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 is identified as the author of “Christmas in Kelly Land”, a satire. It’s also noted that in the spring of 1879 he was on the lookout for mouldboards, the plough part that was used to make the Kelly gang suits of armour the following year.
In Peter Fitzsimons popular and more recent Kelly biography, James Wallace isn’t mentioned even once; in Grantlee Kiezas “Mrs Kelly” and in his “Kelly Hunters”, Wallace is barely mentioned, but Leo Kennedy (Black Snake : the real story of Ned Kelly) elaborates a bit more on his role as a double agent and so does Aidan Phelan in his biography of Aaron Sherritt. However, except for Ian MacFarlane who recognized Wallace as ‘a most fascinating and enigmatic character’ in his brilliant 2012 work (The Kelly Gang Unmasked), Wallace until recently has been more or less dismissed as a minor player, one of Nicolson’s many ‘double agents’ on the fringes of the big picture.
However, two years ago that all began to change with the publication of David Duftys acclaimed Kelly book “Nabbing Ned Kelly” which offered fresh insights into many aspects of the Outbreak narratives, and one of them was the role of James Wallace. Duftys book contains the words ‘James Wallace’ 53 times, and ‘Wallace’ 167 times and provides more detail than any author before him about Wallace’s role as one of Nicolsons ‘double agents’. But Dufty goes further: in the very last chapter of his book he suggests, and advances a very good case for the possibility that Wallace was much more intimately involved with the Kelly gangs exploits than previously recognised. In particular Dufty suggested that Wallace may have been the author of the Jerilderie letter: “If the Kelly gang decided they wanted to compose some lengthy documents, it makes sense that they would seek help from the most educated person they knew and trusted . That person was James Wallace” (p355)
So now, with the publication of ‘James Wallace : The Kelly Gang Sympathiser’ Peter Newman has expanded our appreciation of Wallaces contribution to the Outbreak, from being only worth a sentence or two to occupying an entire book, a change which readers of this book will quickly realise is entirely justified. Peter sent me an early draft of this book and I was very impressed, but the final product is even more impressive. This is a terrifically detailed, exhaustive and very well written examination of Wallace’s life that no Kelly enthusiast can afford to ignore. It’s all presented in a remarkably judgement-free way, with the facts set out logically and very readably, and there’s a large appendix full of original hisorical material that enables the interested reader to dig even deeper. I think this book will stand the test of time as one of those books that breaks open new ground, and will be seen as a turning point.
Newmans interest in Wallace developed from a general interest in the Outbreak and the discovery of a self-published, and mostly unknown book from 2005 “James Wallace : The Headmaster of Hurdle Creek”. The author, Arthur Hall had family connections to the Wallace story, spent 20 years investigating it and realised Wallace was more central to the story than was realised at the time.
Newman chronicles Wallaces entire life with constant reference to the historical record in hundreds of footnotes, and includes in the book relevant extracts from the Royal Commission, newspaper and police reports and the many writings of Wallace himself. He agrees with and greatly expands Duftys belief that Wallace had a major role in the writing of the Cameron and Jerilderie letters, and many other related letters, editorials and commentaries. Therefore, it appears that Wallace must have been a central and influential player in all the Gangs activities and plans, not merely someone who helped protect them by writing letters and misinforming and bamboozling police. Newman names Wallace as the author known as Connor who wrote a letter to an MP attacking Nicolson, and generally implicates Wallace in almost every plan the Kelly Gang ever made, including the outrage planned for Glenrowan – Wallace had to have been involved because he began collecting mouldboards for the armour more than a year before the Siege, telling people the lie that his father was a scrap-metal merchant. Wallace never expressed any notable ‘republican’ sentiments and Newman dismisses the entire notion. He does however develop a nuanced picture of social conditions at the time, and believes there was a sizeable community of ‘sympathisers’ in the North East, by which he means people who understood and were concerned about the predicament the Kellys were in but would neither actively support them, or on the other hand, assist the police.
It’s always been said that Wallace’s role as a sympathiser arose from his friendship with schoolmate Joe Byrne. But very little is revealed about that relationship in this book – the fact is nobody has any knowledge of how intimate they really were. Apparently, James Wallace and Joe were both enrolled at the Woolshed school in 1864 – but then Newman records James went to a school in Beechworth for a couple of years, then went to the Reids creek Church of England school, and finally in 1869 to the El Dorado school, which was James last year at school. Are we really sure they developed an enduring and deep friendship out of that? The following year James returned to El Dorado school as a pupil-teacher. Newman reports that James continued to interact with Joe Byrne and practiced his ‘mesmerism powers’ on Aaron Sherritt, who unlike Joe and James had not excelled at school. Newman writes “A granddaughter would later recall the family talking of how James could summon them through mind power alone, although a more likely explanation is that he possessed a strong and dominating personality and family members were anxious to please him.”
