This post is Part 6 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.
Sympathiser numbers
Bill disputes two comments in my Republic Myth book: first, that I said that the Kelly gang were assisted by a considerable number of sympathiser families mostly related by marriage, saying that “only five names were related by marriage: Quinn, Lloyd, Skillion, Ryan, and Kelly”; and second, that my reference to the 23 sympathisers arrested and remanded in January 1879, is incorrect as “official records show that 169 individuals were arrested” (250). Yet even among the 23 arrested, J. Hart and R. Miller are designated as Kelly relatives in McQuilton’s table of those remanded; add William Tanner (married to a Lloyd), and the attempted rebuttal is simply a furphy. The comment that the gang were assisted by mostly related sympathisers comes from Senior Constable John Kelly’s recollection that the police had compiled “a list… of nearly one hundred families who would render every aid possible to the outlaws, most of these were connected with the bushrangers by ties of blood or marriage, and their residences were distributed over what was called the ‘Kelly’ country in a manner to afford the bushrangers the utmost possibility of succor and assistance”.[1]
Bill derived his tally of169 arrested sympathisers from Tom Newth’s, That’s what Grandpa said. There are 122 sympathiser names in Newth’s book, plus some further names drawn from Ian MacFarlane’s Kelly Gang Unmasked, to give Bill’s total of 169 sympathiser names. He says that “Newth noted that around the 1880s, many of these people were locked up at Beechworth jail, but had to be released because they were detained without a warrant” (259). This is extraordinary bungling by Newth. Twenty-three sympathisers were arrested under the Felons Apprehension Act between January and March 1879 and detained for varying periods between one day (W. and J. Stewart) and three months (about half of them). The list and details are in McQuilton’s Kelly Outbreak, p. 114. Incidentally, in the process of checking McQuilton I see he claimed that, “The Ovens and Murray Advertiserquite bluntly put the number of men ready to support the Kellys [in Decembers 1878] at 800”,[2] a blunder in which he misread 300, the number printed in the newspaper, as 800. I first noticed this blunder in Peter FitzSimon’s Ned Kelly but can now source it to Kelly enthusiast McQuilton. That 300 men is the largest number of sympathisers claimed by any contemporary source during the outbreak.
Bill’s claim that 169 sympathisers were arrested at some point is simply wrong. It comes from his equating the 84 names blacklisted from taking up selections with his combination list of 169 sympathisers and claiming all of the 169 as “an arrested blacklisted Kelly sympathiser” (257). As I noted, Inspector Nicolson provided the Secretary with a blacklist of 84 “suspected persons and criminals in possession of holdings of lands in the North-Eastern [police] district…. Few are mentioned but those residing in secluded or mountainous parts, and where there are great facilities for carrying on horse and cattle stealing and other offences without much risk of observation. Besides the men referred to, there are many young men, members of the same families and others, who are coming to the age at which they may select land and whom it would be most desirable to prevent from selecting in such places.” Bill regards the blacklisted group as Kelly sympathisers. That may be the case for a few but they were not blacklisted for that reason, but to break up stock theft. The 23 remanded persons were either known or probably Kelly sympathisers; the black list was not connected with these arrests.
Bill further claims without evidence that only some 10% of selectors in the north east were real selectors, and that 90% of selectors were actually squatter’s ‘dummies’ (255). He has marked on a map the locations of blacklisted persons who are scattered from Albury to Mansfield (257), to hold that “these were not just a single group or mob around the Greta area as Dawson tries to portray as being the central problem”. For Bill, the map indicates a “widespread state of disaffection” (256). First, nowhere did I say or imply that the blacklisted persons were a single group around Greta area. Quite the contrary; I quoted the Secretary of Lands request for a list of selectors suspected by the police of sympathising with or aiding the outlaws in “certain mountainous districts in the North Eastern portion of the colony”.[3] One can nevertheless see, by overlaying Doug Morrissey’s stock theft route map at the front of his Ned Kelly: A Lawless Life onto Bill’s map, a close correlation between the large number of blacklisted persons around the Fifteen Mile Creek in the Greta and Lurg area and one of the key stock theft routes. One can equally see from Morrissey’s map, consistent with Bill’s observation, that “there are very few blacklisted names north of Wangaratta and in the Beechworth area” (258). These were not on stock theft routes but were bypassed, so Bill is not getting the victory he seems to be claiming here.
Demographic calisthenics
Bill proposes that a realistic estimate of the number of sympathisers can be derived from population data. In summary, he says that average families then comprised 7 or 8 individuals; assuming half of them were of learning and working age, each old enough to understand their social standing, it would follow that of his claimed 169 blacklisted persons, on average each had four members who understood what it meant to be blacklisted. So 4 x 169 could mean 676 individuals, each of these having contact with neighbours and friends who also shared their sentiments. This could mean there were more than three times as many with similar sympathetic sentiments. “By that we could estimate at least 2,000 people having sympathetic support for the Kellys’ predicament over an area of about 8,000 square kilometres or 4 people to every square kilometre from south of Mansfield to the NSW border” (259).
This averaging doesn’t work. First, there were 84 blacklisted persons, not 169. Ignoring that for now and working with Bill’s 169 sympathisers for the sake of argument, the argument secondly fails because no-one knew about the May 1879 blacklist even when Kelly associate William Tanner’s application for a selection was refused on recommendation of the police in June 1879.[4] There was nothing more than one individual refusal known; nothing about a blacklist. Even in October 1880 when Kelly’s solicitor Gaunson enquired of the Lands Department why Maggie Skillion was refused permission to take out a mortgage on her mother’s farm,[5] the fact of a blacklist was still unknown.
