Bill is right about Stringy Bark Creek

INTRODUCTION:

For the entire time that I have been producing this Blog, I have been trying to decide if the contentious subject of Bill Denhelds research, trying to identify the exact site at which the Stringy Bark Creek Murders took place, is something that should also be discussed here. I’ve hesitated for a number of reasons not the least of which is because on the Forum of mine that was sabotaged by Kelly bullies, SBC was the subject that provoked the most interest but also the most anger and vitriol, and possibly was in large part why that Forum of mine was destroyed. I’ve also noted there have been long bitter discussions on several other Forums on the topic over several years which seem to have ended in tears but no agreement or resolution about the site, making me doubt that any further discussion would end any differently. In any case for those that are interested, Bill has a comprehensive site of his own (HERE) which provides exhaustive detail and makes a very compelling argument that the place where Lonigan and Scanlon were murdered is the place he’s identified at Stringy Bark Creek.  How could I possibly hope to add to it? Lastly, this subject is not really about the Mythology of the Kelly Legend but is closer to pure historical research, a dispute not about what happened and why but about exactly where, a kind of niche within Kelly history where ‘place’ is mostly well known.  It’s not a dispute between ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ Ned people, but a dispute between amateur researchers.

In the end I decided I would write about SBC because anyone exploring the Kelly Legend will inevitably come across it and I expect might hope to find something about it on this Blog as well. Its about time the controversy surrounding it was settled, and that’s what discussion here will help to do. I also didn’t want to allow the Bullies who silenced the discussion last time to have the last word on the subject. This time I will moderate with much more attention to personal abuse, to relevance and to fairness.

I am not going to present two sides of this story because having participated in a  long discussion between both sides of this subject a few years ago on the Forum of mine that was sabotaged, and having read all of Bills site, I have no doubt that he is right in his belief that he has identified the true  site.  Instead I am going to present my understanding of what Bill has proved, but in a way that I hope will be easy to understand. One of the problems with Bills site is that there is so much detail and the arguments are at times so intricate that an ordinary person is likely to find his eyes glazing over as he tries to wade through it all. I am going to provide the Idiots Guide to SBC. (with apologies to Bill!) 

Stringy Bark Creek : the last debate:

According to the Tourist brochures that direct everyone to it, the famous Kelly Tree in the Wombat Ranges not far from Mansfield is the place where the Kelly Gang ambushed the Police search party and killed two of them. On this point though I think all sides are in agreement: its not!  Historical records show that the Kelly tree was a more or less randomly selected tree in the general vicinity of the ambush site, at a place that could conveniently be visited by tourists. Ian Jones drew this to everyone’s attention in 1993 when he announced that he and his son had identified what they believed was the true site after  ‘lengthy research and… field work’. Jones said he had ‘absolutely no doubt’ that the true site of the ambush was ‘several hundred meters south of the accepted location (which is marked by the Kelly Tree) and on the opposite, eastern bank of the Creek’  (Footnotes to Chapter 9, A Short Life by Ian Jones)

Despite the fact that Jones said it was “unarguable that the battleground was on the eastern bank’  (The Age: Oct 19 1995) I think everyone now agrees that this second site, the Jones site is also NOT the right place. (by ‘everyone’ I mean all the people who have a particular interest in this subject and who participate in these discussions) The reason is provided by McIntyre, the sole Police survivor of the ambush who says this in his “True Narrative of the Kelly Gang” :

“Sergt Kennedy has selected a clear place near an old burnt hut as the most suitable for our camping ground as it was out of danger of any timber which might fall from the forest trees. Our tent was pitched near the north west corner of this clearing, which was partly natural and partly caused by human agency. The entrance to the tent was facing east and also the creek which was about 70 yards distant.”

If the tent was facing east, and facing the creek, then the tent and the site of the ambush can only have been on the western side of the creek. Period.

But where exactly?

McIntyre wrote a detailed account of the attack, some of which I have already quoted, and he also provided a couple of diagrams of the site, one drawn with much greater care and a lot more detail and many years after the first one.