The picture that emerges of Wallace’s character is what I would describe as ‘Machiavellian’, though Newman doesn’t use that term – he is more sympathetic to Wallace than I think the picture he paints of him warrants. Wallace was an extremely clever and devious man with an enormous ego who manipulated and played almost everyone : police, friends and acquaintances, one against the other. He wrote and published all manner of argumentative lies and deceits, and never conceded to having faulty opinions or to having made a mistake. He was greedy, playing the education system to greatly increase his income running two small schools and a post office with his wife Barbara, while at the same time he was also ripping off the police: in his deceptive role as an informer he claimed expenses that were greatly inflated. Newman writes “the Wallace family was raking it in”.
He was also incredibly cunning, and many people in the police and in the sympathiser community were completely taken in by him – Ward and Standish being two notable exceptions. He was deeply involved as a sympathiser – for reasons and motivations that I don’t think we still fully understand – but apart from losing his job as a teacher, remarkably he managed to avoid all the sanctions and negative repercussions that ought to have come his way. After the Outbreak he was grilled intensely by very suspicious members of the Royal Commission, one of whom, James Graves, MLA had formerly been a supporter but by 1881 had completely reversed his opinion of Wallace. He was also investigated at length by two detectives: but they couldn’t pin anything on him either.
There’s another thing that’s deeply troubling about Wallace : his loyal wife Barbara stuck by him through all this, and must have been keeping many weighty secrets to protect him – and she gave birth to a dozen children for him – but when he was 43 he dumped her for a 27 year old woman called Bertha.
To me, it seems as if Wallace’s deepest character trait was an overwhelming egocentrism, a profoundly arrogant narcissism that demanded he be at the centre of everyone’s lives, controlling and manipulating them for his own gratification. All of that was possible because his skill as a teacher gave him legitimate credibility within the wider community, and it was further enabled by his ability to charm acquaintances and friends, his control of an important post office at Bobinawarrah and his freedom to move about the region without suspicion. I can’t help wondering if he really cared about Joe Byrne or just adopted his cause as some kind of hyperstimulating personal challenge, an opportunity to demonstrate to himself and the world his superior intellect and his power over lesser mortals.
The final mystery of James Wallace’s life is that the last part of it was an almost complete reversal of everything that had gone before. Whereas before he had been an opinionated and prolific Editorial and letter writer and commentator, now his pen fell silent; Whereas before he had been a player and a manipulator at the centre of everything, now he disappeared into the background; whereas before he had been the man in charge, now he played second fiddle to a new wife.
But one thing that didn’t really change was his readiness to manipulate and take advantage of others for his own personal benefit : he and his new wife operated as Clairvoyants and Spiritualists, selling snake oil and once again raking it in.
With this superb book, the enigma that was James Wallace is beginning to emerge from the shadows, but many unanswered and likely unanswerable questions remain. I am looking forward to some lively discussions about who the real James Wallace really was and what he was really all about.
5 STARS.
Splendid work and conragulations to you Mr Peter Newman. Excellent review as always my good friend.
Can you reveal if Newman was able to source the article he identified as Wallace being the author of “Christmas in Kelly Land”? It has always fascinated me as to the contents of the article.
Reply from Peter Newman :
Wallace’s ‘Christmas in Kelly Land’ series was published in the Wangaratta Despatch. The fact that Wallace was questioned about it by the Royal Commissioners indicates they probably had a copy before them. And later, when Detectives Ward and Considine were investigating Wallace with a view to possible prosecution, they sent a file containing a copy of the Christmas in Kelly Land file back to the Crown Law Department. It is possible that these copies are still held somewhere at the PROV, but they are not in the PROV’s Wallace file! Finding it will be like the holy grail!
This subject is way overdue
My g grandfather had no respect for Wallace and repeatedly said so.
“The one that got away”
Great review
Good review, thank you.
It sounds extremely interesting. Looking forward to reading it.
Reply from Peter Newman :
Thank you for that wonderful review David.
James Wallace is certainly an enigma. Early in my research, Ian MacFarlane referred me to psychiatrist Russ Scott (who produced the paper about Ned Kelly being a psychopath). I felt though that I was too early in my research to properly brief Dr Scott, and so let the opportunity lapse. Then, as my research into Wallace continued, I decided I preferred to be non-judgmental and to simply present the facts. I found myself quite liking Wallace – I came to regard him as a “likable rogue” in the same way that I think Nicolson did. I know what you will say in response to that and I agree with you – being a likable rogue is no excuse for what was planned at Glenrowan.
