Kelly Cousin Tom Lloyd Assaults Amelia Goodman and goes to prison.



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 evidence  for the other appalling allegation made against him, that he committed some sort of an indecency on Kate Kelly : often the term used is ‘molested’ or ‘raped’.(HERE)  No  complaint was ever filed, no Court hearing ever happened, nobody was ever charged or taken to Court about this alleged indecent : all we have is a claim made by Kate Kelly to a journalist, months and months after it was supposed to have happened. 


But heres the thing : everyone has heard about this highly dubious claim, many believe it and someone repeats it on Facebook just about every day, but who has ever heard about the actual conviction and  imprisonment  of so-called Fifth Gang member Tom Lloyd for an actual assault on Amelia Goodman, and his near conviction for  indecent assault ? ANSWER : Almost nobody. In fact, I don’t recall it being mentioned anywhere by anyone, ever, over the last ten years.

 


The reality is that Ned Kellys defenders don’t like to talk about  his extended family. The reason is obvious once you start taking a closer look : many members of Ned Kellys extended family were convicted serious  criminals, an awful reality that bursts their Jones-inspired fantasy about the Kellys being saintly poor Irish peasant folk, horribly persecuted by corrupt police. So, where the Kelly apologists like to spread rumours and innuendo and evidence free assassinations of the character of anyone they dont like – both at the time of the Outbreak and continuing to the present day –  they keep as silent as mice about the ACTUAL, PROVEN, DOCUMENTED criminal acts of the members of Kellys own extended family. They ALLEGE without evidence that Fitzparick was an alcoholic but dont talk about the fact that several Kelly clan members were drunks themselves and Ned Kellys own father an alcoholic. They ALLEGE without evidence that Fitzpatrick was a womaniser but dont ever talk about the KNOWN sexual indiscretions of Ellen Kelly, her sister or her daughter. And they ALLEGE without evidence that Fitzpatrick indecently assaulted Kate Kelly but  don’t ever talk about the actual evidence that resulted in Tom Lloyd going to prison for a drunken assault on a woman in her own home.



I wrote the other day that this year ‘Its time to fully expose this extended family of Ned Kelly for what they were: extreme outliers, criminals, drunks and people of extremely loose morals on the fringes of their community.’… For one thing,  Kelly himself as well as the Kelly mob ever since have always been eager to  point an accusatory  spotlight on the moral and other failings of the  police and Kellys enemies,  so  it’s time to balance the books. Lets look at theirs.

 

 

My comment was reflecting what Morrissey showed by his research and what the papers were saying at the time of the outbreak, that in general the inhabitants of the North East, of Kelly Country, were hard working, law-abiding God fearing Christian folk who deplored the criminality and the lawlessness, the drinking and immorality, what Morrissey called the “shanty lifestyle” of the Kellys, and their relations and criminal associates. Church attendance was almost universal, a social necessity for members of small communities but there are no reports I know of that record Mrs Kelly taking her family to church at any time in the 1870’s – did she?

 

 

As the record shows, and I will detail it over a few Posts in coming weeks, in the extended family during the 1860s and 1870’s there was alcoholism and drunken violence, there were instances of domestic and other acts of extreme violence and brawling, there was sexual assault, adultery and fornication, illegitimacy, animal cruelty, arson and of course innumerable charges relating to stock theft, sometimes ending in acquittal but often resulting in imprisonment. Add to that Ned Kellys crimes and those of the Kelly Gang and you end up with a charge sheet like no other: would there be any extended family anywhere else in the colony at the time who generated one anywhere near as long, as wide ranging or as serious? If there was one I would be most interested to hear about it.

 

 

But this was one of the responses I got: “I absolutely refute that statement.”

 

 

Mostly, I think what was being refuted was not so much the criminality – which is well documented – but the idea that this was a criminal ‘family’, and that they were outliers and on the fringes of the community. The point was made that not every single person in the extended family had a criminal record, which is true, but does EVERYONE in a family have to have a criminal record before that term can be applied? Was EVERY member of the Moran, so-called Melbourne crime family a convicted criminal?  So, Ned Kellys two brothers were criminals and did prison time, both of his parents had criminal convictions and served time, several uncles and cousins had a record and served time, same for two brothers-in-law…how  would that list not define a criminal ‘family’?

