I wrote a while back that it’s not enough to debunk Kelly myths once and expect that true believers will straight away toss out whatever belief of theirs that had just been shown to be false, and move on. The natural response, initially at least, is to defend one’s beliefs, but rational people will eventually be persuaded by the force of the logic and the facts to move on. However, for reasons psychologists might know, some people will never let go, no matter how irrational their belief is or how strong the disproving evidence is. These are the kind of people who still insist that the science is wrong and the earth is flat! These are also the kind of people who cling to all the mythology about Ned Kelly : much of it has been been debunked but they remain in angry and mostly uninformed denial, as they do on the Best Bloody Man page, pre-occupying themselves with Kelly trivia, and as is seen on Peterson and Rowsells pages, with all kinds of conspiracy theories and spurious justifications for continuing to claim otherwise. Most of the people on those pages will never change – theyre trapped in a Kelly cult delusional system that blinds them to objective reality, to reason and logic and facts. But there are no doubt plenty of other people with open minds who still think Jones Kelly Republic was a viable thing…all those people lack is information…so read on !
The reality with myths is they have a kind of cultural momentum that resists change, and change requires exposures of the myth to be continual.
The greatest of the Kelly myths is probably the claim that the Kelly outbreak was a political movement , and its goal was to declare the North East a Republic after a bloody confrontation at Glenrowan. Ian Jones was the Kelly enthusiast who developed and popularised this claim, and it more or less achieved its objective of rehabilitating Ned Kellys image from notorious violent criminal to brave revolutionary hero, akin to Peter Lalor of Eureka fame. However, not everyone was convinced, and in the last decade the myth has crumbled, a reality that is nowhere more apparent than in Glenrowan itself, at the new $5M Kelly Discovery Hub where the once central claim of Kelly historians no longer gets even a mention in passing : a truly huge shift in focus that signifies local rejection of the Republic myth that was centred on their town. Rejection of the myth is spreading….but it’s time to explain it all again, and add to the momentum.
To start with, it will suprise many to realise that Ned Kelly himself never mentioned a political ambition involving a republic or anything like it, not once, not ever – and he was a person who was never lost for words. In fact, he seemed very much in possession of the Irish ‘gift of the gab’ and was well known for his lecturing haranguing and hectoring of the hostages that he seized at Euroa, Jerilderie and Glenrowan, talking at length about himself and his ideas. But he never once enunciated any kind of coherent political strategy or vision, or even any political yearnings or insights, but rather voiced grievance and resentments, he spoke of vengeance and railed against police and authority in general. That kind of dialogue continued in written form in the Jerilderie letter, in which no political utterances were ever discerned until almost a century after it was written, people went looking for support for the theory of a Republic. All of a sudden they ‘discovered’ new meanings and found ‘political’ statements by Kelly that had never been noticed before. But really, they were no more expressions of a commitment to a political journey of reform than angry letters to the Editor of the local newspaper are. A political manifesto is a whole lot more than a few wild historical references, sweeping denunciations and unhinged threats.
But it wasn’t just Ned Kelly who never spoke of a Republic or anything like it – not one member of his family and not one of his supporters ever mentioned such a thing. Kelly apologists explain this with a conspiracy theory: they say it would have been treason to talk about it, so they kept quiet – but this is provable nonsense. For one thing, all kinds of alternative political theories and ideologies, including Republican were promoted and discussed openly in Victoria, and talk never resulted in people being hanged for treason! Even the Eureka insurrectionists, despite the killing, were all acquitted! And for another, the idea that every single one of the many hundreds of people who were supposedly in on the secret maintained an absolutely unbroken silence for the many decades that followed, and took this hermetically sealed secret to their graves without once letting anything slip is beyond impossible. Leaks would have been inevitable…and especially once the Outbreak was over, and as the years went by when a belief in the need for secrecy had passed people would certainly have broken their silence. But no such thing happened. It wasnt that they kept a secret – there was no secret to be kept.
In 1911, a decade after satirists had published mock Kelly history suggesting he was planning to become President, Kellys mother gave a famous long interview to a journalist called Brian Cookson. The outbreak had ended 30 years earlier, and it was long past the time when even the most paranoid would have felt a need to maintain the secret – the idea was already out there – but she gave not the slightest hint of her son ever having even the most minor political ambition.
By this time many books about the Outbreak had been published, such as C H Chomleys classic ‘The True Story of the Kelly Gang of Bushrangers’. Several had been published while Kelly was still alive, and author of one of them, ‘Outlaws of the Wombat Ranges’, G W Hall claimed insider knowledge – but not one of these writers ever mentioned hearing anything from anyone about a political campaign, a Republic or anything like it.
In 1929, Ellen and Jim Kellys friend and neighbour Jerome J Kenneally published another classic work “The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and her pursuers”. Kenneally, an educated Unionist and Journalist who could easily have been sympathetic to political ambition, listed Neds cousin, so called Fifth Gang member Thomas Peter Lloyd as his principal informant. He produced a book that was extravagantly supportive of the Kellys, portraying them as victims. It includes a glowing endorsement from Ned Kellys brother Jim who said Australia was now ‘in full possession of the truth’, but the book, purporting to be the ‘complete’ history included absolutely nothing about a Kelly republic or a local uprising or anything like it. Not one word!
One can only wonder how anyone ever had the idea that the Outbreak was a political uprising when Ned Kelly himself and nobody in the Kelly family, and nobody related or associated with them for 50 years after it was over ever even hinted that it was. And yet that was exactly what happened : how come?
