LOOKING BACK AT 2024 : GREAT FOR THE TRUE STORY

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 genuine interest in the true history of the Kelly outbreak, because on this Blog more of this fascinating true story was revealed, and more of the myths promoted and attached to the true story by Kelly sympathisers were exposed and set aside. Twenty-four posts were published over the year on a diverse and fascinating range of topics as we celebrated our tenth anniversary, a milestone that our foes in the Sympathiser camp never wanted to see.

The most popular post, and perhaps the most fascinating and the biggest myth-bust in 2024 was “The Incredible True Story of Boxing Ned”.  Thomas Whiteside revealed the outcome of his meticulous research into the legend that says Ned Kelly became the unofficial Boxing champion of the North-East when he defeated Wild Wright in a 20 round Boxing match in Glenrowan on August 8^th 1874. This research was triggered by a very simple observation: in the famous picture of Ned Kelly posing in boxing attire, his shorts and his face are perfectly clean and unblemished. Clearly it wasn’t taken after the fight, so was it the fight or the photo that happened on August 8^th? The Legend is that the fight was an impromptu event after a chance encounter between the two in a pub, so how come Kelly was dressed up like a professional? Please read this absorbing Post again and follow the argument to its inevitable conclusion: there is no evidence supporting the claim that there was a fight, and the Photo of Ned Kelly posing as a boxer was taken in a mobile Photographic studio,  a vanity project of Ned Kellys that cost him 17s6d! Read it all again here.

Almost as popular as the Boxing Ned discussions, and an equally important myth-bust  were the three Blog posts that explored another famous Legend, the one about Kelly being rewarded with a green sash for saving the life of six year old Dick Shelton, by rescuing him from drowning in the Hughes Creek. This a beloved and dramatic tale : but did you know Ned Kelly never mentioned it, neither did anyone in his family, and neither did family friend J.J.Kenneally in his famous 1928 Kelly book ‘The Complete Inner History of the Kelly gang’ ? That book  was enthusiastically endorsed by Ned Kellys own brother Jim Kelly, and yet it  makes no mention of a rescue or a reward, an event that modern Kelly sympathisers believe defined Ned Kellys youth and provided him with his most prized possession.  The idea that modern Kelly sympathisers know stuff about Ned Kellys life that Ned Kelly never mentioned once and that Jim Kelly hadn’t heard of is absurd. In fact, what is made clear in those three Blog posts and a lot of discussion that followed about the rescuse and the sash, is that this story is a modern fabrication cobbled together almost a century after it was supposed to have happened from a half remembered possibly apocryphal tale of a rescue by some kids, one of whom might have been Ned Kelly. As for the sash, it was never mentioned by Ned Kelly, and it wasn’t ever something the Shelton’s included in their stories;  all we know for certain about it is that it was worn by Ned Kelly at Glenrowan. Kelly fans are desperate to attribute to the sash some special significance, especially because its green, but at Stringybark creek he wore a red one, so it seems he had a fondness for wearing a colourful sash, and that may well be the sum total of its significance. READ IT AGAIN HERE

 

 

We talked a lot about books in 2024, the very first Post being a review of  Jim Haynes history book “Great Furphies of Australian History” . It was good to see things we talk a lot about on FB pages and this blog being noted by history writers and incorporated into mainstream publications. Haynes drew readers attention to several important myths and had this to say about the Kelly Republic “It is a furphy that Ned Kelly had an Irish rebel heritage or any notion of leading an uprising to form a Republic in North East Victoria.” READ THAT POST AGAIN HERE 

The last Post for 2024 was also a book review : Peter Newmans “James Wallace; the Kelly Gang Sympathiser”. This  work, the result of several years research, has been widely acclaimed, as it opened  up a discussion about the place in the story of someone who had previously been mostly ignored. Wallace may have been the tactical mastermind behind many of the Kelly Gangs activities, not just in the writing of letters but in formulating strategy.READ IT AGAIN HERE AND IF YOU HAVENT READ THE BOOK YET GET A COPY

In between those two book reviews there were TEN posts addressing various components of Bill Denhelds controversial 2024 publication “A Certain Truth”. There was a post about his suggestion that Ned Kelly might have been adopted, there was a post about his claim that Ned Kelly was ‘dudded’ by Thomas MacIntyre, and there are separate posts about Bills views about the Republic, about Sympathiser numbers, about Kellys reputed political connections and ambitions, about Fitzpatrick, about the ‘ambush’ at SBC, and of course one backing up Bills main claim to fame, to have identified the site where the police camped and two of them were murdered at Stringybark Creek. START READING  ALL THOSE DISCUSSIONS HERE