 


As for the family being outliers and on the fringes, I agree it wasn’t always the case – when Red Kelly was alive and they lived in Avenel and Beveridge where some of the children went to school, they were indeed part of the mainstream, and again, after the Outbreak was over they seemed to have been rehabilitated back into the community. However, given Morrissey’s analysis, and what Editorials were saying at the time I think outliers on the fringes of society is a fair description of their status through much of the 1870’s, which is the relevant time period when discussing the Outbreak. I would be surprised if anyone would want to argue that during the Outbreak they were embraced as regular members of the law-abiding, God fearing community they associated with. The fact that some of their God-fearing neighbours offered help to the poverty-stricken Kelly women and children is a testament to the community’s commitment to their religion, not to their embrace or approval of the Kelly lifestyle.

 

 

So now let’s turn to the case I mentioned in the Facebook post, an unsavoury event nobody in the world of Kelly admiration would want you to know about or ever want to discuss. (O&M March 2nd 1878)This incident resulted in the imprisonment, in early 1878 of Tom Lloyd the so-called Fifth Gang Member, and cousin of Ned Kelly, for an assault of Amelia Goodman, a mother of four, in her own home. In court, after hearing all the sordid detail, which included description of doors being kicked in, windows and furniture being smashed, a bystander being assaulted and the inebriated Tom Lloyd exposing himself, the Jury wanted to convict Lloyd of indecent assault but the Judge wouldn’t allow it. So, Lloyd went inside for a mere three months for common assault. The other two delinquents involved in this disgraceful event, Dan Kelly and John Lloyd had earlier been fined and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for property damage.

 

 

What happened was that Tom Lloyd, accompanied by cousins John Lloyd and Dan Kelly rode to Goodman’s store in Winton late one day in September 1877 but it was closed. Mrs Goodman was at home with her four children, the youngest 18 months, and a visitor Moris Solomon. Her husband was away and it was night time – “very dark” she said – and on hearing them ‘talk wickedly’ as they dismounted and tied up their horses, she bolted the door. They demanded it be opened, and when it wasn’t they began to kick the panels in, so she opened it and let them in. They were drunk and when Solomon asked them not to ‘annoy a married woman like that’ he was violently assaulted.

Afterwards, “The other two picked him up, and washed his head. Solomon said he would go to Benalla for a warrant. He had his head tied up with a handkerchief. Told them all to go home but the prisoner said they would not go away till they got what they wanted.

She had the baby, which commenced to cry. prisoner followed her; the two others stood in the door. Prisoner went out for five minutes, and came back with his person exposed.

The two others pushed him into the room. The other light was then put out. (Here the assault was described.)”

 

 

It’s easy enough to imagine the sickening behaviour that followed and was described to the Court, but to descendant’s relief I am sure, the sordid detail was not recorded. However we know it was dark, we know Tom Lloyd was drunk and we know he had his dick out. Mrs Goodman’s baby was crying and she had gone to the bedroom, probably to breast feed and comfort her, and Tom Lloyd followed her in. The Jury were obviously so disgusted by what they heard that they asked the Judge if Lloyd could be convicted of indecent assault. He refused and unfortunately his reasoning isn’t recorded, but sexism and misogyny was a woman’s lot in those days: they didn’t have the vote, they had no property rights, they were not believed…. His decision certainly doesn’t give any support to the Kelly sympathiser complaint that the Kelly family were always picked on and persecuted by the Courts and police.

 

Whatever was described, the detail was considered too gross for the papers of the time to publish, but Amelia Goodman, like sexual assault victims have always done, because of shame and embarrassment probably understated some of what was done and said to her. The trauma of the assault was no doubt compounded by her experience in court, and worsened again because like most women complaining of sexual assault she was not believed. Her trauma would have remained with her for the rest of her life. The feral cousins would have laughed it all off as a joke. The following year Dan Kelly and Tom Lloyd were members of Ned Kellys gang. And these low-lifes were supposed to be championing the rights of the poor and the downtrodden. Give me a break…they were nothing but morally bankrupt hooligans.

And three months for ‘common assault’ was also a joke.

 

Later reports of Dan Kelly wanting to have ‘a lark’ with young women imprisoned by the Kelly Gang at Faithfulls Creek station is an echo of this stomach-turning incident at Winton barely a year earlier, and confirms the sleazy and unsavoury attitudes of Gang members four and five. Sadly, this was not the only example of sexual violence entered into the criminal record of Kelly family associates, and it wasn’t the worst one either.

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18 Replies to “Kelly Cousin Tom Lloyd Assaults Amelia Goodman and goes to prison.”