Re Wallace’s relationship with Joe, you are correct in saying there is not much known about that relationship. Joe was the one though through which Wallace got to know the Kellys. Arthur Hall (as evident in his papers) and some in the Wallace family certainly believed that James and Joe had a deep bond – their view is that James did all he could to protect Joe and would “never have shopped Joe”. That does though fly in the face though of Detective Ward’s report about Wallace having asked Aaron Sherritt to shoot him (Ward) on the basis that the blame would be placed on the Byrnes. There are so many contradictions when it comes to Wallace!
Regarding Wallace’s “greed”, he was certainly not averse to making a quid. However his running of the two schools was not a case of ‘playing’ the Education Department – Wallace did well out of the arrangement, but it was also financially advantageous to the Department as well. Where Wallace excelled financially was in his work as a police agent! Given how badly Chief Commissioner Standish came out of the whole Kelly affair, it is interesting to me that he was onto Wallace’s duplicity right from the get-go. On the other hand, Nicolson was taken in by Wallace, at least in the early days of their relationship.
Regarding Bertha Bonn (Madam Spontini), she deserves a book in her own right. I have a ton of material on her that I had to leave out of the book so as to keep the story about James and not her. I think she was a quite remarkable woman and I’m not willing to dismiss her as a snake oil seller. As smart as James was, she was his intellectual superior and he readily took a back step to her. And I don’t think their spiritualism was in any way a con job – spiritualism was a very big deal back in those days (and still is for many). Just as an aside, it was said to me in my discussions with Wallace descendants and with Arthur Hall’s widow that one of the reasons James was attracted to Bertha was that he was seeking through her to re-establish contact with Joe. I didn’t mention that in the book though because it is hearsay, but happy to mention it here.
Hi Peter,
I was nearing the end of your book and went for a walk and while doing so it seemed to quite suddenly dawn on me that Wallace was really a pretty awful person….but you know more about him than I do, so maybe Ive been too harsh on him.
As for being greedy, he was only able to operate two schools because his wife looked after one of them in the afternoons right? Was she even a teacher??
But it was VERY Interesting to hear that Ian Mac suggested you talk about Wallace to Dr Russ Scott, the psychiatrist who co-wrote that analysis of Kellys character. My assessments are totally amateur….but I wanted to put them out there to see if anyone else thought the way I was thinking about him.
But theres another character that someone should write about one day: Standish!. Hes always presented in a very cartoonish way as an arrogant tosser but I keep coming across references to him that indicate he was really quite sharp – such as your description of how he very quickly sussed Wallace out – and he was also in everything…
Hi David, regarding Standish, it was revealing that he took an occasional interest i how poor old Metcalfe was doing, and arranging funds for treatment, but he was kind of his own worst enemy in that jawdropping performance at the Royal Commission –
“196. (By Mr. Nicolson.)—Was there not one superintendent there for twelve months—I mean Mr. Chomley?—He was there.
197. Do you remember my making an inspection of that district in 1878?
—I remember you made an inspection of the district some time before this happened, but I must say I did not attach much importance to any of your reports. They were all merely twaddle.”
Strewth…!! Talk about spoonfeeding the caricaturists !!
Hi David, I like your positive review of Peter’s book about Wallace and agree that he has opened up a fascinating area of enquiry about someone who was previously thought of as a minor player, just another sympathiser, and showed that the serious examination of Wallace by the Royal Commission was thoroughly justified. The appendices of transcribed Wallace letters and police correspondence about Wallace reveal that his involvement was much more than marginal; he was indeed an active sympathiser who materially assisted and supported the Kelly gang on the run.
This book is very well put together and looks great – in case anyone didn’t notice, Bill Denheld did the cover design – and has benefited from tons of footnotes that make it easy to follow up references if one wants to do so. This is vastly better for readers than the more common end-notes that require flipping to the back of a book to check whether references are to sources or contain important extra commentary. I wish footnoting rather than endnoting was the universal practice for non-fiction but publishers seem to think that most people won’t look up references so they dump them at the back. For non-fiction books, footnoted references and commentary were standard in the nineteenth century, the great age of minutely documented academic enquiry. The average standard of general education and literacy is simply not as broad or high now as it was 100+ years ago, and non-specialist readers as well as enquiring types are equally the poorer for it.
