In Discussion

Last week I received a newsletter from DELWP (attached below) supplying details of their plans to upgrade the Stringybark Creek Historic Reserve, and inviting anyone interested to participate in the process of selecting source documents from which to derive new signage for the area. I am inviting readers of this Blog to post suggestions and […]

When I launched my Blog, “Ned Kelly : Death of the Legend”: exactly three years ago I wasn’t at all certain it would last very long. That wasn’t because I thought I might quickly run out of ideas to write about, but because I had recently discovered that people who had a different view of […]

My favourite Ned.  Hard on the heels of the terrific bushranger movie, ‘The Legend of Ben Hall’, comes the announcement from the same Director of a crowdfunding campaign, beginning later this month to make another Bushranger movie. This was not unexpected as all throughout the campaign to fund produce and then promote ‘The Legend of […]

In 2014 a movie maker who didn’t go to Film School launched an ambitious crowd funding bid to raise $75,000 to make a short film that would be ‘…. a highly-realistic, cinematic and gritty 40-minute narrative depicting Ben Hall in the final days of his life, culminating in his controversial death outside Forbes NSW in 1865. […]

To celebrate the 25thAnniversary of the 1967 Kelly Symposium at Wangaratta, a second Kelly Symposium took place at Beechworth, on November 13th and 14th, 1993, but unfortunately no official publication resulted from this second Kelly symposium. However the Lectures were transcribed by a now vanished Kelly enthusiast, Marian Matta, into a document which seems to […]

Ian Jones created a vision centred around Ned Kelly that inspired many, but it was fatally flawed. Ian Jones landmark Lecture, A New View of Ned Kelly, followed Louis Wallers lecture about Ned Kellys trial, which Jones described as ‘brilliant’, saying ‘perhaps it is appropriate that we should follow an examination of a legal judgement on Ned […]

Professor Louis Waller, Oxford graduate and Professor of Law at Monash University gave a long detailed and expert Lecture that was followed by a very long and interesting discussion about Ned Kellys trial. Professor Waller described the trial quite brilliantly, provided fascinating insights into the way trials were  conducted in 1880 and examined Kelly’s defence […]

These two shorter lectures featured the rising star of the modern Kelly phenomenon, Ian Jones, aged 36 at the time, described as ‘a former journalist and a television producer-director’ who had by then been a student of Kelly history for twenty-five years. In the first Lecture, ‘The Kellys and Beechworth’, Jones mostly recounts the relationship […]

In this lecture, Weston Bate says at the beginning that ‘the truth about Ned’ is ‘what we have come for, though I must admit I am a trifle disconcerted that Professor Clark suggests that three truths are encapsulated in any one truth it is possible to lay down – the truth according to the sympathisers, […]

‘Good day to you Ned Kelly’was the title of the lecture given at the Easter 1967 Ned Kelly Symposium by the already famous and widely respected Australian intellectual and  historian, Professor Manning Clark. There seemed to be a growing suspicion at the time that Ned Kelly may have been an unrecognised but important figure whose […]