  1. The Lloyds sounded like real low life people to be around. The perverted behaviour from Tom Lloyd Jr and the disgusting act of murdering a neighbours poor horse from one of the Lloyd uncles are just two examples of the kind of people they really were.

    Dan Kelly had a very bad reputation, but gets written up by most sympathisers as a harmless, sensitive little boy. Their main ‘spokesperson’ Noeleen Lloyd even said in a documentary she thinks of them (Kelly Gang) as just being ‘naughty boys’. I don’t think so! Doubt she would really think so either if she had actually KNOWN them. Who knows what would have happened to the women at Euroa at the hands of Dan Kelly (and likely Steve Hart) if his brother hadn’t put a stop to his thoughts.

    Another thing that’s never properly mentioned about Tom Lloyd Jr too is that he lived in a defacto relationship with his first cousin and fathered many children with her. Talk about a backwards lot.

    1. Ive always objected to people calling the Gang members “Boys”. This is a term of endearment, designed to foster the image of the gang as not really responsible adults but as you mentioned ‘naughty boys’ who were just acting out a bit. Ha ha how funny ….except if youre the woman being assaulted, or the person whose horse they borrowed or stolen – these people were anti-social, criminal and out of control.

      Marrying a first cousin ? Didnt the Church prohibit that ? If so it just proves my point that these families were outliers.

      1. Anonymous says: Reply

        Yes, Tom Lloyd Jr and Maggie Kelly (Skillion) were, as you know, first cousins and lived as husband and wife in a defacto relationship, not legally married, but they had many children together. I have seen it mentioned often of course, but never questioned or a single person saying how ‘unnatural’ that seemed.

  2. Jones’s Kelly fantasises elevated Tom Lloyd Jr to a central place in the Kelly story, promoting him to the “fifth member” of the Kelly gang. If that was true, the sordid details of his exploits at Goodman’s store lower him to new depths and lower Dan Kelly further.

    But how much of what Jones claims for Lloyd is true? Jones involved TLJ in joining in plotting a fictional republic that existed only in Jones’ imagination. He involved Lloyd in meeting Ned Kelly in the bush outside the Glenrowan Inn where he envisaged Lloyd preparing three revolvers, remove Kelly’s oilskin coat and dress his wound, then drape Kelly again for his last stand. There is no evidence for any of this; it is entirely Jones fiction with no references at all. The two paragraphs of references for these claims at the end of ch 18 of his 2008 ‘Short Life’ reference nothing about Lloyd except for one half a line of Jones’ pure speculation. This is another example of Jones just making stuff up and inserting it in the story.

    If one was to go through Jones’ ‘Short Life’ and eliminate anything he claims about Tom Lloyd Jr that is unsourced to a document, which is not much, you are left with some few bits built on oral history, mostly from TLJ’s son the policeman who deliberately set out to lead the Kelly researchers up the garden path as he later stated, especially re the republic myth, and many other bits like this that Jones has simply invented. You could leave TLJ out of the Kelly story without affecting it much at all. He barely rates a mention in Kenneally’s Inner History: just three claims that he was involved in making the armour (in collaboration with weedy Dan Kelly, who Kenneally calls “a handy man with blacksmith’s tools, LOL) with one of these mentions noting that TLJ and Maggie Skillion had travelled together on the Melbourne to Benalla train after the Rosier’s gunshop visit (or perhaps just a dirty weekend on the town, as no guns were on the train with them).

    The historical Kelly story is much smaller than it has generally been imagined in the wake of Jones’ creative writing, and if Kenneally, who wrote his tale with the blessing of Jim Kelly had little or nothing to say about TLJ decades after the event, and wrote as one who used TLJ as his direct informant, one might reasonably think that most of what was claimed by Jones for TLJ never happened.

  3. Sharon Hollingsworth says: Reply

    Everyone in the Kelly world has heard of (or should have heard of) this sordid event as it was in Ian Jones’s “A Short Life.” It is something that not many want to discuss, though. Mrs. Goodman’s first mistake was opening the door and letting them in. She should have had a personal protection device full of swan drops racked and ready and stood her ground. If they busted through, well, that would have been a teachable moment and they might have learned some manners.

    1. Sharon the wonderful image youve just conjured up has me cheering for Amelia blasting away at the drunk hooligans… what a shame these feral people kept getting away with so much apalling anti-social behaviour. It just encouraged worse and worse conduct…and we know how it all ended : very badly.

