Pariah state ambassadors
Minardi
River Cafe quiz

Flavio Briatore
Eddie Irvine
George Galloway
Boris Johnson
Mordechai Vanunu
Helena Christensen
Mark Wallinger
Saif Gaddafi
George MacDonald Fraser
Michael Sheen

Cash & Haggard
AC/DC: An Appreciation
Richard Thompson interview
Why Country Music Rules
Steve Earle interview
Drive-By Truckers' Brighter Than Creation's Dark
R.E.M.'s Murmur
The Go-Betweens' Liberty Belle
The Go-Betweens' Spring Hill Fair
Go-Betweens interview
The Fatima Mansions' Viva Dead Ponies
Microdisney's Daunt Square To Elsewhere
Paul Westerberg interview
Prefab Sprout interview
Bruce Springsteen's Human Touch
Bruce Springsteen's politics
Why Bruce Springsteen rules
American Music Club interview
Accents in rock
Dolores O'Riordan's lyrics
Def Leppard's covers album
The politics of Eurovision
Ryan Adams interview
The Triffids' Born Sandy Devotional
George Jones' The Grand Tour
Luke Haines interview

The Te Kuiti sheep run
The space race
Comedy And Disability
Psychology of space travel
World leaders on drugs
Freedom of speech
Bashar Assad profile
Diana, five years on
Why Formula 1 Doesn't Suck
Walk The Line
Almost Famous
Remembrance Day
Ned Kelly
Political interviews
Exiles
Backpackers
Con artists
Sport and politics
The evil of umbrellas
Dictator decor
Cricket and civilisation
Music as punishment
Music in public
Travel guides

Native America
The Confederate Air Force
The Cresta Run
South Africa

Chris Mills live
Glen Campbell live
Guy Clark live
John Prine live
Josh Ritter live
Laura Cantrell live
Randy Newman live
Richard Thompson live 1
Richard Thompson live 2
Teddy Thompson live
The Blue Aeroplanes live
U2's "Pop"
Willie Nelson live

Addis Ababa
Cape Verde
Chernobyl
Tehran

Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly, considered
The Guardian, August 2003

YOU’VE never heard of Jerilderie; there’s no reason why you should have. It’s home to 870 souls in New South Wales, and if you’ve visited any small Australian town, you’ll know what it’s like: a wide main street, a pub with covered verandahs, a motel for drivers who’ve got tired or lost on their long journey between the big cities, a war memorial which will bear a shocking number of names for a place this tiny. Things have been tough in Jerilderie; recent droughts have bitten hard. If Jerilderie was any other town, it might have nothing to look forward to but decline.
  But Jerilderie has an ace to play: in February 1879, it was victim of a crime unique in the history of banditry. The whole town was bailed up, the entire population held hostage, the police locked in their own cells, the bank robbed, and a pseudo-political manifesto dictated by the perpetrator. In January 2003, Jerilderie applied for government funding to commemorate this event. Jerilderie Shire general manager, Charles Gentner, cited research that had been done to determine Australia’s most adored icons. The winner was no surprise: Don Bradman, the peerless batsman whose test average of 99.94 was adopted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as its mailing address (all post to the ABC goes to PO Box 9994). Not far behind, though, was Jerilderie’s tormentor: an illiterate horse thief and cop killer called Edward Kelly, known to admirers and pursuers alike as Ned.

