Ned was born in June 1855 to a  proud Irish Catholic family whose resentment of the British set the precedent for his life. His short story is one that saw Ned and three mates take on corrupt police, greedy land barons and an ignorant government in a quest to change their world for the better. Wrongly accused, they survived a deadly shootout with police in 1878 that saw Ned, his brother Dan, and their mates Joe Byrne and Steve hart, outlawed with the largest reward ever offered in the British Empire – dead or alive. 

Over the next eighteen months, the Kelly gang held up two country towns and robbed their banks without firing a single shot, wrote numerous essays explaining their actions, and became folk heroes to the masses. Their grand plan to derail a special police train and declare a Republic of North East Victoria came to a fiery end in Glenrowan when they donned their famous but cumbersome armour against an overwhelming police force. By November 11, 1880 the era of the Kelly Gang drew to a close when Ned, after a brief trial, was hanged. Yet the legacy of his life and the chord he struck within a young Australia, unwilling to bend to injustice, saw Ned Kelly become Australia’s most enduring legend. 

Far more than a folk hero, Ned Kelly has become one with the Australian spirit. Listed in the top one hundred of the world’s most influential Irish and arguably Australia’s best-known historical figure, our Ned truly deserves his place in the pages of history. As the subject for the world’s first feature film made in Australia in 1906, The Story of the Kelly Gang has been added to a United Nations heritage register, joining a list of fewer than two hundred items on UNESCO’s Memory of the world register, including the family archives of Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel and the official trial records of Nelson Mandela. 

 

I think Ned Kelly was a hero because he always had a belief that the social inequalities of his days should be righted. He became caught up in a series of events over which he had little control. Towards the end he was no longer just fighting for his beliefs, he was fighting for his life, and the lives of his friends. Up until his final moments he still firmly believed he had fought for a just cause. To me, his final words “Such is life” suggest that he had tried his hardest to live for and by his beliefs. He died a man of honour, loyal to his friends, family and class. He died a spokesman for an entire generation of the oppressed.

 

Ned Kelly was a thief, a bank robber and a murderer. He was in trouble with the law from the age of 12. He stole hundreds of horses and cattle. He robbed two banks. He killed three men.

Yet, when Ned was sentenced to death, thousands of people rallied to save his life. He stood up to the authorities and fought for what he believed in. He defended the rights of people who had no power.

Was he a villain? A hero? Or a victim?

 

Saved boy from drowning when he was a boy himself

Had morals as the laws were injustice

Paid for food and supplies even though they were thieves pg. 69

When they robbed a family, they would have dinner with them in the bush pg. 68

Entertained the victims of the robbery using horse riding pg. 73

Public falsely told the police where the Kelly Gang were going to be pg. 75-76

Ned Kelly’s family were Irish, and historically the Catholic Irish had had a very hard time at the hands of the Protestant English. Many Irish people had emigrated to Australia because the English had destroyed their homes and forced them out of England. The Kelly family was further looked down upon because Red Kelly (Ned’s father) was also a convict. Thus, Ned would always have been treated as nothing more than a criminal’s son, or even worse, an Irish criminal’s son.

How did Ned’s early years shape him as an adult? In 1865 he saved a young boy from drowning in a river. He was only a boy himself. The boy’s parents gave him a sash, a sash that obviously meant a lot to him, for he was wearing it when he was shot down at Glenrowan. A few years later, Ned was given 6 months hard labour for assaulting a Chinese man. Perhaps his growing sense of discontent at the social injustice surrounding him made him lash out at others as oppressed as him, because the English were too powerful to hurt.

Ned Kelly was only seen as a villain by the upper classes. His sympathisers in the lower classes were treated very badly, being held for months on end without charges or trial. They weren’t allowed to take up land holdings in the region as an attempt to get them out of North-East Victoria. The police were trying to discourage support of Ned Kelly within the lower classes. Their efforts weren’t successful, as 30,000 Victorians signed a petition, sympathetic to Ned, to stop him from being hanged. Also, the majority of people receiving a share of the reward money for the capture of the Kelly Gang were either in the police force, employees of the railways, or native trackers hired by the police.

