This post is Part 7 of a review of Bill Denheld’s Ned Kelly – Australian Iron Icon: A Certain Truth (2024), by Stuart Dawson. As before, bracketed numbers, e.g., (xx), refers to pages in Bill’s book.
Were there any Kelly links to political movements?
Bill presents a flow chart showing links between the Gorman family, some of whom became active in the movement for Federation, and the Kellys, suggesting that “the extent to which political activists were influenced by the rebellious actions and beliefs of Kelly sympathisers is yet another fascinating question”, and that these connections “have been totally ignored by past historians” (21). In brief, on Bill’s chart the Quinns, Kelly and Gormans were neighbours at Wallan East in 1858 when Red Kelly worked for David Gorman Jr. Annie, Ned and Maggie Kelly attended Beveridge Catholic school in the second half of 1863 where E. James Gorman was also a pupil.
By January 1864 the Kellys were in Avenel, 75 kilometres (46 miles) north of Beveridge where Bill says Red was still working for David Gorman Jr. until his death in 1866. Bill says that Ned Kelly and E. James Gorman “are mates and grow up together”; but as no Gormans are on the Avenel school rolls at any point from 1864 through 1866 it is hard to see how this claim can be supported.
The Kellys moved further north again in mid-1877, when Ned was about 12. Meanwhile the Gormans moved up to NSW, where eventually E. J. Gorman became a foundation member of the Berrigan Federation League. A different Gorman daughter had grown up to marry Joseph Winter, the owner of the Catholic Advocate newspaper, whose brother Samuel Winter was a founding member of the Australian Natives Association (in 1871) and owner of the Melbourne Herald. What we have is two country-bred newspaper families making good, while the Kellys continued to eke out a squalid semi-criminal existence in the Eleven Mile shanty. The suggestion that E.J. Gorman was in any way significant in the movement towards Federation is undermined by Bill’s own quoting of a descendant who wrote that David Gorman had overstated E.J Gorman’s role and that he “was significant in the Riverina but not on the Federal stage” (22). There is nothing in the chapter that suggests that any of them gave any thought to Ned.
From the other end, there is nothing to suggest that any of the Kellys, Quinns or Lloyds were involved in any way in any local branches of the Victorian Land League, the Australian Natives Association, or any group connected in any way with a movement towards Federation. They appear to have been to varying extents busy on their selections or interfering with other selectors when not thieving or throwing their weight around with the local hoodlums known as the Greta Mob,[1] rather than having any discernible involvement in any level of regional, state or federal political discussions.
Bill nevertheless claimed that “a very large percentage of the population in North East Victoria knew of the Kelly’s Irish background, their class and determination. In his time of retaliation Ned Kelly became their hero for standing up to a persistent controlling elite” (260). This flies against the almost universal condemnation of the Kelly gang after the Stringybark Creek murders including by Irish settlers (not to mention widespread public outrage that Kelly shot at and wounded Trooper Fitzpatrick in the course of his duty the previous April), as Sergeant Kennedy’s wife Bridget made clear: “Many a family came out from Ireland, ours included. Plenty of families did it tough. But that did not mean they turned to stealing and robbing from their neighbours. Only a few families were bad or went bad, but none so bad as the Kellys”.[2] The Euroa and Jerilderie bank robberies were not retaliation, just fundraising for life on the run and paying off a small number of ‘sympathisers’ who sheltered them but might otherwise turn them in. It would be hard to find many who celebrated the gang’s retaliation in trying to derail a police special train and Glenrowan and kill all its occupants. Who in his day called Ned Kelly a hero? Or a figure of resistance? No source that I’ve seen says that. Such a claim as that on p. 260 demands documentation, but there is nothing to support it anywhere. This is not history being written by the victor, but history being imaginatively invented by historians.
The search for Kelly links to the Victorian Land League
Bill agrees that “archival records fail to show direct proof that a republic movement in North-Eastern Victoria had existed, but [suggests that] perhaps there was one in the making, a movement that ignited the Victorian Land Reform League movement which over this time replaced any republic cause” (241). It seems this alleged republican movement might be based in earlier sentiments from the 1850s: “out of the resentment of Eureka Stockade came a visceral dislike for the British, and out of this resentment grew the movement represented by the ANA championing Federation” (18). He seems to be arguing that there was a flow of rebellious, although somewhat vague and indirect, anti-monarchical political sentiment stemming from the Eureka Stockade in 1854, going through the Land Reform League and into the Australian Natives Association, that eventually led to the successful push for Federation but saw the abandonment of early pro-republican sentiments along the way.