      In relation to Jones mention of this incident, from memory he stuffs it up quite badly, claiming quite wrongly that Mr Goodman was convicted of perjury in relation to it, thus adding to the narrative of Kellys being the victims of corruption, and casting enough doubt about what happened for the entire incident to be more or less dismissed.

      Heres a link to a Post I made some time ago about this – The perjury count was against Amelia and was dismissed, and a chap named Unger was convicted of stealing stuff from David Goodman; We have more information available now so this post could be rewritten or maybe I’ll do a new one..

      http://nedkellyunmasked.com/2016/05/dan-goes-to-gaol-two-kelly-myths-sink/

      The other thing that I find so infuriating is the constant references by the sympathiser mob to a completely bogus claim about a sexual assault b y Fitzpatrick, but those same moralistic commentators stay deathly silent about this actual proven and utterly reprehensible criminal behaviour by two very central characters in the story, one actual and one putative Kelly Gang members. These people are not peripheral to the story but deeply embedded actors at the heart of the Outbreak.

      1. Jones SL 2008: 127 says that the prosecution case against the “boys” was an elaborate fabrication; and that “Goodman eventually received 3 years for perjury, his wife escaped a similar charge on a technicality, and Moris Solomon had disappeared “.

        Jones references for the claimed perjury are Kelly’s Cameron letter (LOL) and O&M 20/11/1877. Jones finds perjury everywhere except when the upright Kellys are in the dock!!! Most egregiously with McIntyre.

        Funny how witnesses against the Kelly clan have a remarkable habit of disappearing before court cases.

        Jones concludes same page that “the scales of justice were weighted against the family”. That would be the scales already lenient by not nailing the offenders for breaking and entering and stealing, all of which points Jones conceded; but conviction on the lesser charge of damaging property. What a farcical lot of nonsense Jones concocted around this to excuse the assailants as merely larking, including their bashing Solomon such that he was on the floor and “his brains were out”.

        1. Hi all, I just followed up David’s link in his post above (25 Jan, 9:57) to his old post where he gives the actual text from the O&M and discusses Jones’ total lack of evidence for his invented perjury claim. It is clear that Jones only source for that is Kelly’s Cameron letter, and that Jones had enough additional info to know that Kelly was lying about Goodman. But Jones went ahead and made the false Goodman perjury claim regardless.

          Jones’ Short Life is riddled with these amateur historical blunders, and it seems obvious that no academic scrutiny was applied by his publisher, or by practically anyone else since. I’m no longer persuaded that his hundreds of errors are simply slips of incompetence, as I thought a few years ago. I now think, after deeply scrutinising his manipulation of source material re Fitzpatrick, Metcalf, and his fabricated republic myth, that he simply set to work from the 1950s onwards to rewrite the Kelly narrative and turn Ned into a positive folk hero regardless of all evidence to the contrary – and there is far more against any such image both from Kelly’s own day and since – than there ever was for it.

          Working at the Age and in film and television gave him access to a wide range of people ready for a good story and untrained in any type of critical historical analysis. This includes a whole bunch of leading legal eagles who were all too ready to take his tales and the appearance of correctly referenced evidence at face value.

          By selective omission and clever misquotation and misrepresentation, not to mention perverse overt disputation and hostile dismissal of sources that conflicted his narrative, he managed to persuade numerous leading lights that he was onto something. His powerful narrative skills reached their height in his 1980 Last Outlaw mini-series which is still hailed as a masterpiece of accurate historical storytelling in numerous Kelly website posts and articles. But it is stuffed with unhistorical myths and misrepresentations right through.

          Ian MacFarlane’s 2012 ‘The Kelly Gang Unmasked’ was the first rigorous critique of Jones’ error-ridden Kelly narrative, and it sent the Kelly nuts nuts. Some found it heavy going because of its segmented thematic approach; but it is a masterpiece of rigorous historical criticism. David Dufty’s recent ‘Nabbing Ned Kelly’ is easily the most readable new narrative in the Kelly myth busting genre. If anyone hasn’t read it yet, do yourself a favour!

          1. Gee Stuart thats a very big claim to make, that Jones approach was so consciously cynical and deliberate. I agree though that he went about and very deliberately did everything he could to convert the Kelly story into the heroic myth, and ignored or explained away anything that didnt fit with the image he had in his mind, but I find it easier to believe it was borne out of a sincere belief of his about Ned Kelly.

