JOHN HARBER PHILLIPS 2003 KERFERD ORATION: Ned Kelly and the North-Eastern Victorian Republican movement.

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 widespread support for this view, but in the intervening years the claims on which Phillips based his opinion have been eroded to the point that his conclusion is now obsolete. Never-the-less, die-hard Kelly sympathisers and supporters continue to claim Ned Kelly had a plan for a Republic and continue to point to Phillips opinion as support for it.

In this Blog post I will point out what has changed since Phillips formed his opinion, and explain why his argument for a Republic Movement no longer holds water.

ONE

Phillips begins by saying that shortly after his execution a rumour went around that when captured, Ned Kelly had in his possession “a declaration of a Republic of North-Eastern Victoria.” Actually, the  rumour going around was that when captured, Kelly had in his posession “a pocket book, containing a number of letters, implicating persons in good positions, and the name of one Member of Parliament is mentioned”. So, at the time, there was only a rumour, and it was about ‘letters’ – nobody mentioned a republic or a declaration until many decades later. As for the rumour about letters, no letters have ever surfaced so the rumour may well have been a fantasy.

Phillips belief that ‘shortly after his execution’ people were discussing rumours about a Republic is wrong.

TWO

The earliest mention of a Republic that Phillips said he knew of was “in a magazine, The Irish Times published in Dublin in the late 1920s” but exhaustive searches for it came up empty handed. Nobody has any idea what reference Phillips was referring to, but it clearly wasn’t from The Irish Times in the 1920’s.

What has been found instead is that no-one, not even Kelly gang relatives and descendants ever made references to a Kelly Republic anywhere until 1900, when an article appeared in The Bulletin, speculating that if the police train had been wrecked as Kelly intended, “nothing could have averted the railway catastrophe as a prelude to the Presidency of Edward Kelly, Esq., supported by nine men out of every ten in the disaffected district.” No source was provided for this claim which appears to have been made up by the unnamed writer. Certainly, Kelly never had the support of nine men out of ten.

Twenty-nine years later, Kelly sympathiser and journalist J.J.Kenneally  published his landmark book “The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang.” Ned Kellys brother Jim declared that with Kenneallys book, Australians were now ‘in full possession of the truth’-  but there was not even one word in it about a Republic. So,  in 1929 neither Kenneally, who was very close to the Kellys, nor Ned Kellys own brother Jim, nor Ned Kellys cousin Tom – who was named by Kenneally as his main source –  knew anything at all about a plan for a Republic. Clearly they were not the source for, and knew nothing about the 1900 article that had speculated on a plan for a Republic and for Ned Kelly to become its  first president.

 

However, despite that, the Bulletins  tease from 1900 was copied at random intervals by other newspapers and columns, and repeated with variations over the subsequent years, firstly in non-serious gossip and humour columns, and then from there it eventually found its way into semi-serious commentary in print and on Radio. Kelly apologists and Republic defenders think that each of these several citations are separate pieces of evidence for the Republic but they are not : they are recycled accounts that link back to that one piece of  creative writing in 1900 that made a claim in jest that nobody in the wider Kelly clan circles had ever heard of. Never-the-less, from there, as Philips noted, it reached Max Browns 1948 landmark Kelly biography “Australian Son”.  For reasons known only to Brown, he dismissed the ‘rumour’ about a packet of letters, and replaced it with a false claim, expressed not as a rumour but as a fact that when Kelly was captured a Declaration of the Republic was taken from his ‘pocket’. Not a single piece of evidence exists anywhere to support that claim: its false.

THREE

Phillips next discusses the enormous impetus given to the Republic claims by Ian Jones, who received what he must have regarded as a gold mine of information about the gangs’ plan for a Republic from Thomas Patrick Lloyd. Lloyds father, Tom Lloyd, was the close associate and confidante of the Kelly gang and cousin of Ned Kelly that Kenneally had relied on. Jones didn’t seem to notice that the information that the son claimed to be passing on from his father, was information his father didn’t appear to possess when he helped Kenneally write the history of the Kelly gang he claimed was ‘complete’.

Despite this red flag about Thomas Patrick Lloyd as a source, Jones eagerly incorporated all this information into a landmark address in 1967 when he presented “A New View of Ned Kelly” . This ‘new view’ placed Ned Kelly at the head of a secret army of disaffected selector sympathisers whose plan was to overthrow local government and declare the North east a Republic. The gradual transformation of an idea that began as a joke in 1900 into serious claims about history, took more than sixty years but it was now complete. Jones so effectively promoted this idea in his writing and in his landmark 1980 mini-series The Last Outlaw that even academics like Phillips and several others came to take seriously the idea  that Kelly wasn’t a mere criminal but a political revolutionary, the head of a sympathiser army and a President-in-waiting.

Unfortunately for the true believers, in a quite remarkable but predictable admission many years later, Thomas Patrick Lloyd confessed to Dr Doug Morrissey that the information about a Republic that he gave to Jones was a fabrication. He was fed up with journalists distorting and misrepresenting the family oral histories of the outbreak and decided to tell Jones whatever it was he thought Jones wanted to hear. Morrissey explains this in detail over  several pages in Ned Kelly A Lawless Life, the first book of his Kelly trilogy. This revelation, and huge correction to the record, was devastating to the Republic narrative: it exposed the whole thing as a hoax.

