Did John Monash Meet Ned Kelly?

Sir John Monash on the back of our $100 note. Dame Nellie Melba is on the front.
They were both born in Victoria and died in 1931.

The Ned Kelly Forum Facebook Page has recently informed its readers that when he was a schoolboy, WWI hero General John Monash had a chance meeting with Ned Kelly. It happened, according to the NKF report, in the midst of the Gangs raid on the Bank at Jerilderie, a meeting Monash is reported to have described as one of the two proudest moments of his life.

A number of NKF Members responded with thanks at being provided with this interesting information and the NKF Member who calls himself a “Neducator” boasted about his role in getting Peter Fitzsimons to include this anecdote in his 2014 Ned Kelly biography, writing:

“It took quite a bit of convincing to get Peter FitzSimons to include this incident in his Ned Kelly book as Monash's own biographer Roland Perry said this event didn't actually occur (Monash meeting Ned)...Perry was wrong ...and i found the actual interview and gave it to Peter...which he thought was fantastic to include in his book ‪http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/17137438...”

The problem with this story is that much of it is wrong! For a start, the Neducator is wrong to claim that Perry said  ‘this event didnt actually occur'. You don’t even have to buy the book to see he’s wrong - just look the book up on Amazon, use the ‘Look inside’ function and scroll down to Chapter Two : "An awe struck John Monash had the courage to approach Ned. According to Monash they chatted for a while. Kelly gave him a shilling to mind his horse”

The ‘Neducators’ second mistake was to believe that the meeting took place during the Gangs raid on the bank at Jerilderie. We know this is false because when the raid took place,  John Monash no longer lived in Jerilderie where his father ran a store, but with his mother in Melbourne where they had both moved to assist in Johns schooling. His father Louis remained a shopkeeper in Jerilderie in NSW and John had visited him for Xmas but then returned to Melbourne, some 350km away for the rest of the summer.  The  Jerilderie robbery occurred only a couple of days before the start of the new term at Johns school, Scotch College in Melbourne,  so he couldn’t possibly have met Ned Kelly at the time of the raid. When Ned was robbing the Bank at Jerilderie, John Monash was in Melbourne.

So what are we to make of the story that Monash apparently told of  having once met Ned ? There are two possibilities : either Monash got his dates confused or else he - or someone else - made the whole thing up!

In regard to the former possibility, it has been suggested that perhaps Monash and Kelly met about a year earlier, when the Kellys were engaged in their more regular criminal work of stock theft.  Perry says that Monash told of his fathers purchase of a horse from Ned Kelly who brought them to his home, and of receiving a shilling from Ned for holding his horse. In the newspaper article referred to by the Neducator quite a different story is told - the meeting happened on the verandah of the Hotel where the Gang was quartered, and Ned gave John Monash 'a short lecture. A Sunday school superintendent couldn’t have given me better advice as to human conduct.’ In another place, Monash is reported to have said  Kelly sold his father  four white ponies.

The reason people wonder if Monash was making the whole thing up was not just these  obvious discrepancies between the various tellings of it : theres also the fact that Monash was a prolific writer of letters and a diary-keeper from a young age - but this event doesn’t appear in any of these writings, an absence made harder to understand by the claims he is purported to have later made that this meeting was one of the two proudest moments of his life. In fact he is not known to have mentioned this anywhere until after the end of the First World War, 40 years later.

A more recent biography of Monash, by Grantlee Kieza,  citing a reference from the Argus of 1942, makes this rather sceptical comment:

'We only have his word for it that he had a long meeting with one of Australias most  colourful and infamous criminals but he will recite the story so many times that it acquires the flavour of truth’

Earlier in the same book he wrote of Monash attending a reception at Buckingham Palace, seated alongside Churchill, media Barons and Rudyard Kipling:

“Monash has his own stories to tell the guests surrounding him. He can spin tales as fascinating as any Kipling ever dreamed up. He has been talking himself up since boyhood...’

and later he wrote 

'Monash has been fashioning his own astonishing story from boyhood when he claimed to have met a big-bearded horse thief named Ned Kelly...’

The reality of course is that having a reputation for spinning tales, or failing to record something in a diary, or mention it to a single soul for 40 years doesn’t prove this meeting between Ned and John Monash didnt occur. These facts don’t make it impossible that such a meeting took place but it must raise a doubt about it, something which even Peter Fitzimons realized, prefacing his remarks about this event with the comment ‘it will be disputed by some’ – obviously he wasn’t altogether convinced by the “Neducators” pitch.

But the issue at stake here  in this Kelly Legend discussion is not actually whether or not John Monash met Ned Kelly - in the end, its an insignificant minor detail in the wider Kelly saga of no real importance. Whats at stake here is the integrity of people and websites and Facebook places claiming to be informing us about history, and in this instance of Kelly history. This conversation on the NKF Facebook page is yet another  illustration of  badly done history telling and is an example of the way in which Kelly mythology is sustained - by badly done history telling, or in other words misinformation. If they did history properly there would be no Kelly mythology. Actually when you think about it, the idea that Monash - an erudite, multilingual, travelled and brilliant military man, scholar, engineer, father and proven leader  with a lifetime of achievement and accolade - would nominate meeting Ned Kelly, a horse thief and nothing more at the time of the alleged meeting as one of the two most proud moments of his life is an absurdity. The only agenda that promotion of this story suits is that of the Kelly myth makers.

Its perfectly possible to imagine the evolution of a story about 'something that happened 40 years ago in my town', to 'well yes I was there’ to ‘and I actually met Ned’ to ‘and I held his horse’ - one embellishment leads to another, and its easy enough to justify it to oneself as a bit of harmless fun.

What was needed here was for the NKF member reading that newspaper article to have applied a little analysis and critical thought to the topic. Doesn’t everyone know that you never believe what you read in the newpapers?  He could have asked himself why was this not published at the time of the supposed interview rather than four years later when the great man was dead? Instead of rushing to print , like a trashy Gossip columnist, the NKF could have done a little reading about the  subject as I have done, and these days with the Internet and TROVE and so many resources available at our fingertips there is no excuse for not doing this. There is even less excuse for someone purporting to be a ‘neducator’ to get it so badly wrong.  But if this work had been done, and the uncertainties and problems with the story explored then a useful and interesting post could have been made about the possible meeting between Ned and Monash that might have provoked others to think about and perhaps even do their own research.

But instead of a useful and informative discussion, we have  misinformation, and visitors to that FB page being misled.  I wrote about a similar tactic at the Kelly Vault in relation to a piece of steel Darren Sutton found and believes is a piece of Joe Byrnes armour. There is actually an interesting story to be told there about its discovery and the controversy in relation to its true identity - and it wont be resolved until Darrens book is published later this year – but in the meantime it would have reflected better on the integrity of the Vault for that controversy to have been acknowledged. Instead they labeled the origin of the metal as ‘beyond doubt’.

People purporting to tell us facts about Australian history need to be a whole lot more careful. The Internet has a deserved reputation as a repository for all kinds of nonsense and misinformation, put out there by all manner of  deluded amateurs who think they’re  experts, and with this latest example, The Ned Kelly Forum Facebook page is enhancing that perception. They need to get their act together when it comes to making claims about Kelly history -  indeed all the Kelly Facebook pages do - because if they don’t before much longer they will have destroyed any hope they may have of  their story ever being regarded as believable.