If I have understood this correctly – and it has been pieced together from different parts of the book, as his argument is not presented in a self-contained section – it requires Bill to demonstrate either a continuity of activists or a continuity of popular sentiments. He says that “Rev. J.D. Lang published a draft declaration of Independence of Victoria and had previously advocated republicanism in his lectures, in 1855. He joined the Victorian Land League on 21 May 1857” (242). Bill then suggests that “Perhaps the Victorian Land League organisation may also have considered a Separation, maybe not as a republic but a movement to self-govern rather than put up with the Squatter run government still under the British yoke. And we know in 1901 the Land League with the ANA spearheaded the federal States of Australia” (245). This should be easy to establish: either the Victorian Land League proposed some form of political separation, or it didn’t. What I did find is that in the second meeting of the VLL one speaker proposed that “If the lands were thrown open in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia, would probably follow the example, for within two years there might be a federation, and the laws which were now established in Victoria would probably be the laws of the whole Australian continent”.[3] It does not sound like a call for republican separatism.
It is posed by Bill “that the Land League and separation movements, i.e. ‘breakaway republican sentiments’, were all one and the same” (237). The claim is repeated a few pages later: “Many Land League members sympathised with the resilient Kelly gang uprising seen simply as scapegoats for similarly representing their rights, a challenge to the autocratic establishment for having land issues sewn up in their favour. It is proposed that the Land League and separation movements (i.e., breakaway republican movements), were one and the same” (240). This is clearly problematic, as the Land League movement was not a separation movement, and the Portland and Riverina separation movements had nothing to do with republican sentiments. They were loyalist colonial separation movements, as discussed in my Republic Myth book. The only way I can make sense of this is if the argument is that there were some people in the Victorian Land League movement who had republican sympathies, and Bill does show that this is likely to be the case with a handful of its Irish immigrant supporters. But J.D. Lang, who he praises as an early influence, was a Scottish Protestant and does not appear to have made an anti-monarchical call for land reform. A further problem is the claim that anyone involved in either the Victorian Land League or the two earlier separation movements expressed any sympathy for the Kelly gang during the Kelly outbreak. That would have to be demonstrated with some evidence, not just claimed as a possible sympathy.
Further, it is not clear how these early movements and their claimed sympathies for a disadvantaged class symbolised by Kelly’s later struggle with reality map onto social and economic changes slowly introduced by successive changes to the Victorian Land Acts. The first couple of Land Acts generally seem to have done little, but one writer discussed the impact of the Land Act 1869 in opening up land for selection and curtailing the power of squatters to block it, notwithstanding the issue that selection required fencing, clearing and cultivation as its measure of success regardless of the quality of the soil in the selection. It notes that the Land Act 1878 “eased some of the regulatory conditions associated with Selection and offered the selectors more choice in their land use options”.[4] This is not to deny that serious tensions between squatters and selectors existed over time before the later Land Acts were passed,[5] but I continue to side with Doug Morrissey, that by 1878 – the start of the so-called Kelly outbreak – the selectors had won.
Bill invents the possibility of a “Land League of North-Eastern Victoria” to separate NE Victoria from Victoria in 1880 (246). This is clearly marked as a hypothetical idea, but there is no historical evidence of any such a proposal. As there was nothing to prevent anyone holding a public meeting along these lines had they wished to do so, I think it needs to be dismissed from consideration. The key problem remains that there is no evidence to connect any political sentiments with Ned Kelly’s sympathisers.
The closest we get is Tom Lloyd Senior’s comment to Constable Robert Graham, who with three troopers established a police base in the Greta hotel immediately after the Glenrowan siege, which he relayed to Superintendent Sadleir, that “’the Kellys wanted ground’…. Now [commented Ian Jones], the sympathisers wanted land, and, if they could be guaranteed access to that land, they would get rid of the few trouble-makers and hotheads remaining in the district”.[6] There is some generous interpretation by Jones in using the word “sympathisers” in this. What he actually quoted from Sadleir’s Recollections was, “One of the Kelly relatives, the prospective leader of [a] new gang [who is not named], sought an interview with me when matters looked most threatening. My interviewer was pretty frank, not to say impudent, at first. When he was reminded of what happened to the Kelly gang and that, though a constable might be shot, the police went on for ever, he became more reasonable, and asked only that those of the Kelly circle who had taken up land should not be dispossessed. I was able to promise that no one who continued to obey the law would be interfered with, but that no further selections would be allowed to doubtful characters”.
There is a great difference between what Ian Jones wrote and what Sadleir said. Sadleir was not interested in a “class” of Kelly sympathisers; indeed, there is no evidence for such a ‘class’ outside of the 300 or so noted by the O&M in December 1978. He simply reinforced that the blacklist would continue to apply to ‘doubtful characters’. Sadleir’s other comment was that those who obeyed the law would be left alone. This is quite different from Jones’ conclusion that “With the root cause of the rebellion uncovered, it seemed only a matter of time before things could be placed on a stable basis in the Kelly country”. Jones imagined a republican Kelly and sympathiser movement, linked it with land selection and blacklisting, and created a fantasy land of political rebelliousness that never existed.
