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.

Ned Kelly : The Man Behind the Mask

Unbelievably, already this year two new books have been published about Ned Kelly. The first was the appalling  “Ned : Knight in Aussie Armour’ by Eugenie Navarre which we reviewed over two Posts here a couple of weeks ago. Its such a dreadful publication that I am not surprised that not a single Kelly sympathizer has dared respond to these damning reviews and attempted to defend it, even though several of them made a big song and dance about its imminent release and the Book launch in Glenrowan. If they had any concern for the bloated and ever growing body of Kelly literature they ought now to be apologising for ever promoting it – nailing it to their dunny walls would be too decent a treatment of it!

“Bailed Up” Tom Roberts

The second 2016 Kelly Book is “Ned Kelly : The Man behind the Mask”  by Hugh Dolan.  I discovered it by accident at the bookshop of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, where I visited the awesome exhibition of the paintings of Tom Roberts. One of his most famous paintings  “Bailed up” depicts bushrangers holding up a coach on an outback bush track, and I suppose for this reason, among many others in the Exhibition souvenir shop there were a number of books about Bushranging, and inevitably, about Ned Kelly. This one was a modest $20.00, and is the third in a series published by Newsouth Books.

The author, somewhat surprisingly - given the long hair and green bow-tie he wore for his photo - is a retired Squadron Leader, which would explain why his first two works had war themes : one was about an Indigenous War Hero and the other about Gallipoli. He describes these books as  ‘factual graphic novels’ – or in other words ‘comics’ – and he wrote them for schoolchildren. Ive recently reviewed the way in which Kelly history is told in childrens books and found it universally badly done, so my heart sank – was this going to be another sloppy rehash of Kelly mythology masquerading as history teaching, made even easier to ingest by the use of cartoon  cowboy characters ? A further alarm bell went off in my head when I saw on the back cover “Violent Gunslinger or our greatest hero? Find out who Ned Kelly really was”

The book has a soft cover and runs to about 80 pages so can easily be read in one session. Hugh Dolan says that his starting point was a Kelly Country tour with Matt Shore the guy from the Kelly Vault, and says he will measure the books  success ‘by city folk touring the stunning vistas of the Kelly trail’.

 

Can anyone spot the Typo?

I have no idea at all about what the experts might say makes a good comic, but my guess is that this is a good one. The drawings are clear and uncrowded, and the tones are muted to give the whole thing a sort of old fashioned sepia quality. The text is minimal, the dialogues are simple and the text boxes informative. In fact the story told in this comic is surprisingly comprehensive, and I was impressed by the authors attempt to be impartial and fair to all sides. The good and the bad of the Kellys and of the Police are not exaggerated or disguised, and there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to make a hero out of Ned or demons out of the Police. Obviously in such a brief re-telling, theres very little opportunity to deal in depth with many of the contentious and controversial parts of the story, though I think all are touched on. However, there are three versions of the ‘Fitzpatrick incident’.

At the end, Dolan lists the 8 books he says were stacked on his desk for easy reference while doing the writing and it was pleasing to note one was Morrisseys “Ned Kelly A Lawless Life”. He also lists a few websites, and includes the Iron Outlaw Archive as a resource for its collection of newspaper articles and other documents.

Curiously, no link is provided in the book to something I found on Booktopias listing for this book (which they sell for $15.95) – a free downloadable Teachers Guide and Study Notes by Robert Lewis.(Get yours HERE)

This guide ‘shows how to make most effective use of this graphic text in the history classroom so that students can know, understand and critically evaluate the ideas being put. It also offers a set of criteria for helping students evaluate this and other graphic texts.’

Its excellent reading , though I disagree with this:

 “So, which was he: a murderer/terrorist or a victim/hero?  There is no way any of us can finally decide this for ourselves. The historians and writers know far more than we readers will, and they disagree about their conclusions. So we cannot come up with a final conclusion about who Kelly was.”

As I have repeatedly said, alleging that Ned Kelly was either a ‘Villain or Hero’ and one is somehow at liberty to choose between them, depending on how you happen to feel at a particular moment is an illogical and false dichotomy. Its a tactic used by the sympathiser lobby to blur the distinctions and elevate the idea that Ned was a hero and to minimise the villainy of his life. The truth is that we CAN arrive at a final conclusion about who Ned Kelly was, just as we can decide if we answer the right questions that a cat is not a dog.  

The Study Guide provides  sets of questions to be answered about various stages and events in the Kelly story, and provides numerous links to a variety of relevant resources. To my great surprise and delight I found among them two active links to THIS BLOG, the first to our discussion about Fitzpatrick,(here) and the second at the very end of the guide where it says this:

‘The strength of feeling that still exists about the Kelly gang can be seen in the fierce debates that are carried on online between the pro-Kelly Iron Outlaw website, and the critical Ned Kelly: Death of the Legend blog:”

I already liked this Comic, but when I read this reference to my Blog in the Study Guide, I liked it a whole lot more. It signified to me that Death of the Legend Blog is not only being noticed, but is now being recognized as a legitimate part of the serious debate about the Kelly story and that we are making a real difference. I am excited by the prospect of a stream of young historians coming to read our discussions and learning from them, and hopefully even contributing.Kelly sympathisers would have to be concerned about this book being widely distributed, because I don’t doubt that a majority of readers would see through the kelly myths if they applied the techniques of reason and critical evaluation they are being taught in this study guide. 

