Ned Kelly was hanged on this day in 1880. He was the most famous of the Australian rural outlaws of the 19th century- better known as bushrangers.
Ned’s father was John Kelly was from the townsland of Clonbrogan just outside Moyglass. John was born in 1820 to Thomas Kelly and Mary Kelly (nee Cody). Six of Thomas and Mary’s seven children emigrated to Australia from the slopes of Slievenamon, including John.
John, the eldest of the children, was first to go but it was not by choice. On 7th January 1841, he was found guilty of pig stealing at Cashel Court and sentenced to 7 years transportation.
On the 7th August 1841 'The Prince Regent' convict ship sailed from Dublin with 182 convicts on board including John Kelly. There was one port of call, Cape Town, and the ship arrived in the Derwent River, Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, on 2nd January 1842. By this time John Kelly had already served one year of his sentence and the next six years were spent at convict and labouring jobs in Tasmania. On 11th January 1848 he was granted his Certificate of Freedom.
Sometime during 1848/49 John Kelly crossed the Bass Strait to Port Philip Colony, now Melbourne, and he headed inland along the old Sydney road and worked as a carpenter around Donnybrook and Kilmore, an area with many Irish settlers. In 1850 he met Ellen Quinn, who had come out from Ballymena, County Antrim, with her family as a young girl. They were married on 18th November 1850 in St. Francis’s Church, Melbourne. For the next fourteen years or so John Kelly made a living from horse dealing, dairy farming and even some gold mining. During this time seven children were born, including Edward, who subsequently became the famed ‘Ned Kelly’.
Ned Kelly- Bushranger
In 1877 Ned Kelly shot and injured a policeman who was trying to arrest his brother, Dan Kelly, for horse theft. The brothers fled to the bush, where two other men joined them to form the Kelly gang. The Kelly gang’s perpetration of a series of daring robberies in the Victoria–New South Wales borderland (1878–80) captured the imagination of the public. Some viewed Ned Kelly as a personification of the plight of workers set against large landowners in an economically depressed period.
In June 1880, after several police shootings and robberies, the gang took possession of Glenrowan township, where they were besieged by police. Kelly was wounded and captured in the ensuing fray; his fellow gang members were killed. Later that year he was taken to Melbourne jail, where he was hanged.
In the Bulletin, 31 December 1966, Malcolm Ellis described Ned Kelly as 'one of the most cold-blooded, egotistical, and utterly self-centred criminals who ever decorated the end of a rope in an Australian jail'. As the outlaws were undoubtedly murderers and robbers, they should have excited public detestation. Yet it did not turn out that way, and the hold the Kelly legend has on Australian imagination is too clearly established to be disregarded.
Clive Turnbull claims that 'Ned Kelly is the best known Australian, our only folk hero … Popular instinct has found in Kelly a type of manliness much to be esteemed—to reiterate: courage, resolution, independence, sympathy with the under-dog'.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ned-Kelly-Australian-bandit
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kelly-edward-ned-3933
https://fethard.com/people/redkelly.html