The information about the deeds of the Kelly Gang is very clouded, an example of this being the Stringybark Creek incident, where 3 policemen were killed, with only Constable McIntyre living to tell the tale. Some insist that the Gang deliberately chose to stay and confront the police, rather than simply escape into the bush. In the Jerilderie Letter, Ned states that the police had many more weapons than were needed to purely arrest someone. The Kelly Gang believed the police had come with the intention of killing them. They believed their only chance of escape was to take the horses and weapons of the police. Many would believe their actions were ones of self-defence.

I think Ned Kelly was a hero because he always had a belief that the social inequalities of his days should be righted. He became caught up in a series of events over which he had little control. Towards the end he was no longer just fighting for his beliefs, he was fighting for his life, and the lives of his friends. Up until his final moments he still firmly believed he had fought for a just cause. To me, his final words “Such is life” suggest that he had tried his hardest to live for and by his beliefs. He died a man of honour, loyal to his friends, family and class. He died a spokesman for an entire generation of the oppressed. 

When only 10 years old, Kelly was acknowledged locally as a hero after he courageously saved a seven-year-old boy from drowning. The child, Dick Shelton, had fallen into rain-swollen Hughes Creek, in Avenel, 100km north of Melbourne, when he tried to retrieve his new straw hat, which had dropped off as he walked across a footbridge.

To acknowledge Kelly’s bravery, the Sheltons, who ran the Royal Mail Hotel, presented him with an embroidered green silk sash. Kelly wore this sash in the siege at Glenrowan and his family members wore it in January this year as they read from the scriptures during his memorial mass at St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Wangaratta.

Although Kelly’s official birthdate isn’t known, it’s thought that he was 11 or 12 when his father Red died in Avenel, and it was left to Kelly to register the death at the local telegraph store. Red had been a convict transported to Australia for the theft of two pigs, said to be worth about £6 (about $850 today). After his father’s death, Kelly effectively became the male head of his family – which consisted of his 33-year-old mother and six siblings.

In the following years, Kelly grew to symbolise the industrious and resourceful bush settlers who had learned to live in this harsh country, becoming an expert horseman, bushman and tree feller. As his exploits became more audacious, he also became a symbol of those early Australians who defied the authority of the Protestant English establishment. At the time of his sentencing by the Anglo-Irish Protestant judge Redmond Barry, 60,000 signatures – one-fifth the population of Melbourne – were collected in protest against his execution. A crowd of 5000 also stood outside the Melbourne Gaol on the morning he was hanged.  

Edward (Ned) Kelly (1855-1880), bush ranger, was born in June 1855 at Beveridge, Victoria, the eldest son of John (Red) Kelly and his wife Ellen, nee Quinn. His father was born in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1820 and sentenced in 1841 to seven years' transportation for stealing two pigs. He arrived in Van Diem en's Land in 1842. When his sentence expired in 1848 he went to the Port Phillip District, where on 18 November 1850 he married Ellen, the eighteen-year-old daughter of James and Mary Quinn; they had five daughters and three sons.

Ned attended school at Avenel until his father died on 27 December 1866. Left indigent, the widow and children moved to a hut at Eleven Mile Creek, about half-way between Greta and Glenrowan in northern Victoria, where James Quinn had taken up a cattle run of 25,000 acres (10,117 ha) of poor country in 1862. Well known in the district, the Quinns and two Lloyd brothers, who had married into the family, were suspected by the police in connection with thefts of horses and cattle. In 1869 Ned was arrested for alleged assault on a Chinaman and held for ten days on remand but the charge was dismissed. Next year he was arrested and held in custody for seven weeks as a suspected accomplice of the bushranger, Harry Power, but again the charge was dismissed.