Ned Kelly The True Story

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. […]

The Story of the cop who hunted Australias most notorious bushrangers For a few minutes on October 28th 1878 at Stringybark Creek Ned Kelly wrongly believed he had just shot and killed Senior Constable Anthony Strahan, the subject of this biography. At least, that is what Kelly later claimed in the Jerilderie letter, repeating an […]

In the grandly entitled  “The Author Speaks: On Understanding Historical Figures” Aidan Phelan writes about the so called “Ned Kelly – hero or villain?” argument and returns to two pet themes of his, the first of which is that all human beings, Ned Kelly included, are ‘nuanced complex and multi-facetted’. There is absolutely nothing new in that […]

According to Kelly defenders, Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick was the cause of the entire outbreak. He is routinely vilified as a drunk and a womaniser even though, as Ive pointed out HERE and HERE there is not a single shred of evidence that supports either of those two claims. Neither is there a single shred of […]

It would be interesting to know for certain who supports the idea that Ned Kelly is an Aussie Icon and Hero these days but I would guess that more than half of the population still does. I would guess though, that a survey would show that the huge majority of Australians have only a very […]

I don’t know why Mark Perry was expelled from “Ned Kelly Sympathisers”  FB page but he must be getting close to being expelled from the one he started himself , Best Bloody Man, because he has been pricking a few of the apologists balloons of late. A week or two back he wrote “Some of […]

  Ned Kellys plan for Glenrowan was described as ‘mad’ by a well-known Kelly sympathiser and spokeswoman for the Kelly story. As far as I know, no other Kelly sympathiser has ever challenged that description, and certainly no truly objective observer would disagree: even Ian Jones said it would have been a ‘criminal atrocity on […]