From a different perspective, Bill says that “The main downfall for the sympathisers was a lack of any proper political planning, but a plan did evolve much later that led the path towards land reform through a government political opposition, with support from the ANA, a movement that finally led to Federation in 1901” (90). This again implies that there was some kind of cohesive body of Kelly sympathisers with a common cause, but it is hard to see where this might lie given that the blacklist was secret. Only applicants for a selection who had been refused would know of the refusal; they would know it had been refused on the advice of the police; but they would know nothing of who else might have been blacklisted. There also seems to be inconsistency in suggesting that later plans for land reform, i.e., after the destruction of the Kelly gang, had any links to blacklisted selectors who also happened to have been Kelly sympathisers. As discussed previously, persons were not put on a blacklist because they were Kelly sympathisers but because they were suspected criminals. All up, it is hard to see how the large claim of Kelly links to the Victorian Land League can be sustained.
James Wallace, Hurdle Hut school teacher, Kelly sympathiser, and maybe JL author?
There is nothing controversial in Bill’s observing, as have many others, that James Wallace was a Kelly sympathiser. There was a hut some two and a half miles behind Wallace’s school house where the Kelly gang sheltered for some time while on the run – according to Bill, from February 1879 to June 1880 – with four bunk beds and a waterhole that made living there possible (217, 218, 223). It seems clear to many (including to Detective Ward back in the day) that Wallace did harbour the gang at some point. Where Bill goes further is in suggesting that Wallace may have authored the Jerilderie letter and that he may have influenced the gang towards some form of political stance. Bill is not the only author to suggest Wallace’s involvement in the Jerilderie letter. David Dufty in his 2022 ‘Nabbing Ned Kelly’ similarly suggested that “the content was Ned’s, but as the confidante and resident scholar, Wallace probably influenced it” [square brackets for Dufty’s book, 356]. There are two linked claims to discuss: first, that Wallace was politically radical, and second, that he was the real author of the infamous Jerilderie letter.
Wallace and politics
Bill writes that “Wallace and local farmers around the wider Oxley Plains district got themselves involved in politics as they saw an opportunity to increase pressure on the authorities by giving voice to a resistance movement” (237). This begs the question, resistance to what? A campaign for land reform is not a resistance movement. So what did Wallace do? We learn from Dufty that Wallace was an activist for selectors’ rights [263], and that from 1877 onwards Wallace was an active member of the Upper Murray Free Selectors Association [263, n. 7]. It is hard to trace what this stood for, but it appears to have been one of many similar groups that sought reform of the Land Act against squatter monopoly of land and water rights over selectors.[7] Wallace was a teacher, not a selector; so what was he doing there in 1877, before the Kelly outbreak? Whatever it was, it doesn’t seem connected with the Byrne or the Kellys. He doesn‘t seem to have surfaced in the two other important political reform groups identified by Bill – the Victorian Land League or the Federation movement, all three of which were publicly acceptable causes for citizens to associate themselves with. Bill notes that in 1882 Wallace wrote a miscellany column in the Kerang Times under the pen name ‘Olla Podrida’ [a Spanish pork and bean stew] (247), but that is two years too late to be relevant to the Kelly outbreak.
We know that Wallace gave some material assistance to the gang. Detective Ward learned that Wallace was collecting mould boards [Dufty, 265] although Wallace may not have known what they were wanted for; and Education Department inspector Tom Bolam found evidence of Wallace and his wife helping the gang elude the police [Dufty, 276; RC Q.15056-7]. But it is one thing to say that Wallace had sympathy for his old school friend Byrne; it is another to suggest that he actively took Byrne’s side against the authorities after the gang were outlawed. Yet this is what underpins Bill’s belief of Wallace’s involvement: “It is more likely that Wallace supported a radical change in government rather than putting his life on the line to support an old school mate” (243). Again, it needs to be demonstrated that Wallace had a radical political agenda, but his involvement in the Free Selectors Association does not indicate radicalism. For some seven months, from August 1879 to March 1880, Wallace was paid for information about the gang by the police (RC Q.14761). There was an element of risk in this: Bill correctly describes Wallace as a double agent between the gang and the police (218),[8] even if he was not providing any useful information to the police. After all, a similar situation got Aaron Sherritt shot by Byrne. In this provision of information Wallace obviously said nothing to indicate anything of any political motives by the gang.
