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This paper challenges the traditional ideas of villainy through its exploration of Ned Kelly. In 1878, Ned Kelly led an ambush that saw the killing of three police officers. Two years - and several crimes - later he was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol. There is, however, an historical amnesia concerning Kelly that has allowed him to be rewritten, in popular history at least, as a noble villain. Cinematic interpretations of Kelly’s life have contributed to this amnesia. This paper also presents Ned Kelly’s own voice, as heard in the Jerilderie Letter, which was once suppressed and censored by the printed press.
Memory in / of English-speaking Cinema. Le cinéma comme vecteur de la mémoire dans le cinéma Anglophone, ed. by Zeenat Saleh and Melvyn Stokes, Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, pp, 240-251.
Imagining Jesse James and Ned Kelly: How Historical Outlaws are Remembered as Western Heroes2014 •
This paper considers the religious aspects of the life of Ned Kelly, in dialogue with Russel Ward’s Australian Legend, in order to explore the relatively unexamined religious dimensions of the Australian national myth. Religious leaders could be surprisingly sympathetic toward Kelly, with the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, James Moorhouse, urging congregants to pray for the outlaws as they cowered in the bush on the run from the law. Kelly was an Irish Catholic, of course, but there are also interesting Methodist connections. His widowed mother Ellen married the Californian miner George King in the home of a Primitive Methodist minister, a perhaps surprising thing for an Irish Catholic to do in a sectarian age that frowned on such ‘mixed marriages’. The Wesleyan Methodist preacher John Cowley Coles visited Kelly in the Melbourne Gaol in September and October 1880 while Kelly awaited execution. Kelly the penitent Catholic Christian knelt beside Coles the forthright Wesleyan preacher, together calling upon God to grant mercy to a fallen sinner. An examination of the response of religious leaders to the Kelly Outbreak as well as Kelly’s own religious sentiments can inform and enlarge our understanding of one of Australia’s most enduring cultural icons.
Journal of Popular Culture
“The Influence of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang: Repositioning the Ned Kelly Narrative in Australian Popular Culture.”2007 •
To investigate why The Glenrowan Affair is so utterly, terribly and awfully Bad, this paper discusses its relationship with the industry of Ned Kelly cinema, as well as Kathner's oeuvre, which has recently inspired the docudrama Hunt Angels (Alec Morgan, 2006).
Papers of the 7th Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship: 93-109. ISSN: 2186-2281
Ned Kelly: the multiple truths of Australia’s most famous bushranger2017 •
In a line-up of all the Australian criminals, who sparked fear in the community and generated business for the law and justice systems in the colonial era, no individual stands taller than Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly of Victoria. Of all the bushrangers, it is Kelly who maintains a prominent place within Australian history as a cultural and popular icon. This situates Kelly, and his Gang, alongside many other bushrangers – men who robbed, raped and murdered their way across the Australian outback in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – men who are now often seen as heroes of folklore. Men who have been celebrated in a wide variety of histories: in illustrations and paintings, in articles and books, in newspaper reportage as well as in traditional songs. The practice of celebrating Kelly across a range of creative outputs including art, crime fiction, true crime, film and song is not, however, undertaken without some criticism. There are certainly some who consider Kelly to be a hero, a young man rebelling against unwarranted police persecution and profiling. Yet many others, position Kelly as a villain, one who did not hesitate to engage in, and to lead others in, a diverse range of criminal activities from the stealing of livestock to the murdering of policemen. This research looks briefly at Edward Kelly’s story, not as a neat narrative but as a colloquium of voices, a suite of multiple truths that now surround Australia’s most famous bushranger.
This article examines British director Tony Richardson's international version of Ned Kelly (1970) in the context of international Australian films and the national Australian cinema. Ever since Richardson was given government assistance to produce a film about the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, pressure to help the local industry had been mounting, especially considering that Richardson's film undercut some local productions under consideration. Outraged that a British director would be allowed to make a film about an Australian national hero when its own directors were begging for such opportunities, locals responded to Richardson and star Mick Jagger's arrival in Australia with great resentment. By looking equally at Richardson's calamitous making of the first international Kelly production, and the state of the Australian film industry, this article discusses Ned Kelly as a cautionary tale about foreigners making films about historical Australian subjects. From start to finish, Ned Kelly was a disaster, and never again would an international production be given the same concessions as were granted to Tony Richardson.
JIGS Vol 10
Sarah Pinto and Leigh Boucher 'Fighting for Legitimacy: Masculinity, Political Voice and Ned Kelly'2006 •
Journal of Australian Studies 36.2: 191-206
Instilling postcolonial nostalgias : Ned Kelly narratives for children2012 •
This essay examines books for children focusing on Ned Kelly and the Kelly gang, published from 2000 to 2011. Drawing upon theories of narrative, memory and nostalgia it analyses the narrative strategies and visual images through which these texts position readers, and their investment in formulations of the Australian nation. The essay argues that these books function as exercises in restorative nostalgia, producing palatable versions of Kelly as an Australian hero, and articulating connections between the Kelly legend and Australian national identity. By foregrounding Kelly's Irishness and by representing him as a “good badman”, these Ned Kelly narratives for children, which range across fiction, non-fiction, picture book and play script, reinscribe versions of national identity which occlude more complicated narratives. In particular, their emphasis on struggles between Irish and English settlers, and between selectors and squatters, displaces Indigenous histories, colonial violence, and systemic discrimination against those deemed outsiders to the nation.
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