BOOK REVIEW: “Mrs Kelly” by Grantlee Kieza :

Ellen Kellys life was different from the thousands of other Irish immigrant women who settled in Victoria in the 19^th century because of one thing : she gave birth to Ned Kelly, an Australian with a combination of social and character traits that resulted in him becoming a notorious outlaw. If it hadn’t been for Ned she would probably just have been another forgotten woman who like many others of her time, was poor, married young, never learned to read or write properly, had many babies and lost several of them, was widowed and married again, raised grandchildren, worked extremely hard all her life just to survive, and rode horses.  In those difficult days, it wasn't unusual for a mother to lose an infant or two, but it was still tragic, but Ellen also lost  a daughter in childbirth and another by drowning,  she lost a son in a police siege and another by hanging, and endured the lifelong shame of being the mother of a notorious police killler, who's life and death is the only reason we know about Ellens.   The exploits of her son Ned greatly added to the hardships and the sorrow she was forced to endure to the very end of her long life. 

Grantlee Kiezas biography of Ellen is therefore necessarily largely about Ned, the  forty three years of her life after Ned was hanged occupying just the last two of this big books twenty six chapters, and most of ten chapters in the middle are about the 'Outbreak', events which Ellen had no part in because she was in Gaol for all of it. 

In reality therefore this biography is a new telling of the entire Kelly story, and its clear Kieza hasn’t simply relied on the hand-me-down Kelly story told by the usual suspects starting with Kenneally and ending at Fitzsimons. Instead he has done his own original research, a great and reassuring strength of this book– and created a work that is very heavily referenced from start to finish - chapter three has 124 references !

Kieza has pieced the story together convincingly and without sentimentality about either the Kellys or the Police. There were many interesting details that others may have known but which I hadn’t come across before, or else were things only mentioned in passing but here exposed in sometimes hideous detail – like Jack Lloyds brutal slaying with an axe of a neighbours horse. Who knew one of Harry Powers victims was called Charles Dickens?  Who knew that Mrs Catherine McCormick, the infertile woman that Ned insulted so disgracefully, was only 4foot 10 inches tall? Who’s ever read about the young worker at Kilfera Station who refused an offer of  £50 from the Police to tell them where the Kelly gang was because “I have a mother and father keeping a a little farm not far off and if I told anything they would be murdered and burnt” Keiza then wrote “There are  many more people who either sympathise with the Kelly’s or are afraid of them” These statements are referenced to the Age, Novmber 13^th 1878, p3, a reference that I regretfully could not  find in Kelvyn Gills “Definitive Record”.

This book differs from other books on the Kelly story because the focus is taken off Ned to enable a much wider field of view. What is revealed more clearly than anything Ive ever read before is how the Quinns, the Lloyds and the Kellys created such a chaotic maelstrom of criminality around Ellen and her family. There was an almost constant parade of drunken violence, of theft, of petty lawlessness and squabbling that Red and Ellen Kelly  struggled to separate themselves from, but inevitably got drawn into.  By 1857 “the Kellys now have about 50 Irish relatives living nearby and eventually the Kellys Quinns and Lloyds will be the most prolific family in NE Victoria”

The image created of Ned Kelly in this book will not please the modern Kelly Gang descendants and the sympathisers, because wisely Kieza has avoided the trap of most other biographers, of accepting Ned Kellys words as Gospel. The wise thing to do once you realize how unreliable Ned Kellys word is – in other words that he was a notorious and seemingly congenital liar – is to largely ignore Kellys version of events,  ignore the modern Kelly mythology and look at the record instead. Thus, in relation to Ned Kellys arrest for drunkenness he writes “Ned wakes up with a mighty hangover  the next morning complaining that he feels dazed and that he must have been drugged. He has an excuse for everything”. And later, after describing the fight when Ned refused to be handcuffed, and suffered the indignity of Lonigans ‘squirrel grip’ he writes “By his actions, though, Ned has turned the paltry drunk-and–disorderly offence into a major incident” 

He then goes on to describe how nine days later Dan Kelly and his cousins assaulted and robbed a storekeeper.