Peter’s argument as David neatly summarised it is “that Wallace must have been a central and influential player in all the Gang’s activities and plans, not merely someone who helped protect them by writing letters and misinforming and bamboozling police”. This branches into two sections: evidence that Wallace was indeed active in assisting the gang while they were on the run, including by playing a double game with dubious or useless ‘information’ that he provided to the police; and a case building on a previous argument by David Dufty that Wallace was the author of both the Cameron and Jerilderie letters. Peter develops this further to propose that Wallace also wrote another sympathiser letter sent to the Herald and O&M in July 1879, and a letter known as the Connor letter, plus other correspondence supportive of the gang and hostile to the police pursuit. (In passing, Peter says about one of Dufty’s suggestions, that there is no evidence for Wallace being involved in the Upper Murray Free Selectors’ Association [123], and I’ll leave it for them to discuss.)
Wallace was involved in collecting mouldboards such as were used to make the gang’s armour for months before the first known theft of a mouldboard occurred, but it is speculation whether he knew what the end purpose was. He was certainly involved in buying food and supplies for the outlaws, delaying police mail at his wife’s post office, being paid as a police informant while providing ‘information’ that was either too dated to be useful or was actively misdirectional, and attempting to cause internal doubt in the police about Detective Ward’s character and abilities. (Ward would be probably the most intriguing of all the detectives involved in the Kelly hunt for a specialised study given his extensive plainclothes work; hopefully someone will do it one day.)
Peter suggests that Wallace may have helped plan the Euroa bank robbery (46), but the Hall gang for example needed no external help in their day. The suggestion is based on there being limited time (actually seven weeks) between Stringybark Creek and the Euroa robbery, and the gang being in a state of exhaustion and stress and moving frequently, hence needing a mastermind. Against this, they had been hiding out near SBC for months prior to the encounter, and after SBC seem to have been sheltered by sympathisers thus creating a need for money to buy loyalty. It is hard to see how Wallace of Hurdle Creek would be much use in planning a bank robbery in Euroa, over 100kms from his familiar territory. Anything is possible, but I’m sticking with it being just an interesting speculation here.
There is a map jointly created by Peter Newman and Bill Denheld showing “the location of those people identified in the police blacklist of Kelly sympathisers” (48). I challenged this in my review of Bill’s ‘Ned Kelly – Australian Iron Icon: A Certain Truth’ in this blog under the heading ‘Sympathisers Numbers on 13/8/2024 and downloadable here, http://nedkellyunmasked.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Ned-Kelly-2024-and-the-myth-of-a-republic-of-North-Eastern-Victoria-is-still-a-myth.pdf
I argued that the Land Department’s selection black list was not a list of Kelly sympathisers but rather of persons suspected of criminal activity involving stock theft. In this Wallace book Peter has provided the full text of a Wallace letter to Superintendent Nicolson of 12/11/1879 a paragraph of which says that an application for a 50 acre selection was made by Tom Burke and refused by the Land Board (386). “No reason was given at the time for this refusal but they ascertained afterwards through a friend in Melbourne that he was suspected by the police of being a Kelly sympathiser and that his name along with the names of about 100 other residents of this district [i.e., the North East police district] were registered in a Blacklist at the Land Office. William [Burke] says he is positive that his brother Tom (the applicant was not in any way connected with the outlaws.”
I suggest this passage explains how Peter and Bill’s conflation of the blacklisted names with Kelly sympathisers came about; and maintain that my sharp distinction between the two remains valid. Whether or not Tom Burke was actually a Kelly sympathiser, that has no bearing on his name being on the selection blacklist for the reason given in my analysis, which reviews how the blacklist was put together and had nothing to do with Kelly sympathisers. I also addressed this in my Republic Myth book. Indeed, in the Wallace letter William Burke is adamant that his brother Tom was not in any way a Kelly sympathiser, and there would have been little point in Wallace writing this to Nicolson if it would be obviously known to the police as false.
Another interesting this in this letter is its ending with Wallace telling Nicolson that he is going to a dance and that “I may learn something as there will be a number of Kelites there” (389). To me this is a veiled dig at the police, as the expression ‘Kelites’ would be best known from G.W. Hall’s February 1879 ‘The Book of Keli’ that lampooned the police hunt mercilessly. (An annotated reproduction edited by Graham Jones and Judy Bassett was published in 1985.)
Peter speculates that Wallace may have been the “traveller” who is described in G.W. Hall’s “Outlaws of the Wombat Ranges” who went out to visit the Kellys as related in the book (67). Against this, Wallace was 25 in 1879; whereas the book describes the Traveller as “somewhat past middle age”, so I am unconvinced.
