Ned Kelly

Recasting the Rebellion

To most historians, the show down at String Bark Creek marked the real beginning of what has come to be known as the "Kelly Outbreak." Before that bloody encounter, the powers that be in Melbourne, if they considered the Kelly boys at all, considered them to be an aggravation, a glorified nuisance, but not much more. Certainly they were to be captured, and when they were, they were to be treated harshly. But there was nothing particularly distinctive about them. They were common criminals, as ubiquitous as the red back spiders that to this day seem to haunt every crevice of the country.

But String Bark Creek changed things. Perhaps it was the violence of the showdown, perhaps it was the fact that in some ways, it seemed to the downtrodden selectors of north eastern Victoria to be a blow against all the injustice they had suffered at the hands of the powerful elite, Whatever the reason, afterwards, the Kelly boys began to achieve a an almost mythic status. That fact as not lost on the power brokers in Melbourne who quickly came to see Ned Kelly and his gang as a serious threat to the well being of the commonwealth, or at least to their position in it.

No longer just wild bushrangers, these young men were now dangerous killers, and the state quickly moved to have them all declared as outlaws.

The 100-pound bounty on Ned Kelly's head was increased twenty fold, and a veteran police inspector, Francis Hare, was specifically assigned to track down the gang.

To be sure, that sudden change in status was not lost on Ned Kelly. Almost instinctively, Kelly understood that he had an opportunity to cast his actions in a new light. He had the opportunity, not just to attack the power structure that he believed had persecuted him and his family from the time John Kelly first set foot in the country, but he also lived in a time when new technological advances — the telegraph for example — made it possible for his explanations to be broadcast around the world. In fact, in the aftermath of the String Bark Creek showdown, Kelly's exploits had been chronicled in English speaking newspapers throughout the British Empire. As scholar Graham Seal noted in his 2003 interview with the Observer, this lowborn Irish selector had become perhaps the world's first international criminal celebrity.

It was, perhaps, a particularly aggravating to the authorities that Ned Kelly, who had always had a gift for language and a penchant for publicity that dated back to that day when he was just eleven and saved his classmate from almost certain death by drowning, had all the skills necessary to exploit that to the opportunity to the fullest.