The Kelly descendants and sympathisers also wont be happy with Kiezas description of the three big moments in Kelly history : the ‘Fitzpatrick’ incident, Stringybark Creek and Glenrowan, because once again Neds lies and the modern myths are not the starting point of his narrative. Instead he largely lets the facts speak for themselves:

The Fitzpatrick incident : “Fitzpatrick is on a special mission that will lead him into the pages of infamy. Ned Kelly will say that the two years of murders and robberies that followed this day were the fault of Fitzpatrick. He will warn the Victorian Government during his reign of terror that the young policeman will be the cause of greater slaughter to the union Jack than St Patrick was to the snakes and toads in Ireland. Still, Ned will not be the first criminal to look for a scapegoat”

Stringybark Creek : “ All this time, Ned and Dan hiding in the undergrowth watch the four policemen. …….Ned and Dan retreat for a council of war with Joe and Steve at the Bullock creek hut. They could high-tail it out of there, but Neds predilection for violence imperils everyone yet again”

“Ned will say later that he thought he was watching Flood and Strahan – as though that will somehow justify his activities on that day – but there is nothing wrong with his eyesight, as subsequent events demonstrate. He cradles theold sawn off .577 carbine”

“As Sergeant Kennedy worries how his family will get on without him, Ned blows a huge hole in his chest.

Then he takes his watch”

Glenrowan : “Decades later one of his relatives will claim that Ned had plans to mount a revolution but his supporters would need brains of iron to follow this bleeding wreck carrying a metal mask” This is the only reference in this book to the modern myth promoted by Ian Jones in the 1960’s about a Republic of North East Victoria. There is no actual historical evidence for it, so Kieza rightly ignores the myth.

Chapter 11, which is where Ellens part in the outbreak starts and ends, is about the so called 'Fitzpatrick incident' and should be studied by every Kelly fancier. Kieza brilliantly exposes the messy web of lies, fabrications, changes of story, inconsistencies and absurdities in the accounts given by the Kellys and their friends in attempting to deny what they were accused of doing to Fitzpatrick, who by contrast maintained a  consistent, unwavering and coherent account of that night for the rest of his days. But Kieza hasn't been taken in by Neds lies and  is having none of the Kelly mythology and ends the Chapter with this:

"Now, having plunged Ellen into the worst crisis of her life Ned Dan and Joe gallop away from Greta into the blackness of the night.

In the early hours of 16th April 1878 they leave Ellen to face the full force of the law, with only her small children and poverty as company. The attempted murder of a police officer is a capital crime that carries the penalty of death by hanging.

Once again Ned Kellys propensity for violence has caused his family immeasurable grief.

Little Alice is now just three days old and Ellen is left holding the baby"

But what of the Police? Well personally I didn’t want to read about Police blunders, mistakes, brutality and misdemeanours, not because I want to pretend they didn’t happen but because every other Kelly narrative has exaggerated these Police failings into a massive anti-Kelly conspiracy theory, in conformity with what the paranoid Ned Kelly claimed. I wouldn’t want to give that delusional myth the least chance of  surviving a new look at the Kelly outbreak but in a properly even-handed way Keiza doesn’t hesitate to point out the police faults in the conduct of the hunt for the Kelly Gang. He says Brooke-Smith was “a blundering ditherer and bully hopelessly out of his depth as the Officer in charge of the Kelly district” and he discusses the depraved actions of Police and soldiers at Eureka and at the killing of bushranger ‘Mad dog’ Morgan. 

So, while the Police are not let off the hook by any means and Kieza accurately reports Ned Kelly's frequent claim that he is a victim of police persecution,  he is also careful to point out that the Royal Commission found no evidence that such persecution actually took place: "No evidence has been adduced to support the allegation that either the Outlaws or their friends were subjected to  persecution or unnecessary annoyance at the hands of the police"

It is indeed a warts and all account of the Kelly story, the life of Ellen being a loose thread that runs through the middle of it, from well before to well after Ned Kelly lived. She was a spirited and tough woman who was a largely a victim of the behavior of the men in her life, from Red to Bill Frost and George King, but mostly of her son Ned. He was not a hero or an admirable revolutionary but  'a very dangerous criminal', as Grantlee Kieza declared in an ABC TV interview, and as he makes clear in the book, not so much by asserting it but by telling the story and letting the facts speak for themselves. This book is a terrific read and makes a major contribution to the gathering body of work that at last is correcting the Ian Jones inspired mythology of Ned Kelly, and replacing it with historical truth. It wont change the minds of any of the Kelly gang descendants or of the dwindling ranks of modern Kelly sympathisers because theyre only interested in the Kelly fairy tales. Nothing will ever change a closed mind, but, as I keep saying about this Blog, those people are not my target audience and they are not the target audience of this great new book. The target audience is everyone genuinely interested in properly researched Australian history, and I believe that  if the only book they ever read about the Kelly story is this one, they will learn from it just about all they need to know.

Grantlee Kieza : you’ve written a terrific Kelly book. Well done Sir!