McIntyres first sketch of the scene of the ambush. 
He has inaccurately drawn the ends of the logs crossing over each other

Remarkably, there are also two amazing photos of the exact site, taken within a week of the murders, the so-called Burman photographs. Burman was a commercial photographer who cashed in on the massive public interest in the Kelly story by selling photos of the scene at  Stringybark Creek, and other sites  as “Cartes de Visite”. His informant and guide at the ambush site was Edward Monk who in turn received his information directly from McIntyre when they both returned to SBC with the Police search party to SBC to search for the dead policemen the day after the ambush.

The ambush of Kennedy re-enacted, showing on the left, “McIntyre" seated on the log, “Kelly” crouched down hiding beside him,
both looking towards the north at the returning Kennedy, and one of the posts of the burned hut on the right. 

Burman placed people into the clearing to recreate the ambush scene for his photos, but without McIntyre or his diagrams to help, his recreation was not entirely accurate. Burman has McIntyre seated at one end of a log with Kelly kneeling right next to him, but behind the log; McIntyres drawing shows they were at opposite ends of a log and the ‘north-south’ log was between them.(M3 and EK2 on McIntyres diagram shown below) Thus, McIntyres diagram identifies mistakes in Burmans re-enctment of the scene when Kennedy returned.

So, having excluded two places that were NOT the site of the ambush, could all these separate pieces of information be drawn together to find the place that WAS the ambush site?

Obviously 140 or more years after the Burman photos were taken, things at the site will have changed in many ways. There would be no point looking for the fallen logs for example. However, McIntyre said that the tent was 70 yards away from the creek and the creek wouldn’t have changed much.  He also said the site was near  ‘an old burnt hut’, and that would certainly be something that might have left discoverable traces of itself.

What else did McIntyre claim?

Following on from the quote cited above he writes: “Standing at the tent entrance and facing the creek there was upon the left front a felled tree nearly 4ft in diameter at the thickest part. It lay nearly east and west. About midway this log was joined by another which lay due north and south and terminated where it joined the other. These two logs thus formed two right angles the point of junction being  25 yards from the tent. On your right or the south side of the clearing the ground was free of timber and being of a swampy nature there was a luxuriant growth of rushes and other coarse herbage. These together with a slight declivity in the formation in that direction afforded good cover to within 20 yards of our tent for any party wishing to attack our camp and it was from this position we were attacked, the south side or up the creek.”

McIntyre drew a diagram to illustrate these points (above) but its important to notice that he did it somewhat inaccurately: McIntyre wrote that the north–south log joined the east-west one ‘midway’, and formed ‘two right angles’.  From this description you would expect his diagram would show the logs arranged as a kind of  “T” but what he drew was more like a “7”. He has drawn the north-south log meeting the east-west log at one end of it, not midway, and so his diagram shows only one ‘right angle’. When you look at the Burman photos of the scene you realize there are actually three big logs in the photo – two seem to be more or less in a line end to end, and lying roughly east to west, and the third lies behind them at an angle to these two, lying roughly north to south. The ‘north’ end of this log appears to be near where the other two meet – ‘midway’ along, and creating the two ‘right angles’ that McIntyre remembered.

The photos also show two prominent blackened posts, which must have been some of the ruins of the burnt hut McIntyre mentioned, though he didn’t include them in his map either. Behind the man with his raised arm, who represents the returning Kennedy, there is a clearly seen wooded slope.  This is a distinctive feature of the site, and a key to locating it, as will be seen later.

So somewhat curiously, the diagram that revealed the inaccuracies in Burmans photos – in relation to where he placed the actors – is itself corrected by detail revealed in the photos – the true number and position of the logs in the clearing!.

It is clear from this that the two logs McIntyre included in his drawing are the ‘third’ log (the north-south one) and the log at the right of the photo, running roughly east-west. At M3 He indicated where he sat on this log as ‘ordered by Ea Kelly’ and at EK3 Kellys ‘place of concealment awaiting  men on patrol’ on the other side of the north-south log, near where the fire was. His diagrams didn’t include the log nearest the camera.