Simply put, neither Bill nor David Dufty can point to anything more than circumstantial speculation that Wallace had any political motive for sympathy with the outlaws or did anything of a proto-republican political bent at any point in 1878 through to June 1880. Neither they nor anyone else has been able to find any political sentiments expressed by Ned or any of the gang at any point other than some vague lines from the Jerilderie letter that Ian Jones desperately but unconvincingly tried to interpret as political, all of which I reviewed and rejected in my Republic Myth book. There was not a political word spoken by any of the gang to their numerous captives at Euroa, Jerilderie, Glenrowan, or anywhere else, including by Kelly after his capture. We will have to wait for Peter Newman’s forthcoming book on Wallace to see if he can establish any facts of political activism from which some proto-republican sentiments by Wallace might be claimed, as distinct from simply land reform sentiments and unspecified activism which seems to be all that has been evidenced so far. Ned Kelly did not say anything coherent about land reform in his letters, so if Wallace is to be claimed to have been involved in writing them it is curious that his only clear political interest is absent from its text.
The theory that Wallace may have written or help draft the Jerilderie letter
Bill says that “We know James Wallace tried to help Byrne, suggesting that both Wallace and Byrne were instrumental in writing the Jerilderie letter” (238); “Kelly and Byrne wrote powerful letters that were more than likely drafted and edited by James Wallace who had witnessed how his school students and their families were living in hard times, some in squalor, but they struggled to survive at their patch, all at the hand of an unfair land tenure system of the time” (247). In couple of places Bill has printed his illustration ‘Knights of the Republic’, an imaginative drawing which he says “might well be Wallace and Byrne preparing a letter of protest” (239). Coming from a different angle but also based on Wallace’s known support for the gang (or certainly for Byrne), David Dufty said “Wallace had the motive, the means and the opportunity” [355]. Let us review these propositions.
Bill notes that “Wallace wrote a series of letters to local papers [or at least the Wangaratta Despatch] using pseudonyms. It included [one leading article and] a series of romance called ‘Christmas in Kellyland’” (239, citing RC Q.14744). Unfortunately no copies of the paper have survived, so we have no idea what these were about. Interestingly, nothing about any political views was asked of Wallace by the Commission. It seems that Bill’s question, “Was Wallace supportive of a notional republic movement for North-Eastern Victoria? He didn’t have to support the gang unless there was a much bigger aim for his class” (240), leads nowhere. The question is asked again in different words a few pages later: “Was James Wallace a guiding voice for change that the rebellious Jerilderie letter tried to present to the authorities? Ned Kelly advised them to listen to the people and understand deep seated grievances concerning their personal issues” (247). This is a wild exaggeration of the Jerilderie letter’s content that falls apart, as did Jones’ similar suggestions, on analysis of the text.[9]
The only basis for the claim of Wallace’s involvement in drafting and editing the Jerilderie letter (247) is speculation based on Byrne and Wallace having been at school together, on his known harbouring of the gang, and on Bill’s claim that “Wallace is recorded as admitting to helping Byrne ‘knock his writings into shape’” (243); but this is not what Wallace said. The Royal Commission asked,
“Q: was it not currently reported that Joe Byrne was the scribe of the gang?—Yes.
Q: When you offered your services, was it one of your designs to volunteer to reduce this collection of writing of Byrne’s into shape for him—was that not the arrangement with myself?—That I should endeavor to get hold of this diary.
Q: And get the confidence of the gang through that?—Yes, that was the point I went into the bush for, to receive this diary, and I missed them some way or other.
Q: Did you ever get the diary?—No; I left the district, and I would not know whom to apply to” (14812-15).
All we can learn from this is that Wallace wished to get hold of Byrne’s diary with some intention of knocking his writings into shape, but it never happened. If Wallace was aiding Byrne or the gang with his writings there is nothing whatsoever to show it. And indeed, if it was true, then in Bill’s words, “Wallace seems to have covered his tracks well” (239).
In Nabbing Ned Kelly David Dufty took a different approach to one part of the authorship question based on handwriting analysis and suggested, perhaps cheekily, that perhaps Kelly and Byrne wrote nothing at all [360]. Yet while a 2014 graphological comparison between Byrne’s letters and the Jerilderie letter was inconclusive as to proving Byrne’s writing,[10] it doesn’t rule it out. Dufty argues in support of Wallace’s possible authorship rather than Byrne’s, that Byrne’s two page letter to Aaron Sherritt “has spelling and grammar mistakes that aren’t replicated in the Jerilderie letter” and therefore counts against Byrne’s writing of the JL [354]. Against this, the examples he gives are not fatal to disproving Byrne’s authorship. As was noted in the graphological analysis, the Sherritt letter is too short to conclude anything substantial in the way of comparison. The misspelling of one instance of traitor as treater in the Sherritt letter is compatible with a semi-literate irregularity of spelling, as is live for life. The claim that Byrne wrote has instead of have in the Sherritt letter shows little, as there are 14 instances of has in the JL, together with some 30 instances of have.
