The Cover-up

In the last couple of Blog Posts I’ve highlighted two of the many crimes of violence that Kelly clan members carried out against their own women. They both involved drunkenness, and hideous violence that followed rejection of demands for sex. In one case the response to this rejection was to set a fire that destroyed a home and nearly incinerated 13 children, and in the other, a coward’s punch left a young mothers face disfigured for life. It’s no use, if you’re a Kelly apologist, pretending those two events were the only blemishes on an otherwise blissful domesticity for the Kelly women. We know from contemporary research into domestic violence that the attacks that get to the police are just the tip of the iceberg of violence that stalks these women, so there would have been many other episodes of harassment and bullying and abuse, but only the worst came to the attention of the police.

The Kelly sympathiser community hates me for exposing the truths about the Kelly story, for pointing out the facts that demolish their fairy tales about Ned Kelly, for highlighting the absence of evidence for police persecution and harassment, but I ask  how can Ned Kelly be understood properly if such dramatic and terrifying life events are left out of the picture?

These undeniably true Kelly crime stories – and there are plenty more to come - go a long way to disproving Ned Kellys claim, believed and parroted by all his supporters ever since, that the cause of all the trouble in their lives was the police. They also disprove the claim that police charges against the Kellys were trumped up and manufactured by the police themselves. These stories expose the miserable underbelly of the Kelly clan, an underbelly of drunkenness, violence and sexual license that Kelly apologists have done their best to conceal as they try to re-fashion an image of the Kellys as poor hard-done-by decent country folk.

To illustrate my point about how these stories are kept secret, look no further than Ian Jones, who is supposed to be the greatest of the Kelly scholars. He ignored many Kelly criminal stories in his first telling of the Kelly story, the 1980 TV miniseries, The Last Outlaw – but you might argue he couldn’t put everything in. The problem though is that what he tended to leave out were the bits that undermined his preferred Kelly myth. However, in his widely-acclaimed and very detailed Kelly biography he continued to leave out or gloss over those same inconvenient truths. He completely ignored the vicious assault on Ned Kellys aunty Margaret, and he wrote only four sentences about James Kellys arson. However, those few sentences deliberately underplayed the sinister nature of the whole event saying only that when James turned up at the house he was ‘drunk and amorous’, making it sound as if he was a bit tipsy and playful.  No mention of the gin bottle being smashed over his head, which was a nasty violent act in itself, however justified it may have been. Jones then followed this up with several paragraphs about the trial and went to some trouble to describe Judge Redmond Barry in rather forbidding terms, adding to the Kelly mythology about the great Judge as a tormenter of the Kellys. But there was no explanation of the important fact that the death sentence was a mandatory sentence, one that the Judge had no ability to alter, but Barry knew, and suggested it in his sentencing remarks, that the routine appeal would automatically result in a reprieve. Jones left that out because it suited his myth-making approach to the story to have Redmond Barry demonised as having a ‘down’ on the Kellys. However, Jones did instead speculate about what effect hearing the Judge sentence his uncle James to death might have had on young Ned Kelly, but there was no such  speculation about what effect living in a culture of drunkenness and violence, and watching your home and everything your family owned being burned to the ground might have had on the young Ned Kelly. The toxic environment of domestic violence and lawlessness  that  he was immersed in all his childhood would have had a far greater influence on Ned Kellys development than hearing what the Judge had to say, if indeed at  thirteen Ned Kelly would have made any sense of it.

Peter Fitzsimons more recent Kelly biography treats the near disaster of arson even more dismissively, with this stupidly thoughtless half-sentence: “….she breaks a bottle of gin over his head for his trouble and he burns the place down for hers, but these things happen in the Kelly world” That is an expression of the outdated attitude that has resulted in women suffering domestic violence for generations, the attitude that this sort of bullying intimidation and direct assault was ‘just a domestic’.   And just as Jones did, Fitzsimons uses this episode to bad-mouth the Judge, who is Irish but not a catholic, writing “…so Ned already knows he cant be trusted”. As for Neds Aunty Margaret having her face smashed up by Uncle Jim – not a single word!

