In Discussion

The Story of the cop who hunted Australias most notorious bushrangers For a few minutes on October 28th 1878 at Stringybark Creek Ned Kelly wrongly believed he had just shot and killed Senior Constable Anthony Strahan, the subject of this biography. At least, that is what Kelly later claimed in the Jerilderie letter, repeating an […]

In the grandly entitled  “The Author Speaks: On Understanding Historical Figures” Aidan Phelan writes about the so called “Ned Kelly – hero or villain?” argument and returns to two pet themes of his, the first of which is that all human beings, Ned Kelly included, are ‘nuanced complex and multi-facetted’. There is absolutely nothing new in that […]

According to Kelly defenders, Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick was the cause of the entire outbreak. He is routinely vilified as a drunk and a womaniser even though, as Ive pointed out HERE and HERE there is not a single shred of evidence that supports either of those two claims. Neither is there a single shred of […]

It would be interesting to know for certain who supports the idea that Ned Kelly is an Aussie Icon and Hero these days but I would guess that more than half of the population still does. I would guess though, that a survey would show that the huge majority of Australians have only a very […]

I don’t know why Mark Perry was expelled from “Ned Kelly Sympathisers”  FB page but he must be getting close to being expelled from the one he started himself , Best Bloody Man, because he has been pricking a few of the apologists balloons of late. A week or two back he wrote “Some of […]

  Ned Kellys plan for Glenrowan was described as ‘mad’ by a well-known Kelly sympathiser and spokeswoman for the Kelly story. As far as I know, no other Kelly sympathiser has ever challenged that description, and certainly no truly objective observer would disagree: even Ian Jones said it would have been a ‘criminal atrocity on […]

Ned Kelly is supposed to have said that if he ever shot anyone, Thomas Lonigan would be his first victim. And that’s exactly what happened: Lonigan was the first of the three policemen that Kelly murdered at Stringybark Creek on October 26th 1878. Kellys remark about killing Lonigan was his response to having his testicles […]

There’s one thing that I think pro and anti-Kelly factions should agree on about the events at Stringybark Creek: The Gang didn’t approach the police with a plan to kill them. An argument that they went there expressly with murder in mind can certainly be made from plenty of bits of available information such as […]

I have been debating with myself the wisdom of making this Blog Post because it’s about how, behind the scenes, the Kelly legends are quietly and effectively being dismantled. Ive wondered if it would be better not to alert the Kelly mobsters to whats going on under their very noses, because this might sting them […]

This post illustrates with an actual example, how it happens that things that are untrue end up in the Kelly story. The example I am using to show how it happens is the claim that there was a sympathiser army at Glenrowan. According to Ian Jones, once the Kelly Gang had completed its murderous task […]