Ned Kelly

The Verdict of History

Ned Kelly

Four months after his last stand at Glenrowan, Ned Kelly was tried and convicted of the murder of Lonigan at String Bark Creek. On Nov. 11, 1880, he was hanged.

But if authorities thought that Ned Kelly's death would put an end to his legend, they were sadly mistaken. Even then, in the far more authoritarian days of the late 19^th Century, more than 32,000 people, nearly one in ten residents of Victoria, signed a petition demanding that he be granted a reprieve.

And in the century and a quarter since his death, the legend of Ned Kelly and his gang have continued to grow.

Earlier this year, in fact, Paul Tully, an amateur historian and councilor for the town of Ipswich in Queensland made international headlines when he raised the possibility that both Dan Kelly and Hart had actually survived the gun battle and fire at Glenrowan and that the charred bodies pulled from the smoldering ruin were those of two itinerant workers who had to be unlucky witnesses to one of the most dramatic incidents in Australian history. The state coroner has agreed to study the matter.

Most historians, however, doubt that it would have been possible for the two members of the Kelly gang to have escaped the blaze.

But in one way, at least, there is no question that Dan Kelly, Steve Hart, Joe Byrne and, most importantly Ned Kelly did survive the last stand at Glenrowan. In fact, their iron image was, at least in part, forged in the flames of the old hotel that day.

After all, while most of his pursuers are relegated to the status of footnotes, Ned Kelly's portrait now hangs outside of the Prime Minister's Office, and while the status quo that Ned Kelly so violently challenged is fading into history, the values that Kelly articulated in his letters at Euroa and Jerilderie have become part of the fabric of the nation, and his ethos, real or manufactured for public consumption, has become an essential element of the Australian national character.

As Graham Seal put it in his interview with the Observer, "I think most people would like Australia to be a country with some of those good qualities Ned did have...independence, loyalty and fairness."