^th letter in A Short Life, and briefly discusses Neds  revised plan to assist Curnow to get the reward money. However he avoids drawing anyones attention to the claim by Ned that to help Curnow, Ned  abandoned his plan to help his mother, a quite sensational revelation, that puts Ned in a very poor light. Jones writes “It all seems an aberration of the moment”

But is it an aberration? Thinking about it, rather than an “aberration” I believe these lies and self serving attempts to rewrite history are actually not much different to the style of Neds  outpourings in the Jerilderie Letter, wherein he also attempts to rewrite history and to blame everyone else for his troubles. In the Jerilderie Letter Ned Kelly blames Whitty for his decision to become a stock thief, blames McCormick for the punch he received from Ned’s fist, tells lies about his whereabouts at the time of the Fitzpatrick incident, blames Fitzpatrick for his mothers imprisonment, blames a spiked drink on his misbehavior when drunk, claims he killed the Policemen in self defence…

All that seems to have happened is that the desperate and extreme confines of Death Row have resulted in letters which contain the most desperate and extreme examples of the way Ned habitually approached reality and explained himself. As in the Jerliderie letter, here he is once again using lies and self serving re-interpretations of events to cast himself in a better light and try to absolve himself of responsibility for what took place. The major difference of course is that he no longer has the freedom, or the weaponry to threaten violence and mayhem to anyone who doesn’t do as he demands. Instead he has to try to convince them that they have the story all wrong, and like a child he somehow seems to imagine that adults might be persuaded by his quite preposterous and easily demonstrable lies. Why else would he have told them?

There are a couple of other things about this letter that also seem to have escaped commentary.  The first is that in style and  content it is at odds with the “I-don’t-pretend-to-have-lived-a-blameless-life” letter and adds significant weight to the argument that Gaunson was indeed the main author of it. 

The second much more important  point to consider is that these are the last words of a man purported to have been planning to establish some kind of a Republic of North East Victoria,  a man apparently motivated by some sort of ethical position about the rights of the poor, about Justice and about the immorality of Police behaviour, a man whose grand political vision has been brought to an ignominious and violent end. But where, in all these letters is even a SINGLE word about this vision, this dream that he risked everything to realise? Where does the defeated but defiant visionary state his case for the Republic, invoke noble sentiment about freedom and justice and a higher cause, make the expected rallying call to arms or at least to the cause, urging the Sympathisers not to abandon the noble cause but to continue the fight for justice? The answer of course is he doesn’t, and the reason he doesn’t is that such thoughts and sentiments were never in his head. He was not a visionary. He was not planning a revolution. These last letters, wherein Ned Kelly had nothing to lose by giving voice to his deepest convictions and greatest visions, contain not a single whisper about anything to do with a Republic or anything like it, and in truth, prove the completely fanciful nature of Ian Jones proposition that there was ever such a dream. There is nothing in these letters about his family, about the poor, about anything noble or grand, no concern is expressed for the deaths of hostages or Police, or even of his own brother and the other Gang members - instead these letters are about self justification, and are full of lies and childish attempts to rewrite history in a naive hope that they might be believed, that Glenrowan wasn’t about murder but about Bank robbery, that Curnows bravery was Neds idea, that the Police got it all wrong. To curry favour he even pretends that he was planning to throw his own mother under the bus in preference to Curnow. A true visionary and leader wouldn’t have wanted his last words to be so utterly self centred and backward looking. A true visionary and leader might at least have simply told the truth.

I wish I hadn’t waited so long to get around to reading these letters, because they reveal so much more about who the man Ned Kelly REALLY was. Being his own words, they provide a direct view into his thoughts and motivations and reveal much more than do any oral  historical traditions, police records, Newspaper accounts and other peoples biographies and opinions of him. I also wish that the horde of Kelly buffs who have lauded Ned so comprehensively over the years, right up to the latest effort by Peter Fitzsimons, had not engaged in a kind of cover-up of the implications of the content of this letter in particular. Mostly they ignore all the difficult stuff and all they quote from it is the last sentence :  “I should have made a statement of my whole career but my time is so short on earth that I have to make the best of it and prepare myself for the other world”  What a shame that the time he did spend making statements was wasted by his inability to tell the truth.

The meaning of these letters is not that Death Row transformed Ned into something that he wasn’t, that the writing in these letters is an “aberration”. I think its exposed him for what he always was, and its not a good look. Its actually quite sad and pathetic. I once asked the question “Did Ned Kelly ever grow up?” The answer, given what he wrote in the last week of his life, is “No, he didnt."