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Ned Kelly: A Short Life

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Ian Jones offers a sympathetic look at the life and times of Ned Kelly, one of the last and the most successful of the Australian bushrangers (roughly the equivalent of highwaymen).

From his early days as troubled youth to his end in Melbourne Gaol, and all the details of the time between. This is complete look at Ned, how his world view evolved, and how he closely he came to sparking a full-fledged revolt against the British Crown.

Although Jones is sympathetic to Ned, he does not try to hide unseemly details about Ned, his gang or his family -- which simply adds to the value of book. This is a complete portrait of the man, and it makes for riveting reading.

Ned Kelly is one of those figures where the solid accretion of legend and myth has made getting to the real man a difficult task in all. Kelly is both near-worshiped as a hero and reviled as a criminal who got what he deserved at the end of a rope in 1880. The recent film "Ned Kelly", starring Heath Ledger, portrayed him as a largely innocent victim of police harrassment and injustice. There are plenty who would label him a vicious, callous and murderous villain. Most likely, the truth is somewhere in between.

"Ned Kelly: A Short Life" by Ian Jones is a book about "somewhere in the middle". Jones looks at the evidence, the speculation and the hearsay, and presents as accurate a picture of the real Ned Kelly as you will probably get. Jones is openly candid about what is uncertain, and where different testimonies differ and how. A good case in point is the so-called Fitzgerald incident in the Kelly home, after which Alexander Fitzgerald claimed Kelly had tried to shoot him. Jones quite honestly states that no one really knows what actually happened, as testimony differs. However, Jones is also not shy about giving what he sees as the most plausible explanation.

The mindless hero-worship and the bitter revulsion that is given Kelly tend to over-simplify him. Jones presents a very complex man, and presents elements that add to that complexity. Kelly was a man of contradictions. Ian Jones brings that out, and delves deeply into the surroundings and motivations of what made Kelly "tick".

In the Kelly story, there are also a host of other colourful characters from among Kelly's associates as well as among the Police and the government of the day. Jones covers these people as well, in so far as they impacted on Kelly and company.

This is a very thorough book, and one certainly worth the read. If you only have one book on Kelly, then make it this one. Great as an introduction to the man and his times, Ian Jones has written a fantastic book. I would advise reading it before watching any movies on Kelly, such as Ned Kelly, starring Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom.

125 years after he was executed for murder, Ned Kelly is still reviled, revered and remembered.
Ian Jones writes about Kelly with the authority of an historian, the style of a stortyteller and the reflection of a sociologist.
The context of Kelly's reign (of terror?) is as important as its content, and Jones goes beyond chronology to take us into Kelly's world - a raw, growing nation, struggling with its identity, its mores, its weather and its ethnicity.
Anyone who has heard of the Kelly legend, and wants to explore it, will love and value this book
After reading Jones' account (and having a couple of months' break), I turned to Peter Carey's novel, "True Story of the Kelly Gang." The juxtaposition of fact and fiction is an interesting one, and I was glad I read both.

I have struggled through four biographies and numerous short stories to discover the "meaning" of Ned Kelly. This small time cattle rustler with vague notions of greater things inhabits a place in the mind of Australiana like no other historical figure. He is in fact one figure most widely cited and identified with in Australian popular media, press and the mind of the common bloke.

Every society has its outlaw heros: usually interpreted as victims of some unjust authority, champion of downtrodden rights and the oracle of some uncommon wisdom despite humble beginnings. The US has Jesse James and a whole slew of other cutthroats, Canada has a tortured half-blood religious maniac Louis Riel, and New Zealand has a few quaint highwaymen who are usually more famous when they head to Australia to become bushrangers. In Australia Ned Kelly appears as a sort of national zeitgeist -- the embodiment of everything virtuous and civilised -- a sort of pride in the uncivilised nature of the Oz national character -- the veritable well spring of the spirit of justice and national consciousness.

Writers typically take the above tact with Kelly. No one I have read cites Ned as a common criminal worthy of death because of actions he pursued -- people he killed. It was not axiomatic that the forces who be needed to put him to death, that the unjust imperial English system of law was fated to opress the offspring of Irish transportees, or that Ned had "no choice" but to commit crimes including cold-blooded murder. Ned had choices and made bad ones.

Jones does the best of describing the details of Ned's life. Laying the story bare for all to see. Jones sees Neds as making several bad choices in his life, and he is historically honest in the sympathetic telling of a noteable life.

Yet there are several points in the book that need to be addressed lest Jones fall headlong into the ranks of blind Kelly idolisers.

1)The fact remains that Kelly killed a man during a planned hold up to obtain arms. Both Kelly's excuse that he had "no choice" because the man decided to fire on Ned after Ned bailed him up, is no excuse for murder. And that is precisely what Ned was hanged for. Jones and Kelly sympahtisers attempts to focus on the fact of some wierd "self-defence" argument is extreme and could only be undertaken by a writer, indeed a whole nation of people blinded to the crimes of Ned.

2) There is always a vauge strain to link Ned with a true republican movement in Australia. I was waiting for this to come out all through the book. I wanted to know Ned's thinking and actions on this. Jones even has one chapter called "A Republic." But I read on and on and except for some vague reference in "Jerelderie Letter" (which was not authored by Ned), there is not single reference or utterance to Ned articulating a republican vision.

3) There is a comment about in the picture section of the book about the magistrate whom Jones says "some of his rulings seem absolutely insane when viewed in modern terms" (or something to that effect). Yet in the entire narrative we are not given any reference to any action of this magistrate that would indicate anthing other than fairness and cool reasoning. There is a vague intonation that because he was of Protestant Ulster roots that this court case was a microcosm of Irish oppression. But other than not allowing the defence enough time to prepare (as much a cause of the defence lawyers as the magistrate) there is nothing to impeach this person. Moreover the dialogue between him and Ned is electric at the end of the book and betrays nothing of an anger of the traditional English powerbrokers to rid the land of Ned. Ned was guilty of murder plain and simple and under the laws of the land he had to hang.

Jones, despite his empirical fairness, comes down basically on the standardised allegorical Ned of popular Australian Mythology. Ned is seen as almost inevitably a product of the forces around him. Yet in credit to Jones, reading his prose, one finds it hard to reach the conclusion that Ned was little more than a petty criminal with bad planning and execution skills, a poor judge of people and, most significantly, a cold-blooded murder.

Jones agrees with Ned's assertion that at Stringybark Creek he was driven to shoot when one Constable suddenly drew down on him after Ned had surrounded the camp of the constables intent upon stealing their weapons. He even blows in the head of another wounded constable in the same engagement after the constable pleads with him for his life and represents no threat to either Ned or the Gang.

At many places Ned had the choice to either engage in a life of brigandange and bail up everyone in NSW and Victoria or try to make it straight. His reasons for turning to a life of horse thievery and murder were ones consciously chosen after careful dilberation. Moreover despite Jones' narrative we really do not know what triggered the flight into crime: there are numerous allusions to "protecting the honour of his sister" from predatory constables, but we really do not know the specifics, everything is asserted, from a constable trying to steal a kiss, to more insidious things.

Though tales of Ned still may make for blustery tales of derring do for flush-faced Aussies full of beer intimidating unrepentent Brits, Ned evinces no common ethic that one would willingly want to embue personally or nationally. That Jones or anyone would hold Ned accountable for his actions would benefit biographers of Kelly and maybe the Nation that so blindly embraces him.