The other critical information we can obtain from the Burman photos is the direction in which Burmans Camera was pointing.  This task is made easy by the fact that Burman sat someone pretending to be McIntyre at the end of the log nearest the camera, and someone pretending to be Ned Kelly crouched down just behind him, both looking in the direction from where Kennedy and Scanlon returned, which was from the north. There is no logical explanation for the positioning and the posture of the people Burman placed in those photos, on and  concealed behind  logs, other than that they were looking northwards in anticipation of Kennedy and Scanlans return.  He should have had ‘McIntyre’ seated  at the end of the log on the right of the photo, near where these two logs are approached by the ‘north-south’ log, which is where McIntyre showed he was in his map. The log Burman had them seated on wasn’t shown in McIntyres maps. However that makes little difference to the clues they give about the direction the pictures were taken from - the camera, looking back towards them was facing in a south or south-westerly direction.  The creek would have been behind and to the photographers left. 

On his website Bill verifies the correctness of  this interpretation of the photographs with a very detailed analysis of where shadows fall in the photos. By calculating the angle of the sun at that time of year and time of day Bill  confirms that the photos could only have been taken with the camera looking in a more or less southerly direction. He also cleverly recreates the scene with scale model logs and the stumps and posts seen in Burmans photos.

After all this careful analysis of Burmans Photos, McIntyres recollections and his diagrams, Bill and a group of like-minded amateur historians searched for a site on the western side of the creek, with a declivity to the south, ( a ‘declivity’ is a downward slope) a steeper rising slope behind and hopefully, evidence of a ruined hut.  A number of sites were considered but at only one could a photo have been taken looking south that matched the Burman photos. At this site they also found evidence of not one but two ruined huts in the form of piles of stones that had once formed fireplaces, whereas no convincing evidence of huts was found at the others. The historical record reports there were indeed two huts at the ambush site! At Bills website he illustrates how he used a Laser and an ingenious device he calls the viewer-scope to show that the location they identified as the true site fits Burmans photos brilliantly, whereas at the others , the fit is non-existent.

Frankly I am mystified as to why the rest of the group Bill was a part of were unable to accept the site now known as the ‘two huts’ site as being the place where the Kelly gang ambushed the Police patrol. Identifying it relies firstly on recognition of errors in McIntyres diagram that are revealed by the Burman photos, and recognition of errors in Burmans re-enactment revealed by Mcntyres diagram. This in turn enables accurate orientation of the Burman photos, and identification of the orientation and spatial relations of the slope, the creek, the declivity and the ruined huts. The subsequent on-the-ground identification and close inspection of potential sites confirmed the two huts site as the only possible place.

What needs to happen now is a thorough professional archaological documentation of the Two Huts site, its official recognition and preservation as the actual ambush site, and an acknowledgement of the work of all the people who contributed to its recognition, the foremost of whom is Bill Denheld. 

He has been and remains a persistent dogged and imaginative advocate for historical truth as well as for the Legend of Ned Kelly.

The truth about the Royal Commission

One thing about the Kelly era  that is still the same today is that the Press like to write sensationalist stories in order to sell newspapers. Thus, when the Kelly Gang had murdered three Policemen at SBC the Press became increasingly critical of Police performance and expressed and encouraged a rising sense of outrage in the community when the Gang was not immediately apprehended. With the robberies at Euroa and then Jerilderie the outrage increased even further, so that by the time the Gang had been destroyed and Kelly captured,  but with further loss of life at Glenrowan, the call for a Royal Commission of enquiry into the Police became too loud for the Government of the day to resist any longer, and a Royal Commission was established within a few months of Ned Kellys execution. (Click HERE to read all of the Reports of the Commission at Bills site : Thanks Bill!)

They say these days, somewhat cynically that  Politicians don’t launch Royal Commissions unless they know what the outcome is going to be, and for the Politician the outcome they seek is always some sort of advancement of their own political agenda, whether it be to undermine their Political opponents position, or  strengthen their own. The truth about the motivation behind the establishment of an RC might be better understood by looking at who the Government appoints as Members of the Commission or by its outcomes and at which of its recommendations the Government acts on.  Obvious contemporary examples of the politically motivated RC are the Governments RC into the Union movement, and the absence of the one into the Banking system proposed by the Opposition. There are also examples of RC’s that are less obviously inspired by purely political motive, but the politics becomes apparent afterwards, when the  Government of the day has to respond to the recommendations of the Commission.

So when it comes to the Royal Commission into the Kelly Outbreak we shouldn’t be so naïve as to imagine it wasn’t launched without a Political endpoint in mind, or that its enquiry was wholly objective and free of personal and political agendas.