As regards Wallace being involved in the writing of the Cameron and Jerilderie letters, Peter notes that some of the hostages at Faithfull’s Creek reported seeing Joe Byrne at work on a long letter prior to the Euroa raid (58). As the gang sent at least two copies of the Cameron letter it is most likely that Joe was copying from a master copy rather than composing. If so, we come to the question of original composition. The best that can be said of the Cameron letter is that it is a hopelessly disorganised mess of partial tales and fabrications in no chronological order, and further, that the Jerilderie letter is a longer and more ranting parallel of the same rambling structure. As Jerilderie schoolteacher William Elliott Elliott observed at the time it was apparently the product of a disorganised brain, and it would hardly be a compliment to Wallace if he was responsible for its ravings. Peter provides a useful appendix of Wallace’s letters to Nicolson and they flow rather well. Nothing in their structure, punctuation, expression or style resembles the Cameron or Jerilderie letters in any way that I can see. I’m happy to go along with the suggestion that we don’t know with certainty who if anyone helped Kelly and Byrne draft those letters, or the subsequent July 1879 letter to the Herald provided in Peter’s Appendix 6, but I’m not seeing anything compelling the idea that an accomplished letter and article writer like Wallace produced them. It’s worth noting that they are so full of lies, distortions and outright nonsense (as Doug Morrissey’s documentation re the Jerilderie letter content in his ‘Ned Kelly: A Lawless Life’ demonstrates) that it is hard to see how Wallace, an educated man, could have turned out such chaotic rants expecting anyone to take the content seriously other than as a bundle of complaints of victimisation and vengeful threats.
It is interesting to keep the debate going, but I’m not persuaded that Wallace is the answer.
Peter claims (p. 32) that many settlers had selections that were too small to sustain farms, using the Kelly selection as an example; and that even if they’d worked hard it would only have supported a subsistence lifestyle. This requires evidence, given Morrissey’s study that suggest that majority of selectors succeeded. It seems almost contradicted by Tom Burke having set upon acquiring a 50 acre selection in 1879 (386) if such a size was likely too small to be viable. While Peter agrees that there was no thought of a Kelly republic, he seems to lean towards Wallace having an anti-English outlook: James Wallace’s father Charles was Sottish with a dislike for the English (6) and a previous author (Hall) wrote that James adopted and anti-British sentiments and wanted Australian independence (36).
We can see how descendant’s tales of events can grow unreliably in a comment from a Sherritt grand-descendant recalling the family talking of how Wallace could summon Aaron and family “through mind power alone”. Aaron of course was murdered by Byrne in June 1880 en route to Glenrowan. When we learn that Wallace later remarried to a clairvoyant and spiritualist and they set up as a travelling psychic business, it is easy to see how the second wife’s claimed spiritual powers could be mentally backdated to Wallace in his earlier years while the gang was on the run, where there is nothing anywhere in Wallace’s quite public life back then to lend any support to him having any interest in spiritualism.
Wallace as revealed by Peter is a fascinating character. I am leaning towards David’s description of him as “an extremely clever and devious man with an enormous ego who manipulated and played almost everyone: police, friends and acquaintances, one against the other.” He seems to have relished a reputation as one who “in the know” – boasting at the post office that he had seen Byrne (413); gadding about the countryside at Nicolson’s expense allegedly looking for the outlaws while never finding anything; shutting his school for a week to go to Melbourne to plead for Byrne’s life.
There is a huge amount packed into this book that is exciting reading; it covers far more than I have mentioned here. I think it is essential reading for everyone interested in the Kelly gang as it really fleshes out a new and hitherto unknown part of the story and brings to life a lot of the background drama that has gone under the radar until now. The appendixes provide lots of interesting source material. With Christmas coming up I think this would be a great gift for any Kelly enthusiast friends.
Hi Stuart. Thanks for your review. There is a lot there that I need to respond to when I have more time.
For now, I just want to respond to your comment that I had speculated that Wallace may have been the “traveller” described in G.W. Hall’s “Outlaws of the Wombat Ranges”. The Traveler is described as being as “somewhat past middle age”, and you say you are not convinced it could have been Wallace as he was only 25 at the time. Unfortunately you have misread what I had written. I was actually suggesting that chapters XXIV and XXV in Hall’s book which deal with the traveler had been written by Wallace. Anyway, have another read of pp 65-70 of my book and you will see my reasons for thinking this.
Thanks Peter, will do!
Great review. Very keen to read this new book. Amazed it’s taken so long for Wallace’s role to be put back under the microscope. Always more ground to break!