"'Game as Ned Kelly', the people would say." Really? What people, other than morons? Oh, it's a line from a song by Slim Dusty (an Australian country musician, 1927-2003).

The Kelly gang's idiotic attempt to use suits of armour is its most recognisable characteristic, but I'll deal with that in later shots.

Ned Kelly is a polarising figure in Australia, which in part is why I chose such dramatic light. If you're from here, you know that. Some regard him as a folk hero like Robin Hood. (Folk hero my muscular butt. He stole from rich and poor alike and kept for himself, or at best distributed to his family and supporters as a quid pro quo.) Some regard him as having been a violent thug and proto-terrorist (including me). Some can sympathise with the abuse that he and his family copped at the hands of the system, without which he may not have followed the path that he did. (Surprisingly, including me.)

You do need to understand something about British, and therefore Australian, society in the 1800s. After the Glorious Revolution which deposed the Catholic James II of England (1688), England swung violently Protestant. The problem was that the Irish (and remember that the British crown ruled over all of Ireland at the time) were overwhelmingly Catholic and tended to support Catholic powers like France over England. This generated a huge amount of bad blood and distrust on both sides, and Irish Catholics were certainly the lower classes in the realm, generally. As a result of which, they also generated a significant number of criminals, who were later transported to Australia under the rule and the boot of the Protestant English overlords.

This included John ("Red") Kelly (b 1820 in Ireland, d 1866 at Avenal, central Victoria AU). He was transported to Tasmania in 1841 for stealing 2 pigs. After release in 1848 he moved to a farm in Wallan, 45km north of Melbourne where he married the owner's daughter Ellen Quinn. He was 30, she was only 18 which allowed them to have 8 children.

The third of those was Edward ("Ned") Kelly, December 1854 to 11 November 1880.

His parents had tried their hand at gold prospecting but without success. John started drinking heavily which, along with petty crime, brought him to the attention of the local police. If you've done the maths his alcoholism killed him at the age of 46 leaving Ned, at age 12, the oldest male of the house.

The family moved to a farm in NE Victoria, where the soil was less than optimal and Ellen supported the family by offering lodgings and bootleg liquor.

At the age of 14 Kelly became involved with an established bushranger (highwayman) named Henry Johnson, alias Harry Power (1819-1891). The rest of the story would take pages to write but in a nutshell:
* Kelly was involved in horse theft, for which he was both rightly and wrongly harassed by the police.
* Things really started to spin out of control when a police constable named Fitzpatrick tried to arrest some members of the Kelly family plus associates at the Kelly home. (That was April 1878, when Kelly was 23.) Maybe. There are more sides to this story than there are chicken dinners at an RSL club but in short there was some sort of scuffle. Two family associates got 6 years in jail, and Kelly's mother 3 years hard labour. And from there, it was on.
* Kelly went into hiding. A group of 4 policemen were sent to track and arrest Kelly and his associates, but Kelly spotted them, ambushed them and killed three of them in what came to be known as the Stringybark Creek Police Murders (October 1878). Kelly claimed self-defence, the police survivor claimed it was cold blooded murder.
* Kelly and his gang robbed a bank at Euroa in December 1878. The night before the robbery the gang held up a pastoral substation, taking 14 employees and passers by hostage. Some of those were, however, suspected of being sympathisers of the gang. Remember the social dynamics that I mentioned above? Irish Catholic descendants or ex-convicts who want to "stick it to the damned English" (of which there were many in the countryside) came in useful to Kelly and his gang. As the heist went on more hostages including bank staff were added. Some claim that the robbers acted courteously. Some deny that. The claim that the gang threatened to burn the buildings containing hostages if there was any resistance is undisputed. Charming. I seem to recall certain parties – I can't recall who, now, hmm, who was it, now? – doing a similar thing in France in 1944.
* In February 1879 the gang again needed cash and set out to rob another bank in Jerilderie NSW. When they found that there were only two policemen at the barracks they bailed them up, holding the senior constable's wife and children hostage. When they left they warned the wife not to try to leave the barracks or they would burn it down with her and her children inside. Again, France 1944 rings a bell.
* During the Jerilderie robbery Kelly took deeds, mortgages and securities from the safe and burned them because, and viva la revolution, comrades, "The bloody banks are crushing the life's blood out of the poor, struggling man". Go you hero of the working class, you. Just one small thing, Neddy... did you ever stop to think that there are central land registries, and that the banks will have made copies of the mortgages for their central offices, even before we had Xeroxes? (We sort of did. They were called "clerks" back then.) Also I hope that the "poor, struggling men" kept their bank passbooks in order because you may well have destroyed evidence of payments that they have made. Or does that sort of thinking require an IQ above room temperature, and pointless, self-indulgent performance art is easier?
* In March 1879 the gang "found out" that a former associate named Aaron Sherritt had apparently turned police informer. It's not clear whether he had (he was associating with police but may have been feeding them bad intel), but they murdered him anyway. And you know their threats to burn down houses with people inside? Yeah, they tried to do that at Sherritt's place, so those threats weren't just talk. Being useless pillocks, they failed to get the house to catch alight, though.
* The gang members tried to sabotage a rail line to derail a police train. Specifically, they tried to do it in a way that would cause it to plunge into a gully and cause mass casualties, and they would then stand on an embankment and murder any survivors. Killing injured survivors of a battle? Mmm. These guys just sound more and more familiar. However the plan was beyond their abilities.
* That plan was to take place at Glenrowan which, in a Uno reverse, was the location of Kelly's last stand in June 1880. (Before anyone says anything, yes, the police did set fire to the building that Kelly was in at Glenrowan. The difference is that they did that to drive him out of it, not to try to kill him in it.)

So here it is in a nutshell. Kelly did at least one decent thing in his life, other than die. When he was a kid he risked his life to save another kid from drowning. I can't think of another decent thing that he did for anyone who wasn't himself, his family or his supporters. He stole from people. He would steal from you, he would steal from me. He provided lip service to "the poor, struggling man", then take what they had earned from them. He would take people as hostages and threaten to burn them alive, and he would at least once try to make good on that threat. He wanted to murder disarmed, injured men. He wrote manifestos demanding to be obeyed lest there be consequences, in a way that makes the Unabomber look like a well-adjusted individual. He was, in short, a punk. A punk who was screwed over by the system, sure. But the life of crime is one that he chose to pursue, seemingly happily and without regrets. Until November of 1880, at least, a month shy of his 26th birthday when maybe, just possibly, he may have questioned some of his life choices. But I doubt it.

Such is life.

So... I'm actually fine with this death mask. And I for one do not give a flying fig whether Mick Jagger played him in a film (really, really badly, based on a Rotten Tomatoes score of 27%), he's still no hero.