Ned Kelly The True Story

I wrote this for Facebook but it ended up too long…..so…enjoy! Am I the only observer who has noticed that the windbag Kelly conspiracy theorist Stuart Rowsell is exposing the Kelly sympathiser community as seriously ignorant and completely spineless? Not a single one of them has dared to challenge his recent prolific advancement of a […]

Anyone who doubts that the Kelly Legend is on its death bed only needs to look back at two things to be convinced that it is: the first is the fascinating 1968 publication “Ned Kelly: Man and Myth” edited by Colin Cave. This book contains the proceedings of a Kelly Symposium held in Wangaratta over […]

Ned Kelly wrote in the Jerilderie Letter that after being ordered to Bail Up, Lonigan “ran some six or seven yards to a battery of logs instead of dropping behind the one he was sitting on. He had just got to the logs and put his head up to take aim when I shot him […]

2024 was a great year for anyone interested in discovering the true story of Ned Kelly,  but for people interested in propping up myths about Ned Kelly, it was a year much like several preceding it, a  rotten one, with one  setback after another…   Last year was a great one for people with a […]

In the 1995 Kelly biography by the author who used to be known as Australia’s ‘foremost authority’ on the Kelly Outbreak, the subject of this new biography, James Wallace, is mentioned only three times. He is described as ‘a double agent’, he is  recorded as being a schoolmate of Aaron Sherritt and Joe Byrne and […]

A Critique of the 2003 Kerferd Oration by John Harber Phillips This lecture, delivered 21 years ago by John Phillips, former Chief Justice of Victoria, now deceased, argued that the evidence was strong that in 1880 there was a North Eastern  Victorian Republican Movement, and it was led by Ned Kelly. In 2003 there was […]

To relieve anyone interested in the discussion about Rockets of the necessity to wade through over 200 comments about them in the Facebook thread, here is a summary and the final word.   A single person, Constable Arthur claimed two rockets “one small one large” were fired during the siege at Glenrowan, from somewhere between […]

The blinkered Kelly cult members on BBM are wetting the bed over David Duftys  entirely plausible suggestion that what Const. Arthur reported as rockets in the sky above Glenrowan on the night of the siege was actually an emission of sparks that spontaneously discharged themselves from the train waiting at the ready at the station. […]

In his big new book “A Certain Truth’, Bill Denheld puts to paper his thoughts on a very wide range of topics that relate to the history of the Kelly gang. Bills approach seems to be to rake over the coals of dormant and even resolved controversies, to toss lots of interesting, not necessarily fully […]

This post is the final Part 8 of a review of Bill Denheld’s Ned Kelly – Australian Iron Icon: A Certain Truth (2024), by Stuart Dawson. It asks, why was Kelly’s murder trial moved to Melbourne? And what has that got to do with a republic? As before, bracketed numbers, e.g., (xx), refers to pages […]