Justin Corfield says in his Encyclopedia that Graham Berry, the Premier who established the RC was anxious to have the ‘Kelly business’ over by the time of the next state election. Thus at the very least, this RC was a clever way for the Government to delay having to respond to a difficult issue until a much later time, when they hoped the publics disquiet had settled and its attention had moved on to something else.

There was also an obvious anti-Police bias to the Commission: according to Ian Jones, the Chairman of the Commission Francis Longmore was “an enemy of Standish and the police since the days of Harry Power’. George Wilson Hall, another of the Commissioners was also known to be hostile to the Police in general and to Standish in particular; he was the publisher in 1878 of an anti-police booklet, a satirical parallel of the Kelly story called ‘The Book of Keli’ in which the Police were led by ‘Dishstand’ an obvious reference to Standish who was then mocked and ridiculed along with others whose names also were thinly disguised variations of the names of real people. Such partisan figures  as Hall and  Longmore would never be appointed to a modern Commission. These days we recognize that the appointment of people with known bias to a Commission weakens the authority of its findings, and provides an easy  excuse for them to be ignored or dismissed. In 1880 however such concerns dont seem to have been taken into consideration, but the truth remains, that having biased commissioners reduces the credibility of the Commission.

The full title of the Enquiry was

Royal Commission of Enquiry

into the circumstances of

THE KELLY OUTBREAK

THE PRESENT STATE AND ORGANISATION OF THE POLICE FORCE, ETC.

Its terms of reference were

1. To inquire into the circumstances preceding and attending the Kelly outbreak.

2. As to the efficiency of the police to deal with such possible occurrences.

3. To inquire into the action of the police authorities during the period the Kelly gang were at large.

4. The efficiency of the means employed for their capture; and

5. Generally to inquire into and report upon the present state and organization of the police force.

A total of nine members were appointed to the Commission, and they conducted hearings in Melbourne and various towns in Kelly country, asking a total of 18289 questions of 65 witnesses, starting with Standish himself when the Enquiry began on March 23^rd 1881.  The witnesses were denied the option of being supported at the commission by their own legal counsel.

From all this evidence the Commission produced ‘in lieu of the usual resume of the evidence’ what they called a ‘sketch of the antecedents pursuit and destruction of the Kelly Gang of Outlaws’  This ‘sketch’ was a detailed description of the entire outbreak, based on the evidence supplied by the witnesses, and it formed the basis of the two reports that the Commission produced.

The first report, issued on 6 July 1881 made four recommendations : 

1. - Inspector O'Connor not be appointed as an officer in the Victoria Police
2. - the permanent employment of black trackers as an auxiliary branch of the police service
3. - a thorough system of police patrol shall be established throughout the colony, more especially in the North-Eastern district
4. - that immediate steps be taken to arm the mounted police of the colony with the Regulation Pattern Martini-Henry carbine

The second report was issued at the end of the Royal Commission in October 1881, and contained 17 findings, the first of which was

“ That immediately prior to the outbreak and for some time previously the administration of the police in the North-Eastern District was not satisfactory; either as regards the numbers and distribution of the Constabulary  or the manner in which they were armed and mounted; and that a grave error was committed in abolishing the police station at Glenmore, and in reducing the number of men stationed at  Stanley, Yackandandah, Tallangatta Eldorado and Beechworth”

The next 14 recommendations were about the behavior of named individuals, almost all of them members of the Police force, beginning of course with Standish, then Nicolson, Hare, Sadleir, Brooke-Smith and so on down to a cluster of Constables, and included Curnow and Wallace. The last two findings were expressions of appreciation for assistance provided  by the press at Glenrowan and by the Queensland Government who supplied the Black trackers. They commended Senior Constables Kelly and Johnson, Constable Bracken, Thomas Curnow and Mr C.H Rawlings, but everyone else was rebuked to a greater or lesser degree and recommended for demotion dismissal censure or early retirement.

In summary therefore, of 21 findings and recommendations,  only 3 could be said to be about reform for the future, but six times as many, 18,  were judgments about the past, criticisms of the behavior of players in the Outbreak, or in other words as Sadleir is reported to have said of the Chairman “he went relentlessly for scalps”. And the three positive recommendations ? - establish colony-wide police patrols, arm mounted Police with Martini Henry rifles and employ black trackers!