This book is the best Kelly book ever written for school aged readers, and I hope all Year 9 kids get a chance to read it, but it can be enjoyed by everyone.

At last, another Kelly book I can recommend.  

The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and Their Pursuers

This work is one of the oldest of the classics of the Kelly literature, and the first of its 8 editions was published in 1929. Mr Gerald C Stanley, JP, who wrote the Foreword, believed that until then ‘almost all the books written on the Kelly Gang have borne the impress of crass prejudice and gross libels on the Kellys and their relatives’

He goes on to say that the Kellys were ‘grotesquely represented as brutal criminals whose blood lust could be sated only by an almost daily murder; whereas in actuality they differed very little from other young men of their day and their conduct was the very antithesis of bloodthirsty. Subject to continual Police persecution blamed for every petty crime committed in the districe their mother thrown into Gaol for an alleged assault on a police officer subsequently dismissed from the service for misconduct, it is small wonder  that these high spirited youths, nursing a fierce resentment of the injustice they had suffered should, mistaken as they may have been, as a last resort, give battle to their persecutors’

According to the books Author, J J Kenneally ‘all previous books and publications were almost exclusively written at the suggestion of that blind national or local prejudice which displayed unspeakable contempt for the sacred virtues “Truth and Justice”

What follows however is a further display of contempt for truth and justice, a Kelly narrative that makes so little attempt to be even handed or balanced that one instinctively distrusts it. But then, Kenneally says that ‘the information necessary for me to write the Inner History of the Kelly Gang  was willingly supplied  by members of the Kelly family and those relatives who were actively engaged in protecting their kith and kin from being betrayed for ‘blood money’ by their relatives”  So what would one expect to read except revisionism, justification, excuses for the Gangs behavior and condemnation and excoriation of the Police? And remember that this ‘information’ was already at least 50 years old by the time it was remembered for Mr Kenneally.

Take Kenneallys account of the life of Red Kelly: 

“He was a man whom the Landlords and their henchmen regarded as a menace to the continuation of the injustices so maliciously inflicted on the people of Ireland. Like other patriots he was charged with an agrarian offence. With Jury packing reduced to a fine art the ruling class in Tipperary had no difficulty in securing his conviction and transportation to Van Diemans Land”  

Needless to say this is a highly prejudiced and contentious view of why Red found himself transported, some would call it a misrepresentation, but its hardly worth the trouble of refuting it. Read what Ian Jones has written about this in ‘A Short Life’ to get a truer and more dependable account.

Kenneally then goes on to describe Reds life in Australia as being hampered by the continual intrusion of Police who “without the authority of a search warrant frequently searched his home without success’ He has Red marrying Ellen AFTER buying a farm at Beveridge,(WRONG)  and AFTER his successful venture to the Goldfields(WRONG). He describes Reds arrest and conviction in regard to stealing and killing a calf as a ‘trumped up affair’ (WRONG) and says Neds deterioration after the sentence was as a result of his treatment in Gaol: ‘notwithstanding his good health and perfect physique when sentenced, he died shortly after his release”( WRONG and WRONG)

Thanks to much better research by  modern writers like Max Brown and Ian Jones we know that Kenneallys understanding of Reds life was inaccurate to say the least.  As described in my recent Post, Red was NOT hounded by Police after he completed his term as a Convict, he was given what Ian Jones called a ‘generous’ remission of his sentence, and it was Reds alcoholism that caused his families economic collapse and his premature death. At the time of his imprisonment Reds health was already in serious decline.

Kenneally does however provide as an addition to the fourth Edition, a comprehensive refutation of the claim by an ‘imposter’ in Queensland to be Dan Kelly, survivor of the siege at Glenrowan.

A large part of this book consists of argument centered around extracts from the reports of the Royal Commission. Kenneallys arguments are based on so many prejudices about the Police and so many false notions about the Kellys that refuting them one by one would take forever, but in any case its unnecessary. Its unnecessary in the same way as its not necessary to refute the claims we now know to be false in say a Textbook of Geology, or a medical Manual, or a book on powered flight written in 1929 – modern knowledge and scholarship have rendered these texts obsolete, their explanations as flawed, their data bases as limiting. These texts, like JJ Kenneallys work may be quaint and interesting from an historical perspective but can no longer be relied on as sources, except perhaps in documenting the way in which understanding was so limited all those decades ago and how knowledge has advanced since.

In that light, its interesting that Keneally doesn’t mention body straps or a Republic of North east Victoria! It’s a curious book with a crusading moralistic tone that is more like a Political Pamphlet or an Evangelical Tract than something intended to be a serious work of historical writing. His interest is in spinning a story and in sanitizing the reputation of the Kellys. You can read the entire book for free here.

If anyone still believes that Kenneally was interested in Truth and Justice, consider this remarkable statement from the end of the book (p188):

“Judge Barrys unlawful unjust and maliciously threatened sentence of fiteen years on Ned Kelly at Beechworth in October 1878 already referred to, was responsible for the deaths of ten persons. He was responsible fore the shooting of the three Policemen at the Stringybark Creek; he was consequently responsible for the  shooting of Aaron Sherritt; he was further responsible for the  shooting of Martin Cherry and Mrs Jones little son at Glenrowan; he was responsible for the death of four bushrangers”

Oh yes, according to Jerome, it was all Barrys fault, nothing to do with Ned at all! This is myth in an almost pure form!

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!