In Discussion

This weekend marks the 139th year since the demise of the Kelly Gang at what has become known as ‘the siege’ at Glenrowan in 1880. Kelly supporters have for decades portrayed this event as something worth commemorating, and make all kinds of grand claims about the symbolic meaning of the siege, that it was an […]

“If only the Declaration of the Republic of NE Victoria would surface from the British Museum”   FB Comment 2019   “I believe when captured at Glenrowan Ned Kelly did have in his pocket a declaration for a Republic of North-East Victoria.”   FB Comment 2019   “So Stuart…..is your ego willing to accept the […]

This Blog Post is Number 290 in the series that began five years ago, in May 2014, and I’ve been thinking about where to go from here. I’ve covered all the big issues, some of them more than once and from different perspectives, and though there’s an endless list of interesting debates still to be […]

In the Jerilderie Letter Ned Kelly presented his version of the violent debacle at his mothers home at Greta on April 15th1878, the so-called ‘Fitzpatrick Incident’. In brief, Constable Fitzpatrick went to the Kelly home to arrest Dan Kelly but returned without him late at night to the Benalla Police station, saying that Ned Kelly […]

Everyone accepts that Ned Kelly committed crimes, and for most people that means he was a criminal, and nothing else. However, his supporters claim his crimes were motivated by a sense of justice, that he was driven to commit them by a campaign of police harassment and persecution of his family, and even if his […]

The argument that Ned Kelly should be remembered as an Australian hero and an icon, rather than as a thief and police murderer, is based on the idea that what he did was a principled stand taken in defence of his family against harassment and persecution by corrupt police. It was a theme he mentioned […]

Make no mistake: the MOST important finding made by the 1881 Royal Commission into the Kelly Outbreak, was that it did NOT result from police harassment and persecution of the Kelly clan. This finding is the opposite of what Ned Kelly and his supporters have always claimed, it exposes Ned Kelly as a liar and […]

In the first part of this series of Posts about the contribution of Professor John McQuilton to the Kelly story I pointed out that in an ABC documentary about Ned Kelly, some of the important claims he made were wrong, and they helped support a false narrative about the role of police in the outbreak. […]

Last week I wrote about John McQuiltons contribution to ‘Outlawed : the Real Ned Kelly’ a 2003 ABC documentary that can easily be found and watched on You Tube. Its been watched over 80,000 times in five years. What I showed last week was that John McQuiltons contribution was wildly partisan and in places demonstrably […]

This week I’m going to start an examination of Professor John McQuilton’s contribution to the Kelly story. McQuilton is best known for “The Kelly Outbreak” a 1979 publication based  on his 1977 PhD thesis, subtitled ‘The Geographical Dimension of Social Banditry’. Following its publication well before Molony and Ian Jones were in print, McQuilton became one […]