And that was it! I was staggered! After all those days of hearings, all those questions, all that exposure of Police ‘dirty linen’ and detail about every aspect of the Outbreak  all they managed to  produce were three feeble recommendations about Police patrols , black trackers and rifles, and deal payback  and embarrassment to some of the factions in the force. Nothing to say about Fitzpatrick, and not a single mention of the Kelly Gang. Nothing about Police misbehavior towards selectors, harassment of ex convicts, drunkenness, extra-judicial killings or Police thuggery. Nothing.

I am still shaking my head when I think how thoroughly this Commission has been misrepresented by the Kelly mythmakers, who must be either deeply ignorant of  the Commissioners findngs and recommendations or else they deliberately lie about them.  I found myself having the same stunned reaction as I did after reading the Jerilderie Letter for the first time, realizing that the pro-Kelly brigade had misrepresented it entirely. The Jeriderie letter is claimed by them to be some sort of revolutionary manifesto about the republic of North east Victoria, but it is absolutely nothing of the sort. In a similar way the Kelly mythmakers have convinced themselves and try to convince everyone else that the Reports of the Royal Commission validated their position about Ned Kellys claim to be a Police-made criminal, that the Commission censured Police for the way they treated the Kellys, that  the Commission uncovered all the corruption and unwarranted persecution of  the Kellys and the selector class generally,  and as a result Policing changed in Victoria forever. In fact the Commissions final determinations, contained in its two Reports had absolutely nothing to say about any of that. Nothing. And to claim that any good that may have resulted from the RC, any future reforms of the Victoria Police were somehow thanks to Ned Kelly and are part of Ned Kellys legacy is about as absurd as saying that the changes  Prime Minister Howard made to Australias gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre are something we should be grateful to Martin Bryant for, and are part of his legacy. Ridiculous nonsense.

What the Commission criticized in its Reports were all related to the internal workings of the Police force. The Commission blamed the Outbreak on what they felt were the failures of leadership, of initiative, of decision making, of courage, and of respect in the Force, the factionalism, the petty jealousies and favoritism within the Force, the meddling and interference that in combination enabled the Kelly Gang to remain at large for far too long. And Standish was blamed for much of it.

When it came to responding to the first of their Terms of reference, ‘To inquire into the circumstances preceding and attending the Kelly outbreak’,  the Commissions view was that it resulted from ‘the unchecked aggregation of a large class of criminals in the North East’ exacerbated by the weakening of District policing by the removal of the Glenmore Police station, reductions in the number of Police and the employment of  ‘inexperiened and inferior constables’. They reported ‘The incident, however, which seems to have more immediately precipitated the outbreak was the attempt of Constable Fitzpatrick to arrest Dan Kelly, at his mother's hut, on the 15th of April 1878’.

Later they wrote

‘There can be little doubt that Constable Fitzpatrick's conduct, however justified by the rules of the service, was unfortunate in its results. It may also be mentioned that the charge of persecution of the family by the members of the police force has been frequently urged in extenuation of the crimes of the outlaws; but, after careful examination, your Commissioners have arrived at the conclusion that the police, in their dealings with the Kellys and their relations, were simply desirous of discharging their duty conscientiously; and that 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 has to be said that for the Kelly sympathisers the Royal Commission was an absolute disaster. The Commission found no evidence that the outbreak was caused by ‘Police persecution or unnecessary annoyance’, as  Kelly himself tried to claim and as Kelly sympathisers still fondly like to pretend. The Commission exposed the extended Kelly family as a criminal gang, and in relation to Kennedys death described Ned Kelly as ‘cruel, wanton, and inhuman, and should of itself, apart from other crimes, brand the name of his murderer, the leader of the gang, with infamy.’

So another Kelly myth bites the dust. This time it’s the one that says thanks to Ned Kelly the corrupt Police who oppressed and persecuted innocent selectors were exposed and punished at the Royal Commission. In fact after looking into it all, the RC  branded the Kellys and their associates as a criminal gang and made not one criticism of the way the Police treated the Kellys, other than that they failed to catch them soon enough.