WHEN English people watch Gregor Jordan’s “Ned Kelly”, they’ll see a competent crime caper with the standard accoutrements. There’s a dashing lead: Heath Ledger, tremendous as Ned, despite an inexplicable Irish accent (Kelly’s parents were Irish – his father was a convict, transported for stealing pigs – but Kelly was born in Victoria, and never left Australia). There’s a likeable sidekick: Orlando Bloom as a twinkling Joe Byrne. And there’s an annoying, irrelevant, romantic back-story. While one hesitates to speak ill of a classmate (Mr Foster’s fifth-form English, Mosman High School, Sydney, 1985), Naomi Watts’ deployment as Ned’s fictional posh totty is approximately as necessary as landing gear on a submarine (she’s great in “The Ring”, though).
  For my fellow Australians who go to see “Ned Kelly”, there’s more at stake. The man in the iron mask is a treasured national myth, whose name has entered the language as a simile for courage and calamity: one can be “as game as,” or “in more strife than,” Ned Kelly. Kelly’s short life has been celebrated in countless songs and poems, the paintings of Sidney Nolan, dozens of books, including Peter Carey’s Booker-winning “True History Of The Kelly Gang” – and this “Ned Kelly” is far from the first film. There was the 1970 abomination of the same name, starring Mick Jagger as Ned – a casting clanger unlikely to be equalled until someone asks Ringo Starr to play Geronimo. Further back, there was 1906’s “Story Of The Kelly Gang”, which was the first feature-length movie ever made anywhere. Coming just 26 years after Kelly was hanged in Melbourne gaol in 1880, it demonstrates the speed with which the Kelly legend gripped Australia’s imagination.
  Ned Kelly was what Australians call a bushranger, a breed of highwayman which flourished in the 19th century, and which are wistfully revered by the citizens of one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. The nearest approximation in British mythology is the East End gangsters of the 1960s. Like the Krays, Kelly and other bushrangers lived on a reputation for loyalty, chivalry, roguish charm, kindness to their old muvvas, etc – and, as with the Krays, that the reality was less romantic, especially if you crossed them, has done little to tarnish the image. Victoria’s cricket team style themselves the Bushrangers.
  Kelly may seem a curious choice of national hero, but Australia is remarkably indulgent, even proud, of its criminal heritage. Our favourite folk song, “Waltzing Matilda”, is a narration of the final moments of a suicidal sheep-stealing tramp. All Australians so qualified, myself not excluded, are given to irrationally competitive boasting about the malfeasance of their convict ancestors. Jordan’s “Ned Kelly” portrays the Kelly of received wisdom – a hybrid of Jesse James, Robin Hood and Subcomandante Marcos, the similarly masked commander of Mexico’s Zapatista guerillas. We are persuaded to see Kelly as a battling farmboy who, persecuted beyond reason by corrupt, vindictive police, blossoms through the crap heaped on him by fate into a fearless outlaw and crusader for the common man. If he robs a bank, he burns the mortgages of the put-upon locals. If there’s a confrontation with the cops, they shoot first, and Ned prays for them as they gurgle their last.
  None of which is necessarily a problem – like Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli”, another film depicting an Australian legend more often shrouded in sentimental fog than bathed in critical light, you get the sense that “Ned Kelly” always intended to show the myth rather than the man. On that front, however, there are some bewildering omissions. There’s nothing of Kelly’s trial, at which his banter with the judge cemented his reputation for insouciant boldness: when Sir Redmond Barry signed off the death sentence with “May the Lord have mercy on your soul,” Kelly replied “I’ll see you there when I go.” (Barry died 12 days after Kelly’s execution). The film also throws away Kelly’s famous last words, “Such is life,” over the closing credits, as the wounded Kelly is dragged from his dramatic last stand at Glenrowan: they’d make more impact coming, as they did, from a 25-year-old wearing a noose.
  Unfortunately, nothing in the surprisingly drab screenplay is as impressive. The only memorable words are Kelly’s own, heard as Ledger declaims a section of Kelly’s testament, now known as the Jerilderie Letter. Ledger delivers Kelly’s priceless description of the Victorian police (“a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat-headed big-bellied magpie-legged narrow-hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords”) with irresistible glee, but he’s missing the most intriguing stuff. The 8,300-word Jerilderie Letter is a key reason why Kelly’s story has outlasted those of other bushrangers. While much of it is the standard self-pitying ranting of the career criminal, it hints at a semi-coherent ideological agenda. If Kelly had been spared the rope, his political instincts could have come to something. Mobility between delinquency and authority was not uncommon in the colonies – when Kelly was hanged, the Speaker of the Victorian parliament was one Peter Lalor, an Irish immigrant who’d lost an arm leading the Eureka Stockade revolt on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854, which had killed more policemen than Kelly ever did.

I PASSED through Glenrowan a few months ago. It’s a one-street town with nothing going for it bar the fact that this was where Ned Kelly imprinted his image on history, the indomitable outlaw in his home-made armour valiantly confronting an army of police – it has to be wondered whether Kelly would be talked about as much had he not put that tin bucket on his head, instantly creating a brand image so stark and simple that it could be both appropriated by great artists and drawn by impressionable children. The first thing you see as you drive into Glenrowan is a giant Ned. Pretty much the only buildings are shops flogging Ned Kelly t-shirts and tea-towels. There’s also a profoundly rubbish animatronic display and a dismal museum, the highlight of which is a talking cockatoo which, I swear, told me to piss off.
  Ned Kelly – the myth, if not the man – deserves better, and “Ned Kelly” is an engaging, if flawed, attempt to do for Kelly what “Braveheart” did for William Wallace, what “Michael Collins” did for Michael Collins. The difficulty is that while adherents of Wallace and Collins can make a plausible case for martyrdom, Ned Kelly died for nothing, a rebel who never really found a cause, which is why generations of Australians have been able to imagine that the heart beating beneath Ned’s breastplate was as gold or as black as they fancy. If he’d lived longer, he may have got better, and he may have got worse, but it’s safe to assume that immortality as a muse for painters, authors and directors, and a meal-ticket for dull country towns, was not what he had in mind.

PRINT PAGE | BACK TO TOP