In 1948, Max Brown published another of the Kelly classics, “Australian Son”. Brown made a big deal of how thoroughly he did his research, treading the highways and the byways of the north-east and listening to the stories and gathering information from now elderly living witnesses to the outbreak. None of them talked about a Republic. Brown included the entire Jerilderie letter as an appendix to the book, but didnt identify any particular republican or political sentiment in it. However, in his Foreword he claimed that in 1880 there was a rumour that a Republic declaration had been taken from Kellys pocket when he was captured, but Brown got it wrong. The reference from 1880 was a rumour that ‘a pocketbook containing letters’ were taken from Kelly when he was captured – not a Republic declaration. However, Browns false claim was out there, in a work that was hailed as a classic, and in the way that rumours and inaccurate references do, this one was eventually asserted as fact – Kelly had a Republic Declaration in his pocket at Glenrowan! But thats not true.
A few years later a journalist by the name of Leo Radic suddenly seemed to recall that he had seen this Declaration at the London Public Records Office and several people rushed off to London to find it…and returned empty handed. Forty years later Radic changed his mind: he hadn’t seen it after all!
In 1954 Frank Clunes book, “The Kelly Hunters” appeared : again no reference was made to a republic or to Kelly having any political aspirations.
Meanwhile, the satirical reference from 1900 to Kelly becoming president was being shared around the newspaper circuit, modified and expanded with each re-telling, and accorded increasingly but entirely illegitimate status as an actual rumour from 1880. Oviously the idea was starting to circulate.
All that needed to be done to legitimise the myth was for someone to bring these two rumours together: a republic document taken from Kelly when he was captured, and the story about a plan for him to become president. Enter Ian Jones, an already committed Kelly admirer who was troubled by Kellys plan for Glenrowan, a plan to commit what Jones called ‘a criminal atrocity of monstrous proportion’, a plan that was at odds with the view Jones wanted to promote of Ned Kelly as an admirable figure driven to the edge by the harassment and persecution of police. He wanted to find a reason to explain the planned atrocity away.
Jones asked the son of the so-called fifth Gang member Thomas Peter Lloyd – whose name was Thomas Patrick Lloyd – about these stories and was told they were true. Thomas Patrick Lloyd told Jones he had learned all this from his father and as a boy had seen exercise books containing the minutes of meetings that Kelly and his republican co-conspirators were holding in secret. He also gave Jones details about the two rockets that Cst Arthur reported seeing, telling Jones who fired them and why.
Sensationally, many years later Lloyd admitted to Doug Morrissey that much of what he told Ian Jones was made up: Gang descendants like him had become fed up with journalists who seemed to ignore descendants accounts and print whatever they liked – so Tom decided to tell Jones what he thought he wanted to hear, fake history that he made up to keep him happy. Jones should have realised this was all fake history because Tom Lloyds father was J J Kenneallys principal informant and he clearly had never heard any of this stuff because he never said one word about it to Kenneally. If he had heard of it, it would have been in Kenneallys book, which, you will remember was endorsed by Jim Kelly as being the full story!
Never-the-less, in 1967 at a Symposium in Wangaratta, long before Lloyds confession to Morrissey, Jones pulled all this together and presented Australia with what he called his “New View” of Ned Kelly. The “New View” can be read in the published proceedings of the symposium ‘Ned Kelly Man and Myth’: according to Jones Kelly wasn’t a violent criminal but the leader of a selector backed political uprising that planned to declare the North East a Republic, after his gang and a sympathiser army had defeated the police in a confrontation at Glenrowan. Once the train had been derailed and survivors killed or taken prisoner by the Kelly gang in their protective armour, the sympathiser army was going to be called into battle with signal rockets…eventually, a prisoner swap was going to see his mother released from prison, banks would be raided and somehow the region would be declared a Republic. It wasn’t criminality but a just war! Just ignore the fact that Ned Kelly himself doesn’t seem to have heard about it!
One really cant help but admire Jones, an amateur historian, for the brilliant way he promoted his idea, and how quickly he was able to convince almost everyone that his ‘new view’ should be accepted as genuinely historical. Doubters were quietened by the force of Jones debating style, his extensive knowledge, his quick wit and his persuasive personality, not to mention his influential TV miniseries from 1980, The Last Outlaw that skilfully presented his personal view of the Kelly story as objective history. The Kelly narrative switched to being about a genuine Australian hero and an icon, and stayed that way for nearly 50 years. An entire tourism industry sprang up to accommodate the rising interest in the new Australian legend.
Inevitably though, cracks started to appear, notably with the publication of Ian MacFarlane ‘The Kelly Gang Unmasked’ in 2012 when the historical basis for the entire modernised narrative of Kelly as hero was subjected to withering academic review. The death knell for the Republic was the 2018 publication of ‘Ned Kelly and the Myth of the Republic of North Eastern Victoria’ by Melbourne historian Dr Stuart Dawson who examined in meticulous detail every component of the Republic narrative from the claims about local unrest, a sympathiser army and the Rocket signals to the story of Leo Radics report that he had seen a Declaration. It is unarguably the most important piece of modern research into the Kelly story and is required reading for anyone interested in the history of the Kelly Gang. It covers everything I’ve mentioned in this Post and more and in much greater detail, is supported and backed up by literally hundreds of references and is no doubt the reason why at the Discovery Hub in Glenrowan itself, Jones theory about a Kelly Republic of North East Victoria isnt mentioned even once. That is a remarkable turnaround, given that when the Hub was being planned, the Republic narrative was mainstream: its now been consigned to the wastebin of history.
Download Dawsons brilliant research and read it for free by following the link top right of this page.