Dufty wrote that “the penmanship of the JL is neat and clear. Whoever wrote it was doing their best cursive and concentrating hard” [356]. His examples of differences between some letter tail shapes in Byrne’s letter to Sherritt and the Jerilderie letter indicate only that there are some similarities in the sort of cursive writing that was commonly taught at that time. Dufty notes that there is an absence of lopsided figure 8’s in the JL [357]; that there are other lettering discrepancies between the two letters [358], and that a reconstruction of a sentence from the JL using sample of Wallace’s handwriting from others of Wallace’s letters show “they are not identical” [358]. What we are left with is an interesting but not to me compelling speculation. Nothing here counters the long held view that Byrne wrote up neatly what Ned originated or drafted. Ned certainly adopted the Jerilderie letter as his own, telling Mr Living at Jerilderie to whom he entrusted the letter that it was “a little bit of my life”.
Should we look to Wallace as its possible author or co-author, as distinct from its scribe? Dufty is obviously correct to argue that if Wallace wrote the Jerilderie letter then he also wrote the earlier Cameron letter, upon which it is closely modelled [354; 358]. Given that the Jerilderie letter is only a longer and more ranting version of the Cameron letter, and as Jerilderie schoolteacher William Elliott observed at the time, apparently the product of a disorganised brain, it would hardly be a compliment to Wallace if he was responsible for its ravings. Any claim of Wallace’s authorship would indeed need to be based on the Cameron letter; and yet in it there is even less basis to stretch a claim for a political Kelly. But we can go further:
Dufty proposed that the Jerilderie letter “would have taken many hours and multiple drafts (particularly given the neatness of the writing, and the almost complete absence of mistakes and corrections), in a hideaway somewhere. There would have been multiple sessions, re-readings and conversations about it” [356]. While initially plausible, the theory breaks down when we consider the 7,403 word letter’s construction.[11]
First, it consisted of “56 pages of blue-lined notepaper, in red ink until it ran out, then the last twenty pages in black”.[12] Wallace as a schoolteacher would not have run out of either colour ink.
Second, while the idea of multiple sessions makes sense, there was no consistent application of effort in them that someone such as Wallace would put into its production. Ian Jones noted that “The ‘remarkable variation’ in [its] writing sprang from the fact that the letter was written in 14 different sessions. The start of each session is marked by careful copperplate which slips into a more mature, relaxed hand and even into a tired scrawl after several pages. The longest session produced eight pages; the shortest, only one”,[13] hardly indicative of a set of sessions that a teacher would put aside to write a well-presented document.
Third, the punctuation is abysmal. In may places there are no full stops to end sentences or capital letters to start new sentences; the spelling is atrocious throughout, and while some early pages have paragraphing, in others from p. 9 onwards some have none but are just a stream of words. Further, the SLV’s Jerilderie letter has a transcript margin note on p. 1, “The places left blank denote where words could not be made out.” A school teacher would never have written something so chaotically disjointed and hard to follow for a printer.
Fourth, there are large sections of almost direct text overlap between the shorter, earlier Cameron letter and the later, longer Jerilderie letter. (A visual comparison of these overlaps is on p. 65 of my Republic Myth book.) It is obvious that the former was the direct template for the latter.
The suggestion that there would have been “multiple sessions, re-readings and conversations about [the Jerilderie letter]” implies a coherence of thought and purpose that as Elliott noted is entirely absent from its disorganised ramblings. It is simply a rant, written in short sections of greatly uneven length averaging 4 pages each yet varying from 8 pages to only 1 across 14 sessions. It seems safe to say that Wallace was not involved in its writing up and, as has been held by most, it is most likely the product of Kelly and Byrne’s uneven (and by its content, possibly at times tipsy) attentions.
The next and final part of this review will take issue with the claim by Bill and others, including some prominent lawyers, that Kelly’s trial was moved to Melbourne to ensure his conviction. I have addressed this before elsewhere but will revisit the key points that relate to Bill’s remarks in his ‘Ned Kelly: A Certain Truth’ book which is being reviewed here.
[1] See table of sympathisers and Greta Mob members in Doug Morrissey, ‘Ned Kelly’s Sympathisers’, Historical Studies, October 1978, 296.
[2] Quoted in Leo Kennedy’s Black Snake: The Real Story of Ned Kelly.
[3] Age, 20 January 1857, 5, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/154823924#
[4] Thesis, University of New England; author uncertain but possibly A.M. Cook. Chapter 5, ‘The Selection Period (1860s – 1880s)’, https://rune.une.edu.au/web/bitstream/1959.11/6541/2/open/SOURCE05.pdf, 110.
[5] There is a short section about this tension in the Wimmera district in the Horsham Heritage Study, Vol.3, Stage-2.1 (2014) chapter 5, ‘Settling the land’.
[6] Ian Jones, ‘A New View of Ned Kelly’, in C. Cave, ed., Ned Kelly: Man & Myth (Cassell, 1968), 178.
[7] See e.g., 1876, Musclebrook And Upper Hunter Free Selectors’ Association, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/18803394.
[8] For a good summary, cf. Doug Morrissey, Selectors, Squatters and Stock Thieves (Connor, 2018), 68-70.
