Another Kelly Myth Implodes!

The following is a story that promoters of the Kelly legends wouldn’t want you to read, even though it’s a true story about what happened to a family of poor Irish Catholic migrants to Australia in 1841. The  reason Kelly sympathisers wouldn’t want you to read this story is because it undermines the myth they want you to  believe  about poor Irish Catholics in Victoria at that time, that everything was stacked against them and that their lot was one of Police harassment and persecution, exploitation and poverty. What their myth teaches is that the Kellys were just another God fearing  Irish Catholic pioneer family, struggling not only against the elements,  but something far worse, a British colonial system that was actively prejudiced against all of them and determined to dominate and oppress them.  Heroically of course, Ned Kelly decided to fight back against this injustice  – and if they became ‘criminals’, they were ‘police-made criminals’ -  or so the Kelly’s would have us believe. This story shows otherwise.

So what would a poor Irishman, his wife and eight children, yes, a family of ten have to look forward to when they arrived almost penniless in Melbourne, in the winter of 1841? They had fled the Irish famine which killed a couple of million people, but arrived in Melbourne ‘at a disastrous time. Falling wool prices, a punctured land boom and rampant imports brought a four year depression…businesses crumbled with bankrupts paying as little as a farthing in the pound..”  And of course if we are to accept the Kelly legend, the whole ‘system’ was stacked against them. Had they leapt from the frying pan only to find themselves in the fire?

It simply MUST have been really hard going, to arrive with almost nothing and a large family, and to provide even the barest of the necessities of everyday life from day one. However, our poor Irish immigrant told his young family they had come to Australia to ‘improve their position’ so he set to work and took a job as a Porter. This work would have been poorly paid so perhaps he worked long hours, or had two jobs, but eventually he had enough to rent some land and buy some cows and bullocks. Now, his wife and the older children could help with the work, milking the cows while he carted goods and sold firewood in Melbourne. It seems they all worked incredibly hard so that by 1849 they were able to rent a bigger property 30 miles from Melbourne.

The following year, his eldest son tragically drowned, but in  Melbourne, his second eldest daughter married a man called John, a fellow Irishman with a convict background who had also arrived in Melbourne with nothing, but he knew bush carpentry and how to split logs and do fencing.  He was permitted to build a small dwelling on his father-in-laws property and worked for him in what by now had become a lucrative trade breeding and trading in cattle and horses.  John briefly joined the Gold rush and returned with enough money to leave the farm with his wife and baby daughter and buy land of his own, 41 acres, two miles away, at Beveridge. In 1859 he bought more land totaling 21 acres as well as two half-acre township allotments. He built a house, and things were really looking up.

 

The house red Built at Beveridge

John was of course  ‘Red’ Kelly, his wife was Ellen by now the mother of Ned, and her father, the Irish immigrant who had arrived penniless in 1841was James Quinn.  In 1856 James’ 15 long years of hard work paid off and he bought 422 acres of his own next to his rented land. Later James Quinn challenged the right of the Roads Board to cut his property in two with a new road, and won compensation, and then in 1864 paid  £2000 for a 20,000 acre lease on the King River, Glenmore Station. Another land owner not far away in the King Valley with a  quite similar story, was James Whitty. He also was an Irish catholic who arrived penniless and by dint of hard work and clever business deals also became a wealthy landowner.

This is the point at which its necessary to take stock, to look at the fortunes of the Quinns and of his daughter and son-in-law Red Kelly,  and of Whitty, and ask where is the tale of oppresson and persecution, of being deliberately kept poor, of harassment and provocation? These people were all poor Irish Catholics, penniless and powerless on their arrival in Melbourne, yet they went on to lead useful and comfortable lives and gained the respect of their communities, with no hint of hindrance or interference by colonial powers. The truth is, that up to this point the story is one of freedom to work, to travel, to buy and sell land, to marry and to come and go in pursuit of ones own dreams, and for people willing to work very hard, of reaping the rewards. Remarkably, James Quinn challenged the Government in the Courts and won compensation – something the Kelly myth would never have predicted was possible in a system they claimed was so loaded against them. This story is most definitely NOT a story of  ‘suffering innocents’ and persecution by a malign Police force and corrupt authorities.