Third, Bill’s own map of the north east parishes (257) that identifies all known sympathisers shows that the vast majority of parishes had not even one known sympathiser in them. For an accurate estimate of the number of sympathisers the best source is the police, who were actively interested in them. As I noted in my Republic Myth book, there were about some 100 heads of families identified by the police; and we have the O&M estimate of 300 individuals all up in December 1878. If anyone wants to claim higher numbers of sympathisers they need to demonstrate a basis for it.
Bill’s proposal seems to be that sympathy might reflect a common grievance or empathy for the Kelly’ situation as downtrodden selectors hounded by the police; but that in turn requires evidence that the police were focusing on poor selectors as distinct from focusing on those who were criminals or had known criminal associations. There is nothing in the newspapers of the day to support the idea that the police were in some way agents of the squatters and sought to support squatter’s class interests against selectors generally.
To return to the black list, no-one would know they were on the black list unless and until they applied for a selection in the north-east police district; and there were no restrictions on them being able to select anywhere else in Victoria. Bill suggests that “Many of the neighbours were not blacklisted as they worked as labourers for their nearby squatters” (259), but this avoids the point that the blacklist was determined by police submission of names of those they saw as “suspected persons and criminals in possession of holdings of lands in the North-Eastern [police] district”, regardless whether these might be dummy selectors or not. It is bending history to suggest that “If too many people were blacklisted in one area, arrested and locked up in their district this would have caused a more serious uncontrollable uprising” (259). This again equates the 23 arrests and remands in early 1879 with names on the blacklist; but as we see from the blacklist at VPRS 4965, Con 2, Unit 4, Item 177, there is almost no overlap of names between them and the remanded persons. One could argue that the blacklisting was unfair; but one cannot equate the blacklist with Kelly sympathisers.
Bill next introduces the idea of ‘6 degrees of separation’ (that everyone on earth is theoretically separated from everyone else by only six people) into his sympathiser calculations: “Multiplying friends and associates at 5 degrees of separation there could have been 9,000 people in north-east Victoria alone ‘sympathetic to the Kelly cause’; it could be 20,000 around Victoria” (265). Why not go the full 6 degrees and multiply the 9,000 to get 54,000 sympathisers across Victoria in a population that was then approaching 850,000?[6] Clearly because this theory needs the sixth degree treatment!
What was the “Kelly cause”? To get his mother, together with Bill Skillion and Bill Williamson, out of gaol to which they had been sentenced for aiding and abetting the attempted murder of a police constable, a crime that it is clear that the three had jointly committed (unless the third man was actually Joe Byrne).[7] Bill suggests that the Jerilderie letter wording that “It will pay Government to give those people who are suffering innocence, justice and liberty” should be applied to all the 169 sympathisers he wrongly claimed were blacklisted and gaoled (264), but this misreads the JL’s wording to apply it, as did Ian Jones, to more than Mrs Kelly, Skillion and Williamson. The parallel words in the Cameron letter written a month before the 23 sympathiser remands took place are his “warning that if my people do not get justice and those innocent released from prison”. In both letters these relate to previous wordings speaking of “the conviction of my mother and those innocent men” (CL) and “lagging my mother & infant and those innocent men” (JL). It is wishful thinking to attempt to apply that any wider.
Bill also hopes to establish some demographic basis to apply the O&M’s April 1880 caustic mocking that “9 out of 10 bush hands and swagmen” applauded the Kelly gang, to the Parish of Moyhu. He says that 97 of the 100 names on the Moyhu Parish map were small landowners, then suggests with no evidence that half of these were squatters’ dummies; and then claims of the 48 “true selectors”, 18 were blacklisted. This is simply wrong: only four Moyhu names appear on the blacklist.[8] Once again Bill is claiming all identified sympathisers to have been blacklisted. It is just factually wrong. He next moves to the 1877 Parish maps of Lurg and Greta, noting “49 listed sympathisers out of 61 names on the maps, or 80%. This is close enough to the Bulletin’s 9 out of 10 men in the disaffected district” (264). This misreads the Bulletin’s mocking 1900 article with its ‘9 out of 10’ figure obviously drawn from the O&M’s ‘bush hands and swaggies’ figure to apply to the north-east population at large. That can’t be done; first, because it was simply a publisher’s joke; and second, because as Bill’s own map on p. 257 shows, the concentration of sympathisers there follows the Fifteen Mile Creek stock theft route identified in Doug Morrissey’s map and is totally untypical of N.E. Victoria. So while Bill’s demographic section attacking my Kelly Republic myth book is full of figures and maps and what-ifs and therefore looks impressive, it is entirely hypothetical and at odds with the facts.
The next part of this review will return to the question of whether there were any north-eastern republican sentiments in general, or in the land reform movements Bill claims that there were; but I will suggest that there were not. Some persons who interacted with the Kellys may have had some political interests, but there is a solid case that the Kellys and the Kelly gang did not. Certainly there seems little to suggest that there were any pro-republican sentiments in the land reform and similar movements in the Kelly period of the later 1870s.
[1] Ex-Sgt John Kelly, in Thomas McInyre’s True Narrative of the Kelly Gang (PDF, VMP), 89.
[2] Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 14 Dec 1878, 4.
[3] S. Dawson, Ned Kelly and the myth of a republic of north-eastern Victoria, 23.
[4] Tanner’s land refused, VPRS 4965, P2, Unit 4, Item 196, 16 June 1879.
[5] Peter FitzSimon’s summary in Ned Kelly (2013), 635, from Argus, 16 October 1880, 8.
[6] Argus, 5 December 1881, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11525770#
[7] S. Dawson, ‘Redeeming Fitzpatrick: Ned Kelly and the Fitzpatrick Incident’, Eras Journal, 2015.
[8] VPRS 4965, Con 2, Unit 4, Item 177.