Why Ned Kelly hated the Police

On Facebook I have been accused by Bob of failing to mention the truth about why Ned Kelly hated the Police. Bob lists three examples of incidents that he regards as reasons for Neds hatred of police : his arrest when Hall tried to shoot Ned, the fracas when he refused to be handcuffed and was subdued by Lonigan using the ‘squirrel grip’ – a handful of nuts – and the death of his sister Annie giving birth to the child fathered by Constable Flood. Bob, like many Kelly sympathisers  believes these and other incidents justified Neds hatred of Police, that it was the Polices fault that Ned Kelly hated them.

Contrary to Bobs claim, I have not ‘hidden away’ from the bad behavior of Police, and in the post “Hall arrests Ned Kelly”– which everyone should re-read to refresh their memories of exactly what happened – I wrote of Halls behavior that 'it was appalling – not only had he tried to kill Ned and used excessive force once the tables had been turned, Hall later lied in Court about seeing documents that hadn’t been issued when he said he had seen them’ .  I also wrote about the incident involving the squirrel grip in a post in August 2014 ‘Reflections around the crown Jewels’ and I recommend that Post also be read again to refresh everyones memory of the entire incident.

I admit however that I haven’t ever discussed the relationship between Annie and Flood, though a really indepth analysis would probably not be something Kelly symapthisers would want to read, because undoubtedly it will expose the ambiguous relationship that existed between the Kellys and the Police. Kelly sympathisers like to think of this relationship as a cartoon style ‘goodies vs baddies’, Kellys on one side, Police on the other, but as Morrissey and others have shown, it was much more fluid than this, there were friendships across this imaginary divide that resulted in such things as the young Ned running to the Police station for protection from an uncle, the Kellys using the Courts to pursue personal disputes, uncles co-operating with the Police to dob in Harry Power and collect  massive financial reward, the friendship between Ned and Fitzpatrick, and of course a sexual liaison between Flood and Neds sister. But  its quite ridiculous to blame Flood for Annies tragic death in giving birth to the child that resulted from the relationship. The relationship was consensual, as far as we know, and Annie would have been well aware of the possibility of pregnancy resulting from it. Its not usual anywhere, except perhaps in the Kelly world to blame the man for the  tragic death of his partner in childbirth, but death in childbirth was not such an uncommon feature of life in the bush in the 19^th century. No doubt it was a tragedy and a terrible loss, but to blame Flood for it is ridiculous.

Never-the-less Bob may well be right that the three incidents he lists, and others, were reasons Ned Kelly might have given for his hatred of the Police. But having reasons for hating the Police doesn’t have to mean the hate is justified or  that the Police deserved to be hated. So was it justified, and did the Police deserve to be hated?

Certainly, if Ned hated Flood for what happened to his sister, his hatred was irrational and unjustified. And exactly how reasonable or rational was Neds hatred of Police for responding in kind to the violence of Neds resistance to being arrested or to being handcuffed? If he had gone quietly and still been bashed and beaten, then hating them might be reasonable but thats not what happened - Ned Kelly created a massive violent brawl and no doubt inflicted some pretty painful injuries on several of the Police trying to  subdue him.  I doubt very few of us would have much sympathy for a fellow who abused and attacked Police trying to do their duty, and who in the melee he started, came off second best. We might be tempted to say “ you asked for it mate, be a man and suck it up” But thats not what Ned Kelly ever did - right to the end he refused to accept responsibility for the consequences of his own actions, and was forever looking for someone else to blame for how things turned out. The reality of Neds hatred for the police, when you examine its possible causes closely is that it was out of all proportion to the actual events that may have given rise to it, it was extreme, irrational and unreasonable. Nothing the Police ever did to the Kellys justified in any possible way his murder of three innocent Police at SBC, or his plan to kill many more at Glenrowan - his reactions were way beyond reasonable, proportional or justifiable. Thats why Ian Jones said Neds plan for Glenrowan was madness - completely out of touch with any kind of reality, reason or logic, based on absurd overreactions to incidents largely originating in the behaviour, not of the Police but of the Kellys themselves. And you see this madness when you read the crazed hysterical outburst known as the Jerilderie Letter.


