Ned Kelly

The Enigma Behind the Mask

Ned Kelly's Armor

That iconographic portrait of Ned Kelly, lumbering in his handmade armor, armor fashioned, a police report would later note without a hint of irony, out of plowshares, his gun blazing as he struggles against a rain of police bullets, is one of the most powerful and enduring images of Australia.

In the century and a quarter since he launched — or was driven to launch — his personal assault against the established order in colonial Australia, he has been the subject of scores of books, most recently Peter Carey's Booker-winning novel "The True History of the Kelly Gang." There have been half a dozen or more motion pictures, not to mention plays and countless scholarly treatises on his life, and the meaning of it.

In the northern reaches of the Australian state of Victoria, an industry has grown up around the places where his legend began. In fact, his image was even used during the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games in Sydney. The celebrated artist Sidney Nolan had etched his image into the popular psyche through a series of paintings, and one of those paintings now hangs outside the office of the Prime Minister in Canberra. The outlaw was even honored in 1980 when his portrait was placed on a stamp.

And yet, despite all of the adulation that he has received over the years, Ned Kelly remains one of the most controversial figures in Australian history. To some, he was nothing more than a brutish bandit, the product of a nascent criminal class that peopled the bush in those early days in Victoria, a thug who learned his craft at the knee of an older bandit. To others he is a symbol of rebellion, an exemplar of the character the nation would like to have, strong, independent, driven by a thirst for justice, a Robin Hood who gave his life in the struggle against a brutal and oppressive class structure that rewarded the rich and punished the poor. As Graham Seal, a professor of Australian history at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth put it in a 2003 interview with the British newspaper The Observer, "It is unusual for an outlaw to achieve quite this measure of respectability...but I think most people would like Australia to be a country with some of those good qualities Ned did have, in terms of independence, loyalty and fairness."

Even now, when the iron mask is pulled from Ned Kelly's face, he is a still an enigma, a man in whom one sees precisely what one wants to see.