            I think we need to be mindful of how utterly a person can become sincerely obsessed with an idea thats entirely false, how such a person ends up being unable to see anything from any other perspective than through the prism of the delusion. We see how mightily impressed Jones was with his own ability as well, when we see him on a video dismissing a site at SBC because he just didnt feel a vibe there…..what the hell? He seems to have believed he had a sixth sense for what really happened. But as everyone now realises – if it wasnt already obvious from various other blunders of his, in announcing with absolute certainty certain things were so which turned out not to be so – his MOST certain and MOST important claim, that everything was justified by the notion of the Republic, is completely and utterly wrong, false, delusional, a fabrication.

            Kelly mobsters are going to have wake up soon and realise that without that central pillar of Jones mythology, the entire structure collapses.

            And thats a good thing, because it frees everyone to go about working out what really happened and putting the Outbreak in its correct historical context.

  4. Hi David, I don’t think Jones’s approach was “consciously cynical and deliberate”; that is not what I’m saying. I agree with you that he sincerely believed the Kelly tale that he created; and he held that others who had a different view to his own (that Kelly’s seigificance was largely socio-political) albeit with good reasons, were, as he put it in the preface to Short Life new edition 2003, “marred by extreme selectivity, exaggeration, blatant omission, factual error and occasional fabrication”.

    In berating any critics who combatted his ‘new view of Kelly’ – essentially the same as what he presented under that banner at the 1967 Wangaratta Kelly seminar – he accused them of exactly what he did himself in multiple places. It seems that what he thought he was doing was bringing to light a repressed Kelly story about a significant socio-political actor; yet as we have seen there was not a shred of evidence for his Kelly republic fantasy; all there was was blundering mis-statement, misquotations, etc., for the central pillar of his book; the pillar without which he has nothing from which to see a socio-poliical Kelly at all.

    As I showed, the oral history on which he places so much weight – the rumours of a Kelly republic he heard whispered vaguely about in the 1940s and 1950s were entirely the result of “beleive it or not” stories widely circulated in the early 1940s, derived from a spoof article from the beginning of the century. Hence their vagueness; there was never anything there. He then went and made up the sympathiser army fisction with tales from one of the few sympathiser family descendant’s deliberate leg-pulling to mock him. (He also invented widespread sympathy for the Kelly gang that never existed in the bush.) I traced all this nonsense to its sources in my Republic Myth book so won’t rehearse it here.

    Remember when he claimed a photo to be a portrait of ‘Gentleman Ned’? Remember when he claimed a Japanese Samurai suit in the Burke Museum to have been Chinese armour; (in Short Life first edn photos) a mistake that no schoolboy of his age should ever have made, let alone an adult? Remember how he invented skyrockets at Glenrowan to summon his fictional sympathiser army, a longstanding popular Kelly myth until David Dufty solved it as being sparks from shunting a locomotive? Remember how he invented body straps that he claimed the poilce got a saddler to manufacture to go on a killing expedition to Stringybark Creek?

    He must have really believed all this BS himself to pursue it so long; but what is unforgivable is twisting and misrepresenting historical source evidence to build his claims. That’s all I’m saying; and I documented many instances of him doing this in my three articles I mentioned above (Fitzpatrick, Republic, and Metcalf).

    I think it’s time to acknowledge that the Last Outlaw miniseries is almost entirely fiction. Very watchable, even persuasive to those with no background; but utterly divorced from historical reality throughout. I might watch some of it it again myself this weekend, just for a good laugh. It is very well told BS…

  5. I have no time for Ian Jones at all. Not so long ago, The Last Outlaw was uploaded to YouTube, so I took the opportunity to watch it. It portrayed a family, and in particular a man being abused and bashed by police, and with his family receiving the same treatment. I did not see anything of the extensive criminality of the Kelly’s, Quinn’s and the Lloyds. All the police were the bad guys, presented as vicious stand over thugs, while the Kelly’s were presented as being poor settlers, with strong family ties, being abused by authorities. What was presented to the public was a complete load of fictitious rubbish.
    The Last Outlaw was removed from YT, probably due to copyright issues.
    When one reads Ned Kelly, A Short Life, the same theme is prominent. I cannot remember anywhere in Jones book where he didn’t claim that the police were perjurers, and the Kelly’s always told the truth.
    Jones conveniently hid from the public a great deal of detrimental information that degraded Kelly, that was the truth.
    Looking at this with logical eyes, it is very clear to me that Jones knew what he was doing, and any suggestion that he was conned, does not lie well with me.
    I consider him a disgrace to this nation, for the garbage he promoted.