I agree with Bob that Neds motivation was hate rather than some higher noble political ambition about the poor and the rights of selectors, as Ian Jones would prefer.  Rather, for Ned it was an intensely personal thing, and hatred is an intensely distorting and blinding emotion, a prism that Ned looked though and could only see a need for horrendous ‘suicide bomber style’ revenge.

But there is another more important, often overlooked source of Neds hatred for Police : his parents. I am not referring to what happened to his parents but to the values they instilled in him, the things they taught him from the youngest age, and the attitudes prejudices and resentments that he absorbed from them and the wider community of Kellys and Quinns that he grew up in.  Ned was taught to hate, to disrespect and have contempt for the British authorities, for Irish who co-operated with them, for squatters and the wealthy. Being taught to hate, when your brain is wired for psychopathy is playing with fire. Sadly though, being taught to hate wasn’t unusual then, and its not unusual now. Its a common and horrible fault of many parents all over the world to this day, where children grow up being taught to respect only their own, to believe utterly in the rightness of thier own cause and to hate and perpetuate hatred war and resentments against the rest, against Jews, Palestinians, Blacks, Muslims, Aborigines, Catholics, Asians, gays, Communists, asylum seekers ….and in Neds case the British and the Police. This is where Ned learned not to take responsibility for his own behavior but to blame his misfortune on the British, on the Police, on the Courts, the squatters, the wealthy…this is where Ned learned such an arrogant regard for his own righteousness that he was later able to write in the Jerilderie letter : “I would have scattered their blood and brains like rain, I would manure the eleven mile with their bloated carcasses and yet remember there is  not one drop of murderous blood in my veins”

As Peter Fitzsimons put it of the young Ned Kelly: “Ned takes hatred of the English with his mothers milk and his fathers every rant”

And the end result of this hatred? -  his brother and three friends dead, three Police dead, three hostages dead and Ned Kelly on death row. These are the poisonous fruits of intergenerational hate, and therein lies the one lesson that Ned Kellys life could teach all of us in these troubled times : here was a fine strong good looking intelligent witty and hard working young man brought down and destroyed by all consuming hate. For Gods sake stop encouraging people, and especially your kids to hate one another. It always ends badly. 

Be like Captain Jack and love everybody.

Peter Careys Ned Kelly Fantasy

This book has become part of the modern Kelly story for many people, not just in Australia but throughout the world. Additionally, it also has an important place in the annals of Australian literature, its special qualities earning its author a  rare second Booker Prize, and elevating Peter Carey to the status of truly great Australian writer. It is therefore a novel that should appeal to everyone interested in writing and literature, but to Australians especially as its about one of our own, written by one of our own.

Despite this , I had never made reading this book a priority, because it’s a novel, and my interest is in Kelly history not fantasy. However quite recently I saw an aged and  sun-browned copy in a second hand bookshop that was a mere $8, so I bought it and now  that I have finally finished reading it, I realize it was money well spent.

Peter Carey says it took him three years to research and write this novel, and says in the Acknowledgements, among other things “..it is Ian Jones I am most particularly obliged to. It was to his works I turned to, almost daily when I was lost or bewildered or simply forgetful of the facts”  Therefore it is  no surprise that Careys vision of Ned Kelly is much the same as Ian Jones : an honest poor and persecuted selector, a devoted son becomes a ‘Police made’ criminal because of the corrupt Police and Judiciary,  and at the end, the leader of some sort of failed rebellion.

The title is doubly misleading because the story told is neither especially true nor much about the Kelly Gang, which only comes into existence in the final quarter, when the Police ambush at Stringybark Creek is described. The novel is a mock autobiography, in which Ned Kelly relates his life story for the benefit of a daughter that he never knew. Its chapters are called Parcels, each ‘parcel’ an invention of Careys clever mind purporting to be one of a bunch of  ‘13 parcels of stained and dog eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kellys distinctive hand’ that Ned gave Thomas Curnow  at the Ann Jones Inn, close to the end of the siege. Needless to say no such parcels exist, Ned Kelly has no known descendants and the girls mother, Mary Hearn never existed.