Full marks though to Grantlee Kieza who, in his terrific biography of Ellen Kelly has broken with the long tradition of concealing the violent truths about the clan, and graphically describes Uncle Jim Quinns attacks on Margaret, and later that same week on the splitter, John Page. Court reports about these two assaults that were published in the O&M on 25^th January 1872 are not included in Kelvyn Gills massive two volume “Definitive Record” – but they contain additional gruesome detail about what happened to Page in the form of Doctor Hutchinsons report:

‘Dr Hutchinson deposed that on the 15^th inst. Page was brought to the Wangaratta Hospital. There was a wound on the left leg four inches above the ankle, contused and punctured ; higher up on the same leg a lacerated wound three inches long ; on the right leg a lacerated wound an inch long, below the knee ; on the right thigh two lacerations six inches long ; two severe bruises on the right lower ribs, &c. ; three lacerated; -wounds on the scalp ; the left eye blackened, : &c. Several of the wounds were through the skin. The life of Page was in jeopardy.’

Page had fallen out with Brickey Williamson who was a mate of Jimmy Quinn. The day after Quinn had attacked Margaret, he went with Williamson to Pages house and attacked him too, using the handle of an auger. Page had attempted to defend himself with a pick handle, but clearly came off second best. Quinn went away, but returned to continue the assault and tried to drag Page to a nearby waterhole to drown him.

“Bleeding profusely and terrified, Page grabbed a fence post and hung on with all his remaining strength. Maggie Kelly who happened to be visiting a friend nearby ran out and screamed at her Uncle to let the man go. One of Pages friends grabbed a spade to beat Jimmy back” (Mrs Kelly by Grantlee Kieza, Chapter seven)

Maggie Kelly was just eleven - and now a witness to a vicious bashing, and near murder by her own Uncle! Child psychologists would no doubt have much to speculate on the damaging effect on a young girls mind of being witness to such violence as this, the obvious one being a normalisation and desensitisation to violence, but studies also show exposure to violence greatly increases the likelihood of the child being angry, anxious and depressed.

It seems the innocent victim in this Kelly story was an 11 year old child, Maggie, and 

the criminals were not police but her own family. Why on earth do the Kelly 

apologists keep insisting that everything that went bad for the Kellys was the fault of 

the police? This was the lie told by Ned Kelly – modern apologists only excuse for 

believing it might be that Ian Jones didn’t tell them the whole story but now, after 

reading this what will their excuse be? 

Exposed : More Domestic Violence in the Kelly clan

What Ned Kelly's uncle did to his sister Margarets face was much WORSE  than this!

The image Kelly sympathisers want you to have in your minds of the extended family of Ned Kellys aunts and uncles as he was growing up, is that they were decent but poor country folk, struggling to make a living in the harsh frontier environment of north-east Victoria. They want you to believe that the authorities, corrupted by their associations with rich landowners and their own prejudices, harassed and persecuted the Kelly ‘clan’ for being Irish, for being Catholic, for having convict associations and for being poor selectors. The story is that having observed all this as he was growing up, once he was old enough Ned Kelly finally decided to do something about it.

As I showed last week, in contrast to that treacly sweet Kelly myth of family harmony against the dark forces lined up against them, the  plain truth is that it wasn’t the police or the squatters who caused Ellen Kelly to be poverty stricken and a solo mother of seven in 1868. She was a poverty-stricken widow because of her husband’s alcoholism - which killed him in 1866 -  and her brother-in-laws act of drunken revenge, setting fire to their home and nearly incinerating 13 children. She and her two sisters lost everything, because Ellen didn’t want to get into bed with Uncle Jim. That was his revenge.

This horrendous act of retaliation was the kind of thing that drew police attention to the Kellys, and so it most certainly should have.  They came across children sleeping outside in the grass, women whose husbands were all in prison, stories of drunken brawling, promiscuity and arson. The idea that police interest in the Kelly clan  was harassment that had something to do with their religion or their nationality or their convict associations is laughable – it arose from the ghastly criminal actions of the Kellys themselves which on that occasion very nearly resulted in tragic consequences for as many as 13 clan children. Ned Kelly could have been one of the children incinerated when that old pub went up in flames.

Its hardly likely that this was a one-off. Uncle Jim was said to be rarely sober so they had probably been putting up with this drunks intolerable and boorish behaviour  for a long time. They were all probably glad when the police took him off their hands and he went to prison for fifteen years. But he wasn’t the only criminal in the clan when Ned Kelly as growing up.

Ned had another Uncle Jim, Jimmy Quinn, his mothers brother, and in 1872 he was involved in yet another case that Judge Redmond Barry had to preside over at the Beechworth Circuit Court. This time James aka ‘Jimmy’ Quinn was tried for ‘wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.’  And who did he wound you might ask? A policeman? A squatter? A bully from the ruling class? Someone harassing and oppressing them as they tried to go about their lawful business? That’s what you might expect if the Kelly myths were true but no, he beat up his own younger sister, Margaret. She was one of the poor women who lost everything when their accommodation was burned to the ground four years earlier by the other of Neds Uncles Jim.