FOUR

Phillips discusses in detail the recollection made in 1969 by Melbourne journalist Leo Radic that 7 years earlier, in 1962, in the London Public records office, he had seen the ‘Declaration’ said by Max Brown to have been taken from Ned Kellys pocket. Phillips wrote “I think that it is both safe and reasonable to regard Len Radic’s account as hard evidence of a North-Eastern Republican movement”. This was because Phillips didn’t think a journo would get it wrong!

However, though several subsequent amateur and professional searches at the London PRO failed to find it, for many years Radics claim was taken very seriously, and there was an expectation that sooner or later this ‘holy grail’ of Kelly relics would be discovered. However, in 2013, Radic offered a reassessment of his claim to have seen the fabled ‘Declaration’ and announced he had got it wrong. The multiple searches for the Declaration failed because it never existed.

FIVE

Other supporting evidence that Phillips cited in making his case for the Republic, was offered without any critical analysis, but included the irrelevant fact that two academic historians, Prof John McQuilton and Prof John Molony had expressed their support for Jones ‘New View’!  So what? As I keep repeating, the case for a Republic has to be made on its own merits, not on a headcount of who does and doesn’t support it.

Phillips makes reference to actual Republican movements that existed at the time in colonial Australia : but their existence isn’t evidence that Ned Kelly was also planning one. Again, the case for a Kelly Republic has to be made on its own merits.  The records that prove other Republican movements existed provide nothing concrete to support of a claim about a Kelly Republic – in fact by  referencing these other movements Phillips actually undermines one of his other arguments , the one about such movements needing to be secretive because treason was punishable by death. The examples he cites were not secretive and their supporters were never charged with any crime, let alone executed for treason, but to this day Kelly Republic  supporters continue to claim the absence of evidence for a Kelly Republic  is because it needed to be top secret to preserve the lives of its promotors. Thats nonsense.

Phillips also offered as support, references in the literature to parties of armed men being seen at Glenrowan on the night of the siege, and this related claim: “Witnesses gave accounts of him (Kelly) addressing a body of his supporters on a nearby hilltop. He ordered them to disperse. One witness thought they numbered up to 150 men, all armed.” This claim about meeting sympathisers on the hill was part of the tall tale that Thomas Lloyd invented for Ian Jones’ and importantly is disproved by Kellys own testimony: Kellys movements that night were tracked by Rawlins whose report shows that at the time Jones guessed Kelly was on the hillside dismissing a sympathiser army, he was actually lying in the undergrowth behind the Inn, watching Rawlins passing so close to him that Kelly said he could have reached out to touch him.

The reports of parties of armed sympathisers converging on the scene turn out to be grossly inflated and inaccurate. There was only ever one such claim, and it referred not to “parties” but to a single party of heavily armed men on horseback. When Jones mentioned it in A Short Life he wrote “The phantom army was beginning to emerge”. However, the original reports, when tracked down were about four men who were on foot, one of whom possibly carried a firearm, and who were definitely not sympathisers. So not ‘parties’ but ONE party, not on horseback but on foot and not heavily armed but ‘possibly’ carrying a gun.

Phillips also claimed as support the report of rockets being fired at Glenrowan, but we now know that much of that detail, such as who fired them and why was supplied to Ian Jones by Thomas Patrick Lloyd so can be dismissed. That leaves only the original claim by Const Arthur to have seen two rockets, one large and one small, for a reason and purpose that were unknown to him. It remains impossible to understand how the only person who ever reported seeing them was Arthur because the place from where he believed they had been launched was right in front of a large crowd of spectators and police. It remains possible that he saw something other than rockets, such as spark emissions from the train on standby at the very place he suggested was where the rockets had come from. We will never be sure, but even if it could be proved he saw actual rockets, Arthurs report provides nothing in the way of evidence in support of a Republic.

SIX

Phillips concludes with a lengthy discussion about the Land rights acts and a claim borrowed from Jones about social conditions in the north-east. Jones and Phillips contention was that social instability and selector dissatisfaction in late 1870 made the North East ‘ripe for Republican sentiment’. However, that view was challenged by an actual historian (Prof Weston Bate) when Jones described it that way at the Kelly symposium in 1967, and has been challenged since by Morrissey among others. In any case, even if social conditions were ‘ripe for Republic sentiment’ that doesn’t mean that Kelly was planning to establish one. That case has to be made on its own merits, with actual evidence showing that he was.

CONCLUSION
With the benefit of hindsight, knowing what we do about Thomas Patrick Lloyd and Len Radic in 2024, its easy to see how, through no fault of his own  Phillips got it wrong in 2003 when he said in the Kerford Oration:

“Accordingly, I think that it is both safe and reasonable to regard Len Radic’s account as hard evidence of a North-Eastern Republican movement. This being so, it is proper to regard Thomas Patrick Lloyd’s reports as satisfactory supportive evidence. Together, this material clothes what had previously been a legend with the aura of reality.”

 

In fact, with the passage of time every single one of the pillars of Phillips mostly circumstantial argument about a Republic have fallen over. There is nothing left. The Republic is a Myth.

Download the Oration HERE:  Kerferd – complete speech

REFERENCE : I relied heavily on Dr Stuart Dawsons brilliant monograph, downloadable from the top of the page “Ned Kelly and the Myth of the Republic of NE Victoria.”