[9] See my Republic Myth book pp. 6-10; cf. Doug Morrissey’s analysis of the letter in the appendix to his ‘Ned Kelly: A Lawless Life’.
[10] Tahnee Dewhurst, ‘Analysing the handwriting’, in Craig Cormick, ed., Ned Kelly Under the Microscope (CSIRO, 2014), 213-223.
[11] SLV MS note, 7,403 words; far short of Max Brown’s oft-repeated claim of 8,300 words.
[12] Ian Jones, The Fatal Friendship (2003), 100.
[13] Ian Jones, ‘Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter’, LaTrobe Journal, 66 (Spring, 2000), 33-37.
Further to my comment in the article that “Dufty notes that there is an absence of lopsided figure 8’s in the JL [357]; that there are other lettering discrepancies between the two letters [358], and that a reconstruction of a sentence from the JL using sample of Wallace’s handwriting from others of Wallace’s letters show “they are not identical” [358]”, the fact that Wallace claimed that he could imitate Byrne’s handwriting only leaves further doubt as to the JL’s scribe; but it does not moive the needle towards Wallace as scribe.
BTW, in regard to my previous review post 7 about Sympathiser numbers, where are all the defenders of the mythical huge number of Kelly sympathisers? It was quite a revelation when I noticed that John McQuilton in his 1979 ‘The Kelly Outbreak’ had mis-read the O&M to give a figure of 800 as “the number of men ready to support the Kellys”, rather than the figure 300 that is printed in the newspaper. No wonder so may people have imagined some huge north-east support for the Kellys that never historically existed. People interested in the Kelly story have been wildly mislead for that past 45 years. And the mistaken reading was not corrected in McQuilton’s 1987 paperpack version. In those eight years, no-one ever thought that was nonsense and bothered to check? The intellectual standard of Kelly studies has been woeful for decades. That’s 45 years of “authoritative” garbage skewing a key part of the Kelly debate. An apology is long overdue.
I think the age when Kelly was taken seriously is receding into the past, albeit less rapidly in so-called “Kelly Country”, so no serious person can be bothered revisiting the old texts and the old arguments to see if they can withstand the kind of careful scrutiny you’ve been subjecting them to Stuart. The myth is dying a natural slow death anyway.
The remnant who still profess to be interested in the Outbreak are mostly blind Kelly devotees who are not interested in scrutinising the record and correcting it. Their interest is confined to defending the idiotic Kelly mythology and to abusing and ridiculing any person who dares challenge it in public.
But as I say, they are on the wrong side of history, and in time even the north-east will have to acknowledge that admiration of anything to do with Kelly arises from ignorance of the historical truths. When that finally happens Ian Jones will come to be regarded as Australia’s Erich von Daniken.
Wallace’s boast that he could imitate Joe’s handwriting puts him in the frame. The fact that the samples aren’t identical doesn’t mean he was wrong; it just means that if we scrutinise the writing closely we can find differences.
You’re right that the figure of 300 supporters in the Ovens & Murray Advertiser was misread as 800. I don’t think that difference is decisive either way. 800 supporters is a lot; but so is 300. that would still make an army, just a smaller one. (to clarify, I don’t believe there was such an army)
But it was only a round-number estimate anyway, a throwaway line by a journalist with no sympathy for Ned Kelly. Maybe it was an underestimate, or maybe it was an exaggeration. Too much importance was placed upon it from the start.
Hi David D, I agree with that re Wallace’s handwriting; it could be argued either way.
The problem is that the 800 sympathisers wrongly claimed by McQuilton in his 1979 Kelly Outbreak and the 1987 reprint, rather than the 300 printed in the O&M, have lent academic credence to a vastly inflated number of sympathisers that never existed. That takes it beyond the 100 heads of families given by the police, which is plausibly 300 from among those 100 families, and puts it wrongly into the stratosphere. Who knows how many Kelly authors McQuilton in turn influenced into envisioning a huge potential army of sympathisers, but I’m sure it would be a lot; as we can see from FitzSimons 2013 Ned Kelly as one example.
I don’t believe it was a throwaway line by the O&M journalist. I think it was realistic based on the other “100 heads of families” police estimate, and that it is a significant blunder in claims about the Kelly outbreak. Also, I think there is a vast difference between the terms “sympathisers” and “army”; a world of difference. Sympathisers might provide horse feed or food but that is a far cry from anything to do with an army; the very idea of which depends entirely on the debunked republic narrative.
