I discussed Ned Kelly the man in image 13223. To say I'm not a fan would be putting it mildly. In short he was a bushranger; an outlaw who stole from people, murdered people, held them hostage, threatened to burn them (and their children) alive... you know, all the things that some people think makes one a folk hero because He! Stood! Up! To! The! Man! (And I didn't dispute that "the man" inexcusably abused his family, but it's not like he wasn't sticking a middle finger up provoking it from an early age.)

There were of course a lot of bushrangers in the mid to late 1800s: Ben Hall, Captain Midnight, Captain Thunderbolt... most people won't know even those names unless they are aficionados of Australian colonial history, and they're amongst the most famous. (Also, to be honest, I only recall them as names rather than as living, breathing people, and I could not recite their exploits.)

The only real reason that Kelly is remembered is that bloody stupid armour of his. (Though to be fair, apparently the armour wasn't Kelly's idea; gang member Joe Byrne is believed to have been the brains trust behind that one.) The sight of someone dressed like a soup can shooting at coppers certainly does capture the imagination, there's no denying it.

I thought I had more shots of it than this, but apparently not. But this still gives you the idea, or you can go to an Outback Steakhouse where there is usually a replica hanging on the wall.

Ned was not an educated man, and that's not his fault. Being the third of 8 children, his father drinking himself to death when Ned was 12... he never had a chance. He would have known nothing of King Henry V, much less the battle of Agincourt, much less how the French knights were slaughtered because their heavy suits of armour weighed them down in the mud. And these were not medieval suits of armour either; compared to the Kelly gang's armour, a medieval suit of armour would have felt as light weight as wearing aluminium foil. To stop then-modern bullets the Kellys used mould boards as material for the armour. (Those boards are curved plates which churned the earth as part of a plough; they were about 5mm thick and therefore incredibly dense and heavy.)

It's true that they were never intended to go into a fight against anyone who could shoot back on an equal footing. As I explained in the earlier shot, the Kelly gang had intended to derail a police train into a ravine, then stand on an embankment shooting down into the ravine and murdering any (preferably injured) survivors from the crash, like the true folk HEEEY-ROES! that they are, if you believe some people. The armour was only there to cover them in case any of the police were still (a) alive and (b) armed.

Even that probably wouldn't have worked that well because you can barely see out of the damn slit, you can barely move your arm, so aiming the gun? Not quite as easy as it seems. ("Oh, didn't think of that!") But that's not how it played out. Instead the police surrounded them and while the armour could stop bullets from the police guns if the police were stupid enough to shoot at the armour, the gang still could not wear armour to cover all of their legs, or they wouldn't be able to move. Nor could they have armour on their hands or parts of their arms, or they wouldn't be able to shoot. So where did the police shoot? At the intersection of "Stupid" and "History Repeating Itself", of course.

The result was that the entire gang ended up dead except for Ned, who was captured (with a bucket of wounds to his legs and his arms) and sent for an appointment with the gallows at this very place. (After a few weeks in hospital, that is. He needed to heal up before he could be hung.)