  6. I just had a look at some Kelly clips from the Last Outlaw on YouTube and the various comments under them indicate that most of those who put a comment up thought (a) that the Last Outlaw starring Jarrett as Ned was the best Kelly movie to date, and (b) that it is at least reasonably historically accurate.

    Which is to say that the majority of viewers are (a) extremely historically ignorant about the Kelly story, and (b) couldn’t care less. They are there for the hero worship as many comments make clear; and also to blame the police for persecuting their hero and his poor oppressed family as Jones depicted it.

    The more they get into the Jones narrative, the more they convince themselves that Kelly was what Jones creatively painted him up to be, rather than the dysfunctional colonial Frankenstein that he was.

    1. Hey Stuart Ive been giving this a little thought lately, the way so very many Australians have been induced to believe a load of codswallop about a police killer, to the point they have entire Man caves dedicated to the guy, theyve invested thousands of hard earned dollars on kelly memorabilia,tatooed themselves with the idiots face and armour and falsely purported sayings, public institutions have also been duped as have educational institutions, entire communities in the north east….….I am just wondering if we cant make a case for this being a literary swindle on a grand scale foisted on gullible people by Jones in particular?

      Its really quite an achievement, when you think about it, to have convinced an entire nation that the the opposite of what actually took place was the truth, and to have the memory of a violent criminal elevated to the status of national Icon.

      Something to think about.

      1. Yes, I see the problem…

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  7. Sharon Hollingsworth says: Reply

    How about this as to what sort of character we are dealing with? It sounds like one of Maggie’s daughters killed herself after her step-father Tom Lloyd got angry at her. Was she that afraid of him??? 16 Feb 1897 – NED KELLY’S NIECE. – Trove (nla.gov.au) https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/84829794?searchTerm=%22ned%20kelly%27s%20niece%22

    1. Hi Sharon, that’s an awful story in the Bairnsdale Advertiser and it certainly sounds like suicide as the magistrate said, principally because of the note to her brother. It says this happened while she was living with her stepfather Tom Lloyd Jr after her mother (Maggie) was dead. Cornfield’s ‘Kelly Encyclopaedia’ says that Ellen Skillion was the daughter of Maggie and her first husband, William (Bill) Skillion, who had moved away from Greta after he was released from gaol for his involvement in the Fitzpatrick incident. Cornfield says nothing about how she died; Jones SL adds only that Maggie had married Skillion 6 weeks before their baby Ellen was born. Kieza’s “Mrs Kelly” gives the story on p. 490 from a different source, ‘Suicide near Benalla’, Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, 19 Feb 1897, p. 28, so it was certainly around for Jones to see.

      Did Jones know about this suicide of Ellen Skillion at 22 and intentionally omit it? Like so much else he omitted that showed the Kelly clan in a bad light? It is hard to believe with his combing of Kelly news over 40 years that he simply missed this. FitzSimons ‘Ned Kelly’ and his research trogs also passed it over, but they seem to have used Jones as a crib as well as a personal consultant. (Jones is thanked for this in FitzSimons’ acknowledgements pp. xiv-xv.)

      Jones also told FitzSimons not to bother reading Ian MacFarlane’s ‘Kelly Gang Unmasked’, as David revealed on this blog when he spoke with FitzSimons about it at one of FitzSimon’s book launches, which shows how pathetically precious Jones was about challenges to his Kelly narrative. Why debate when you can fudge, fiddle, hide and misdirect? The Kelly story is nothing like Jones and those he directly influenced wrote it. And that’s practically every Kelly non-fiction author for the last 50 years, as seen in their acknowledgements. No wonder the general public know so little about the facts.

  8. While we’re on the subject, it is clear that many mistaken writers, dramatists and film producers invested the Kellys and their deeds with a glamour they do not deserve.

    Oh look, that was EJ Brady saying that way back in 1944. The Kelly tale was already growing like Patterson’s curse long before Jones started fertilising it with

  9. Another example of the geriatric pro-Ned mentality types that shuffle around Glenrowan wearing Ned Kelly gear with Ned Kelly stickers on their cars looking sorry for themselves that their hero went out with a whimper…

    Ned’s last words LOL, https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1669214/eras181_dawson.pdf

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