In Discussion

The argument that Ned Kelly should be remembered as an Australian hero and an icon, rather than as a thief and police murderer, is based on the idea that what he did was a principled stand taken in defence of his family against harassment and persecution by corrupt police. It was a theme he mentioned […]

Make no mistake: the MOST important finding made by the 1881 Royal Commission into the Kelly Outbreak, was that it did NOT result from police harassment and persecution of the Kelly clan. This finding is the opposite of what Ned Kelly and his supporters have always claimed, it exposes Ned Kelly as a liar and […]

In the first part of this series of Posts about the contribution of Professor John McQuilton to the Kelly story I pointed out that in an ABC documentary about Ned Kelly, some of the important claims he made were wrong, and they helped support a false narrative about the role of police in the outbreak. […]

Last week I wrote about John McQuiltons contribution to ‘Outlawed : the Real Ned Kelly’ a 2003 ABC documentary that can easily be found and watched on You Tube. Its been watched over 80,000 times in five years. What I showed last week was that John McQuiltons contribution was wildly partisan and in places demonstrably […]

This week I’m going to start an examination of Professor John McQuilton’s contribution to the Kelly story. McQuilton is best known for “The Kelly Outbreak” a 1979 publication based  on his 1977 PhD thesis, subtitled ‘The Geographical Dimension of Social Banditry’. Following its publication well before Molony and Ian Jones were in print, McQuilton became one […]

Last weekend at Chiltern, which is up the road from Wangaratta, there was a fund raiser for a local museum in the form of a kind of Kelly symposium. The promo advertised that there would be talks given by four notorious Kelly apologists, Brad Webb, Paul O’Keefe, Alan Crichton and Steve Jager, as well as […]

A short trailer for the short film Stringybark Creek has just been released, but it will be some time before the film itself is made available to the general public.  What little is shown in the trailer looks pretty dramatic, but it gives nothing away – its a teaser, as trailers always are.   The […]

“Despite various trumped up charges and some very dubious convictions against the Kelly family, Superintendent Nicolson’s memo to his police officers within the North-East confirms the police were instructed to harass and intimidate the family in an effort to remove them from the district.” So begins a post that appeared a couple of weeks ago […]

I saw a discussion on Facebook a couple of years ago in response to someone asking who among all the world’s great people would readers most like to have dinner with. Someone nominated Captain James Cook, another said Winston Churchill, and inevitably I suppose, someone said that he would most like to have dinner with […]

Last week I talked about how movie makers Matthew Holmes and Aidan Phelan have chosen to ignore what Ned Kelly actually said were his reasons for planning to kill police and take hostages at Glenrowan, and instead propose that his real motive was something ‘much bigger’. This got me thinking about the way in which […]