Hi David, von Daniken was those Chariots of the Gods books in the 1970s! “Was God an Astronaut?” 😂
There was another guy with numerous books, Colin Wilson, obsessed with UFOs and haunted houses. 😂😂
And do you remember Lobsang Rampa and his books about The Third Eye? 😂😂😂
And on 1980 there were at least a dozen books foe the anniversary of Ned Kelly’s capture and hanging, including Molony’s classic of academic fiction, “I am Ned Kelly”, which attempted to present history as Ned would have seen it, complete with an “academically thorough” Kelly republic myth that he got from having his gullible leg pulled by ex-policeman Mr Lloyd son of TLJ, making a complete fool of him and saying so to both Doug Morrissey and to Leo Kennedy’s dad 😂😂😂😂
The laughs go on 😂😂😂😂😂
Next up for the comedy gold award should be the Iron Outlaw website 😂😂😂😂😂😂
In Nabbing Ned Kelly, I suggested that James Wallace was the scribe of the Jerilderie Letter. Up until then, the consensus was that Ned Kelly dictated while Joe Byrne wrote. The reason for that consensus view was that Ned wasn’t highly literate, having had only a couple of years of schooling. He could read newspapers, but reading was something more easily refined outside of school than writing, which required access to pen and ink as well as lots of boring practice; something that was unlikely to appeal to Ned Kelly. The only surviving parchment with his handwriting shows that he could barely write. That isn’t surprising: he was a man of action, and was not the sort of bloke to sit around writing letters. Ian Jones understood this, which is why he assumed that Joe wrote Ned’s letters.
So, given that, the claim that Joe Byrne wrote the Jerilderie Letter was a reasonable one (although there was no evidence). But my claim, I think, is stronger.
You describe my closing line about Ned and Joe as cheeky: “It is entirely possible that, apart from classroom exercises, neither of them ever wrote anything at all.”
Yeah, I’ll cop to “cheeky.” I put that chapter about the Jerilderie Letter, and another about who made the armour, at the very end of the book, because I didn’t want these things to distract from the narrative. I wanted to tell the story itself, and to keep these discussions as separate, stand-alone pieces. These are speculative by their nature, because they address secret activities that were never satisfactorily investigated. I put together the best case I could for both, but – as I said at the time – I was always aware that I could have been going up the wrong track.
However, I’m not convinced by any of your counterpoints to the James Wallace theory. You start with this:
Sure, but add to your list the following: he was more literate than anyone in the gang; he had a penchant for writing long documents; he specifically wrote about the Kelly gang in at least two other contexts (as a police spy and for newspaper articles); he was keen to be a player in the drama and to insert himself into events; and he may have briefly been an active member of the gang.
As an aside, you mention Joe’s diary, or journal, and complain that Bill wrongly puts it in Wallace’s possession, because when he was a witness at the Royal Commission he denied having it. But even if Wallace possessed Joe’s journal, he wouldn’t have admitted that to the Royal Commission, because it would have been seized, and its contents probably would have incriminated him. Maybe he had Joe’s journal, maybe he didn’t, but besides that, his testimony at the Royal Commission indicated that the gang saw his role, or at least one of his roles, as some kind of scribe. And if Joe was such a great writer, why would he want Wallace’s help?
Then you say:
Yes, the examples are fatal. Someone who writes ‘traitor’ correctly knows how to spell that word. Someone who writes ‘traitor’ as ‘treater’ doesn’t how to spell it. As luck would have it, the word appears in two documents, so we know that Joe Byne didn’t know how to spell the word ‘traitor’ but whoever wrote the Jerilderie Letter did.
On my handwriting analysis, you comment:
It absolutely counters that view. You might not find my evidence compelling, but at least it exists. By contrast, there is quite literally no evidence for the ‘long held’ view that Joe wrote the letter.
Really? A small, remote, one-teacher school would never run out of ink? Not even if the teacher was working after-hours on a clandestine writing project?
I presume by “abysmal” you mean that the punctuation is sometimes missing. This was common at the time. Some of the police and court witnesses wrote reports and statements with no commas and with full-stops often missing, but otherwise well written.
If Wallace was the writer, he was doing it on his own time, in secret, as a favour to friends. We’re not dealing with J.R.R. Tolkein sitting in his comfortable Oxford office putting the final touches on The Lord of The Rings. It was most likely written in a ramshackle hut by gaslight, with a bunch of criminals beside him, telling him what to write. And it was written as it was spoken.
Partisans on both sides – at the time and ever since – have failed to accurately assess the qualities of the Jerilderie Letter. Those who side with Ned perceive it as a brilliant, multi-layered manifesto full of wit, allusion, social commentary, and vision. Those who dislike him or perceive him as a villain dismiss it as nothing but an angry, disjointed rant.
A lot of it is ranty and disjointed. But it aspires to be more than that. It is also intended as an indictment of the convict system and the Victorian legal system, and there are parts that are well crafted and clever.
I made the case for James Wallace as Ned’s writer in Nabbing Ned Kelly. It’s plausible, and as far as I can see, it still stands up, and I’m glad that others are exploring that angle further. I’m see no reason to defer to an alternative point of view simply because it was “long held”.