In fact this incident from January 1872 has horrible parallels with the 1868 one. They both were about drunken clan members trying to hit on women, and seeking revenge when they were rejected. This time, the perpetrator, James Quinn aged 32 entered Margaret Quinns bedroom early one morning, took all his clothes off and tried to get into bed with Jane Graham who was sleeping at the foot of Margaret’s bed. Margaret’s husband was Patrick Quinn (same surname but different family altogether) and wouldn’t you know it, he was in prison for violent assault.

In court the 21 year old Jane Graham was interrogated and its recorded that “It was with difficulty any evidence could be extracted from this witness”. At one point she is recorded as saying “I don’t remember what happened next” . This of course was long before the day when it was realised how court processes entrench the embarrassment and shame, and traumatise yet again the victims of sexual assault, but its clear in that remark, that this is what was happening in court to young Jane Graham. She has been identified as a local prostitute, but that didn’t give Uncle Jim the right to force himself on her, so Margaret  objected to his behaviour. In court Margaret said:

“About daybreak prisoner came into the room undressed and began to pull the clothes off the girl. She called out and I woke and told him he should be ashamed of himself. ….. I told the girl we would get  up and dress as it was daybreak.  We did so when the prisoner struck me a severe blow on the side of the head with his shut hand. It knocked me senseless and I knew no more for some time.  I do not recollect any other blow. I was struck on the mouth. When I came around I was lying on the floor bleeding from two wounds in the face.”

“Stephen Byrne, a labourer deposed: I know Mrs Quinns house. I recollect going there on the morning of Saturday. I heard James Quinn say that he had beat his sister and I went to see what was the matter about sunrise. ….She was cut  in the face and bleeding freely….I fetched her to the doctor. She was not able to walk and my employer sent me in with a spring cart”

In Court,  Doctor W B Hutchinson said:

“She had one wound two inches long from the mouth up toward the eye, cut right through to the mouth, and two other wounds about the lip and one on the nose, separating the cartilage from the bones. …. She had lost a good deal of blood.” (Click this link to read the court report yourself.(O&M April 17 1872))

This was obviously an appalling and violent attack, the kind we refer to these days as a coward’s punch, a massive hit to the face that felled Margaret immediately. It could have killed her. Margaret would have looked much worse than the woman in the photo at the top of the post, with a two-inch laceration extending right into her mouth, her nose pulverised, blood streaming from the injuries, unable to stand. Her young face would have been disfigured for the rest of her life.

A couple of months earlier, that same Doctor had been in court describing the injuries this same Jimmy Quinn had inflicted on a John Page in another violent assault. Quinn was hiding under a bed when police came to arrest him. Page was ‘in a very bad state’ after the assault and remained in the Wangaratta hospital for two or three weeks. And was John Page a despised squatter, a tyrannical policeman, or oppressor from the ruling class? No, he was a ‘splitter’, in other words a poor hard working labourer.

Quinn received two years for this assault and then in April another eighteen months was added for the assault on his sister.

Kelly apologists do their best to hide this sickening episode in their history, and the many others like it, and instead promote the claim first invented by Ned Kelly that police interest in them was persecution and harassment, that they were targeted because they were Irish selectors and related to convicts, that they were innocent victims.  The facts show this to be an outright lie, a fiction, a cover-up. The facts, recorded in the newspapers and Court reports of the time prove that police interest in the Kelly clan came about because of the Kelly clans own unquestionably criminal behaviour – sexual assault, arson, infliction of grievous bodily harm – and shockingly, much of it on their own family members. We know that in every case the domestic violence that makes it to court is just the tip of a putrid ice-berg, and so no doubt it touched every corner of the Kelly world. The Kelly cover-up of their wretched drunken violent treatment of women, turns the stomach, especially when they repeat their claim thier troubles were all the fault of the police..

This was the environment that Ned Kelly grew up in – violence was the clan norm, and Ned Kelly was an enthusiast for it, boasting in the Jerilderie letter “I had a pair of arms and a bunch of fives on the end of them that never failed to peg out anything they came in contact with”. How utterly unsurprising that his first criminal charge, at the age of 15, was for assault. How utterly unsurprising that his last criminal act was an attempt at ultra-violence at Glenrowan, a police massacre.