The rest of the story unfortunately fails to live up to the promise of the early years, John Kelly dying in poverty only seven years after he bought his second property at Beveridge. However his tragic decline wasn’t a result of Police persecution; it was a direct result of his fondness for alcohol, and the effect this had on his farming ventures, and his ability to survive through a drought. The farms failed and as a result he sold up at a loss and moved even further north, to Avenel. He drifted deeper into poverty, and only then was there any involvement of the Law in his life, when he stole a calf and killed it for food in mid 1865. Here, rather than observing an example of what the Kelly myth would predict - harsh and unfair treatment by Police and the Judiciary -  we observe lenience as he was convicted of the lesser charge of being illegally in possession of a cow hide. The sentence was a fine of £25, or, if unable to pay the fine, six months in Gaol, which is where he went.  Ian Jones writes “he was probably released in the first week of October with a generous remission of more than two months” – that ‘generous remission’ once again disproving the Kelly myth of poor Irish Catholics, and the Kellys in particular as always being mistreated and discriminated against by the Authorities. In December he was fined 5 shillings for being drunk and disorderly, but that was the last time the law took any interest in him. In 1866 “Red fought a losing battle with the farm and with booze. His liver and heart suffered.  As the year rotted away Ned helplessly watched his father destroy himself” (Ian Jones A short Life 2008 Edition p30) He died on December 27^th aged 45, a terribly sad and tragic end to a life that came so close to breaking the shackles of a convict past. But lets be very clear about this : Red Kellys demise, and the poverty and deprivation that Ellen Kelly found herself in by 1866 when Ned was 11, was NOT a result of Police persecution or harassment by authorities with a prejudice against Irish selectors : it was a result of Red Kellys alcoholism. - nothing to do with the Police, nothing to do with the Law , nothing to do with ’the system’.  The truth is that no matter how fervently Kelly sympathisers might want to look elsewhere and for someone else to blame for this tragedy, its the Kellys themselves that were responsible.  How different the history of North East Victoria might have been if he had beaten the drink and been there to provide a positive role-model for Ned and Dan as they grew up, and teach them the values of hard work and patience, and respect for law and order? We will never know.

James Quinn on the other hand continued to prosper, and wasn’t victimized by the Police, or brought before the Courts, but even though he set a fine example of the value of determination and hard work it seems these lessons were lost on some of his children. In 1856 his 15 year old son Jimmy (James Jnr) was charged with possession of stolen cattle but was discharged. In 1860 he was jailed for six weeks following a conviction for Assault, but on another assault charge and one of Horse stealing he received the benefit of the doubt and wasn’t convicted. The Kelly myths would have you believe the Police were picking on him; but as Ian Jones says (p18) ‘If this is true he also received the benefit of the doubt three times out of four – as he would in another Horse stealing  case almost as soon as he was released from Prison. Less lucky on a charge of Illegally using a Horse he served a four month sentence. Tall darkly good looking young Jimmy had begun a long career of crime, most of it generated by a volcanic temper that led him into a succession of brawls and sometime murderous assaults, punctuated by a few stock thefts. Cause and effect can be debated but he emerged as a dangerous unpredictable ratbag of a man, rarely out of trouble’ 

Some years later, another insight into the dark character of this man is provided by his readiness to assist the Kellys supposed  enemies, the Police to catch Harry Power. Working with Jack Lloyd, another of Neds uncles, he received a share of the Police reward of £500, but shortly after, when Ned was a meager £10 short of meeting the fines he was ordered to pay after his convictions in relation to the McCormick affair, neither of those two men was prepared to help him out. As a result Ned served an extra three months hard labour - so much for the Kelly clan solidarity!

Its interesting to compare Jimmy with his older brother Jack , who also seems to have flirted with a life of crime. In 1860 Jack was charged with Horse stealing and later in the year for cattle stealing, and the following year with Robbery under Arms but on every occasion he escaped a conviction. Many years later he was named as a sympathizer but wasn’t ever again before the Courts. Again we see another scenario that doesn’t match the Kelly myth of  Police-made-criminals, of oppression and unfair treatment in the Courts. Instead what actually happened was that the Law treated Jack Quinn correctly and even though there may have been smoke Police couldn’t find a fire and he was discharged every time. If  Jacks involvement with the Law was a result of a corrupt system and Police harassment, why was he never convicted of anything and why was he left alone from 1861?

As for Jimmy, which Kelly sympathizer then or now would be so foolish as to suggest that poverty and deprivation and a system biased against Irish Catholics was to blame for what he became, that Jimmy was a ‘police made criminal’?  The Kelly sympathisers own ‘doyen’, Ian Jones says Jimmy Quinns problem was his personality, his volcanic temper. Jones obviously doubts the "we were picked on” refrain of the Kellys and their supporters. 


What I am showing here, from historical facts and not  the conjecture and ‘family tradition’ which make up the Kelly myths, is that there was NOT widespread victimisation by the Police and by the Authorities generally, of poor irish immigrants.  In fact the evidence largely supports the exact opposite of the Kelly myth. This myth is an invention of the Kelly believers, an old trick of habitual criminals  world wide hoping to elicit sympathy and support by disingenuously claiming  they’re innocent and being picked on, singled out for no particular reason, other than prejudice and suspicion of anyone poor and Irish. 

The reality is that when the Police took an interest in the Kellys, it was for legitimate purposes related to maintaining Law and Order. That was one of the main findings of the 'Royal Commission of enquiry into the Circumstances of the Kelly Outbreak’ 1881, an enquiry Sympathisers like to selectively quote from, but this finding, an answer to the first of the listed purposes of the Commissions Inquiry, is another thing they wouldn’t want you to read!