 

 

In a complete change of pace there’s a very satisfying piece from Stuart Dawson in which he outlines his investigations that showed that the Kelly chiildren didnt ever go to the Avenel Common School, as was always thought and is proclaimed on a NK Touring route sign in Avenel to this day. The Kellys had left the area when the Common school first opened in 1867 –  their school was its predecessor, known by the name of its first teacher as the  Richardson school,  at a different but nearby site.  ENJOY READING IT AGAIN HERE

There were also two posts about the two rockets that were reported to have been seen during the Glenrowan siege, a minor, almost insignificant topic that is STILL obsessively occupying the minds of Kelly fanatics on Facebook. Many of us find it surprising that only one person ever reported seeing them, a fact that gave rise to a suggestion the ‘rockets’ could have been an emission of sparks from the train waiting at the very place from which the observer said the ‘rockets’ had come from. A few noisy Kelly fanatics on Facebook refuse to acknowledge the oddity of rockets being fired near a crowd of onlookers but only one person reporting seeing them, and their tedious jeering and mockery of a quite reasonable suggestion to explain that oddity eventually compelled me to write a couple of Blog posts on the subject. Their response was just more childish sniggering. READ THE TWO OF THEM AGAIN STARTING HERE

Lastly, in a somewhat tangentially related post to the one about rockets, I wrote a critique of the 2003 Lecture given by former Chief Justice of Victoria John Harber Phillips in which he outlined why he believed it was reasonable to believe Ned Kelly had a plan to declare the North East of Victoria a Republic. READ IT AGAIN HERE .

This subject is related to the rockets not only by also being about the siege at Glenrowan, but also because like the rocket claim, its one that has been integral to the Kelly legend for decades and is a claim that Kelly sympathisers are clinging to desperately. They cling to it desperately and are defending it in all kinds of absurd ways, because they’re in denial about what Ian Jones said himself, that without a political aim, such as establishing a republic, what Kelly planned and attempted to carry out at Glenrowan would have been a criminal atrocity on a monstrous scale. This is the reality Kelly sympathisers everywhere still refuse to face, long after the Republic idea has been consigned to the dustbin of history, that what’s left of the Kelly legend after the Republic has gone is only violent murderous criminality. Instead they cling desperately to things like the rockets and like Phillips support for the Republic concept in 2003, never letting on, as I show in the Blog post, that many of the things Phillips based his claim on have been dropped, disproved and debunked. All the pillars supporting Phillips argument have been kicked out from under it, and so the argument has collapsed.

Its a shame but this post about Phillips and the arguments advanced in the other 23 Blog posts this year will change the minds of almost no Kelly sympathisers. In the ten years the Blog has been operating I’ve seen how firmly their minds are made up and how  closed their minds are to new ideas. They will continue to defend their beliefs like the members of a cult, with jeering and mockery, with lies and blind hostility and paranoia directed at me and at anyone else who dares challenge them. The Kelly sympathiser pages will just keep doing what they’ve always done: repeating the same old thing, saying the same old thing, pretending to be ‘academics’ and Kelly historians and ‘researchers’ while posting incoherent rambling paragraphs that the gullible misinterpret as coherent argument, displaying the same old images and repeating the same old stories from the same old outdated books in defence of a version of outbreak history that was mostly invented almost a century after it all happened. And that’s their right. Flat earth theory still has its devotees and so does the Legend of Ned Kelly, the hard done by revolutionary peoples hero : theres no law that requires people to only believe things that the evidence supports. They aren’t going to change, least of all after reading anything posted by their nemesis, Dee!

But my hope is that people who are open minded and have an enquiring mind, people who are fascinated by history, people who like a good crime story and the challenge of separating myth from reality, of separating truth from fiction – my hope is that these people will read these pages and find much that’s interesting, informative and entertaining, and they will go away better informed.

 

In the year ahead, 2025 we will continue to do what we have always done, maintaining our enthusiasm for telling it like it is, for correcting the record where we think its mistaken, for challenging the details both big and small, and providing a platform for the exchange of ideas and insights into what continues to be the fascinating story of the Kelly Outbreak.

I wish everyone all the very best for 2025.