Hi David D., there are some good counter points in the above, as I expected, but my most significant criticism remains that the JL was written in 14 sessions varying greatly between 1 and 8 pages; and that this does not give me any confidence that Wallace who was clearly capable of writing long letters and articles had anything to do with such an uneven production. That’s as regards the structure.
Second, the JL says nothing about land reform, which I gather from your book was Wallace’s only known political involvement.
Third, Jerilderie schoolteacher Elliott to whom the letter was handed described it along the lines of deranged rubbish; hardly what any educated person would have written.
Fourth, as you say, whoever wrote the JL wrote the Cameron letter on which it was closely modelled (except for the more famously deranged parts). Yet there is nothing political in the Cameron letter.
So I continue with reservations re the proposed Wallace authorship; but see my response to your third post below.
With respect to the inconsistent spelling and any clues this might give us, is there not a third possibility that a semi-literate author / transposer might have had some reference source at hand to assist with spelling during the writing of one letter but not the other? E.g. A newspaper or book correctly spelling ‘traitor’ to refer to during one session but then later having no reference source / guide and instead going by memory / phonetics alone?
Love this back-and-forth Stuart and David, fascinating stuff, James Wallace is just such a character (went through Milawa and Oxley on the weekend actually, thought of Wallace and the secret hut).
That scenario doesn’t ring true to me. If Joe Byrne didn’t know how to spell a word, he was hardly likely to go thumbing through old copies of the Ovens and Murray Advertiser looking for an example. But also, the Joe Byrne letter in which it’s misspelled was written after the Jerilderie Letter, not before.
Hi Thomas, I guess we’ll never know; but the point seems to be that Byrne’s letter to Sherritt with the spelling of “treater” was 26 June 1879, several months after the JL with “traitor” in February 1879. I’d guess that the Sherritt letter which is written neatly was written alone; where more likely the JL was written in company, which means he could if in doubt presumably check his spelling verbally (or on a paper or something as you suggest) before writing. But this is just speculation. The question why his spelling of that word would get worse over a few months assumes that it was ever good. I don’t know about that…
I agree with you that the mainstream historical version of the politics of the Kelly Gang is just flat out wrong, and it’s wrong in a big way. There was no republican movement in North-Eastern Victoria, and Kelly did not have aspirations to establish a republic. Moreover, there was not even social unrest or a widespread radical political movement. However, all of that was true of the Eureka Rebellion in Ballarat. There seems to have been a blurring of two major events in colonial Victoria: the Eureka Rebellion in 1854, and the Kelly Gang Outbreak from 1870 to 1872.
Furthermore, the notorious police corruption that spurred the Eureka Rebellion had been to a large extent reined in by the time the Kelly Gang came along. There was still some corruption, but Kelly supporters misunderstand its nature, and the role it played, to the extent that it played any role at all.
There were political dimensions to the Kelly Outbreak, but they’ve been obscured by the hysteria about rebel armies, Kelly republics, and a misguided view of Kelly as a visionary anti-colonial activist.
The unrest in the north-east centred on criminal, not political activities. Those participating were more akin to a mafia than a resistance. The actual mafia – the Italian mafia – did over time gain control of towns in southern Italy, and did become a sort of ruling force, not through war, but through stealth and through a slow but steady increase in their grip. That was happening, and if things hadn’t exploded so spectacularly, might have continued.
Irish settlers varied widely in their allegiances, but at least some of them had pro-Irish, anti-English sentiments and were very anti-authoritarian. A self-serving worldview, you might say, but a worldview nonetheless.
But the plan to derail the train at Glenrowan went way beyond all that. It was intended as an act of terror. Ian Jones’s belief that Kelly hoped it would start a revolutionary war is wrong; but Glenrowan clearly, in some sense, had a political dimension. It was anarchic.
James Wallace, schoolteacher and associate of the gang, wasn’t Irish himself, but he liked the Irish people he knew in the district. He was involved in political organisations. And he helped the Kelly Gang prepare for the attack at Glenrowan. The more you look into Wallace, the more he looks like a political player. None of it is conclusive but it is all suggestive.
There’s nothing wrong with using circumstantial evidence, especially if that’s all you’ve got.
We don’t know how politically active Wallace was, or how radical he was (if he was radical at all) but the circumstantial evidence paints a picture.
Hi again David D., I agree with the above, except in me seeing the attempted train derailment as an act of revenge, rather than terror which as you say has a political implication. Steve Hart was called by the name Revenge on one occasion; the railroads warning at the end of the Cameron letter is another indication, as is the 2014 Russ Scott and Ian MacFarlane analysis, “Ned Kelly – Stock Thief, Bank Robber, Murderer – Psychopath”.
I am hoping that Peter Newman’s forthcoming book, “James Wallace: Kelly Gang Sympathiser”, might shed light on whatever politcal involvement Wallace may have had.