Author: David

  The recent discussions on Facebook about exactly where along Stringybark Creek the police murders took place quickly degenerated into a hopeless tangle of threads and comments that became impossible to follow, and went nowhere. As a result, The Kennedy Tree report group began a similar conversation on their own page, once they had lifted […]

Most people in Australia know something about the bush ranger Ned Kelly and would recognise the suits of armour his Gang made for themselves, but how many of them would know that in the last ten years the story of the Outbreak has undergone a radical shake-up?  In this essay I  briefly review the way […]

My good friend,  SBC expert Bill Denheld is talking to members of the BBM Facebook page about his search for the site of the Police murders shown in a couple of very famous photos taken at the time by professional photographer  Mr F C Burman. Many people are claiming it’s all too complicated and too […]

For the last ten or twenty years, in late June, Kelly sympathisers have gathered at Glenrowan to commemorate and celebrate  the Siege of June 1880, the focus being Ned Kellys menacing armour and his so-called ‘Last Stand’, a desperate 15 minute act of insanity Kelly sympathisers think was heroic. It used to be a highly-organised […]

The title of this very interesting little book, published in 2007, is taken from the banner headline of an article of the same name published in the Border Morning Mail (now known as the Border mail, published in Albury-Wodonga) on August 18th 1944. The article was based on an Interview with 82-year-old David Mortimer and […]

I don’t really give a rats about what happens on the BBM Facebook page…. except for two things : firstly I dont like it when people are misled by buffoons pretending to be experts, and second, the fact that almost every day of the week someone on it will reference me and my Page in […]

This isn’t a review, but a response to one. Dr Stuart Dawson wrote a scathing review of Kate Kelly by Rebecca Wilson, firing within me the primordial defence mechanism of one author seeing another author under attack. I wrote a long response to that review, which grew so long that I’ve asked the proprietor of this […]

  Having admired Grantlee Kieza’s 2017 ‘Mrs Kelly’, I was keen to have a look at Rebecca Wilson’s 2021 ‘Kate Kelly: the true story of Ned Kelly’s little sister’, thinking it would likely model itself on Kieza’s well-researched approach to Kelly history, albeit from a different angle to focus on a child of the family. […]

The fake news about the so-called “Kelly outbreak” has been the dominant narrative for decades, so its not going to be enough to correct it once and expect that from that moment on everyone will know the true story. For one thing, there are the mobs of  Kelly supporters on pro-Kelly FB pages who are […]

    This is the second review of the excellent ‘Justice in Kelly Country’ to appear on this blog. For clarity in reading, this review will use ‘Strahan’ to refer to Senior-Constable Anthony Strahan (the author’s great-great-grandfather) who was deeply involved in the Kelly hunt, and ‘Lachlan’ to refer to Lachlan Strahan, the book’s author. […]