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AUSTRALIA IN HISTORY’S PAGE
Such is life, or is it?
One of Australia’s great folk heroes is Edward (Ned) Kelly, a
bank robber and bushranger with an iron-clad approach
Government policy in New South Wales
shifted from opposition to regulation and
control. By 1840 squatters were among
the wealthiest men in New South Wales,
many of them from upper and mid-
dle-class English and Scottish families.
While a teenager, Kelly was arrested
for associating with bushranger Harry
Power, and served two prison terms for
a variety of offences, including receipt
of a stolen horse. He later joined the
‘Greta mob’, who stole livestock. A violent
confrontation with a policeman at the
family home in 1878 led to his indictment
for attempted murder. Fleeing to the
bush, Kelly vowed to avenge his mother,
who was imprisoned for her role in the
incident. After he, his brother Dan, and
associates Joe Byrne and Steve Hart shot
dead three policemen, the Government of
Victoria proclaimed them outlaws.
Kelly and his gang eluded the police for
two years, helped by an extensive network of sympathisers. In January
1879 police arrested all known Kelly friends and purported sympathis-
ers, a total of 23 people, and held them without charge in Beechworth
Gaol for over three months.
In 1880, his gang attempted to derail and ambush a police train; the
attack failed and Kelly, the only survivor of the gang’s gun battle with
the police, was captured and taken to the Old Melbourne Gaol. His last
words were reported to have been “such is life”, or “ah, well, I suppose
it has come to this”. Another suggestion is “what a nice little garden”,
which he said as he passed the Gaol’s flower beds. The Gaol warden,
when asked to confirm Kelly’s last words said the bushranger had
mumbled something indiscernible. In time-old tradition, the news-
papers of the day didn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story (a
practice that continues to this day).
In tomorrow’s edition, learn all about one of Australia’s earliest tech-
nological achievements!
S
ome readers may remember the 1970 film, Ned Kelly, which
starred Mick Jagger in the title role. Please forget that.
Born Edward Kelly in December 1854, Ned Kelly was an Aus-
tralian bushranger (think highwayman), gang leader and bank robber.
He is best known for fashioning a bulletproof suit of armour (think iron
bucket on head and iron breastplate). Kelly was eventually brought
down by a police sergeant who shot him in the (iron-unclad) legs at the
gang’s final stand in Glenrowan.
Kelly and his gang, which operated in the state of Victoria, were by
no means the only bushrangers in Australia at the time. The country,
which was first settled by Europeans in 1788, was sparsely populated.
Bushrangers tended to operate in the remoter parts of the country that
had been settled during the 1840s and 1850s. Their targets were the
wealthy and banks; they were generally quite popular among the mass-
es. During the Kelly gang raid on the bank at Jerilderie, they burnt the
mortgage papers of small-scale farmers who were indebted to the bank.
Kelly was the third of eight children to Irish parents. His father, a
transported convict, died shortly after serving a six-month prison sen-
tence, leaving Kelly, then aged 12, as the eldest male of the household.
The Kellys were a poor farming family who saw themselves as down-
trodden by the “squattocracy” and as victims of police persecution. The
squattocracy (a wordplay on aristocracy) were those who squatted on
unoccupied Crown land for pastoral or other purposes – there was a
lot of ‘unoccupied’ land during the early days of settlement as the local
indigenous population weren’t deemed to be occupying the land. And it
was all claimed for the British Crown.
From the mid-1820s, the occupation of Crown land in Australia with-
out legal title became more widespread, often carried out by those from
the upper echelons of colonial society. As wool began to be exported
to England and the colonial population increased, the occupation of
pastoral land for raising cattle and sheep progressively became more
lucrative. Squatting had become so widespread by the mid-1830s that
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Ned Kelly in the Gaol Hospital at Melbourne