Carey cited the Jerilderie letter as his inspiration for a style which gives the novel its special charm - its comparative lack of punctuation, its long sentences and colourful  at times hilariously witty language, written in the first person as a stream of consciousness from Neds mind onto the paper. The Ned Kelly that emerges has an even greater wit than the Ned of the Jerilderie letter, and in other repects is quite different  - this new Ned Kelly has a much greater sense of humour and of fun, he is open hearted and lacks the arrogance, the intense blood thirsty hatred and anger so apparent in the Ned Kelly of the Jerilderie letter, he is long-suffering and polite and tries not to give offence, by referring to things as ‘adjectival’  and by writing swear words as “b…d” and “b…..r”. This Ned Kelly is likeable and accessible as a human being. 

“I seen Fitzpatrick pull my sister roughly onto his knee that were the last adjectival straw as far as I were concerned I showed myself plainly at the door”

“I seen Cons Hall descend from the Pub like a glistening old spider gliding down from the centre of its web’

Readers who are really familiar with the Kelly story will get a lot more out of it than most, because historical names places and events  appear at unexpected places, language we are familiar with from the Jerilderie letter and elsewhere appears in a different context, and events people and developments we know are invented  appear, but they are mostly believable and certainly interesting - the idea that Neds father and Steve Hart were cross dressers is a wild one, but Ned having a permanent girlfriend and becoming a father is believable and humanising, as is the suggestion Ellen had an affair with Harry Power and the place where the inspiration to wear armour came from is cleverly introduced. Mary Hearns relationship to Neds step father is a shock!  Anyone unfamiliar with the Kelly story would not notice these clever inventions or smile at the artful way Peter Carey has inserted them into the story.

The overall result for me was a fascinating and enjoyable read that I would commend to everyone who lkes reading and especially to Kelly fans.

Oddly enough though, ‘The True History of the Kelly Gang’ seems to have had little appeal to the sad individuals with a peculiar obsession with Ned Kelly like readers of this Blog and I have. This is suggested by the almost complete absence of any serious discussions about it on Kelly related websites, Blogs and Facebook pages - I fully expected to find a review at the Eleven Mile Creek site, but the search drew a blank. However this book was the original catalyst for Sharons interest in Ned Kelly – and I would imagine that could be true for many people - but apart from a cursory mention on the Iron Outlaw book reviews pages, there was nothing about it on Iron Outlaw or in the Ned Kelly Forum.

However I was pleased to find on the web archive of Bail Up something that I had decided I wasn’t going to do, a catalogue of the ‘fictions’ presented in the book along with the relevant ‘facts’. Heres a couple of  examples:

‘Fact - Ellen did have an intimate relationship with Bill Frost, and later had an illegitimate daughter to him. He abandoned her, and she sued him for child support and won (having established in court that he was her only lover).

Fiction - There is no evidence that Ned threatened to shoot Bill.

Fact - The Kelly gang did use the majority of the stolen bank money paying debts and sympathizers. 

Fiction - None of it was stolen from the gang (by M.H.), however they did use up the sum quite quickly

I thought about  doing something similar myself but decided that such a catalogue, at one level made no sense, because the book, despite its title is NOT a “true” account but an imagining, a fantasy, an emotional creation only loosely attached to the cold facts. The spirit of the novel is only appreciated by a willingness to momentarily suspend disbelief and live in the fantasy, to ignore the places where reality clashed with the narrative, where history contradicted the story and known facts were dismissed. Never-the-less, knowing that Ned Kelly was real and many of the other people and the places mentioned were actually real, I knew there would be people who would wonder exactly where the truth ended and the fantasy  began, and how much of what was told was historical and what wasn’t. So at Bail Up, an attempt was made to define the borders between the two (HERE ) 

This is the perennial problem of the historical novel, a form which simultaneously invites you to accept what you’re reading as true but refuses to take responsibility for any of it as being historical reality. The reader can neither dismiss it all as make-believe, because the historical setting is real, nor can the reader catalogue all of it in their memory as fact because the book identifies itself as a Novel. The truth though is that this book is a novel and it was never meant to be a text about historical truth but rather a story about emotional truth, about the experience of being Ned Kelly as Carey imagined it could have been. But the Bail Up writer has produced a means by which certain fictions and the truths in the story can be separated, and the books true fiction and true history identified for anyone who wanted to know.

The Bail Up analysis however fails to identify the biggest fiction of them all - the likeable witty and friendly character created in this clever novel is called Ned Kelly but he is its greatest fiction. Sadly such a Ned Kelly never existed.