Who was Ned Kelly?

Ned Kelly (1854 to 1880) was an Australian bushranger and the most famous outlaw in the country's history. The son of an Irish convict father and an Irish-born mother, he led a small gang of brothers and friends through a series of bank robberies and police shootings in north-eastern Victoria between 1878 and 1880. He was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880 at the age of 25.

Kelly grew up in the rough selector country of north-eastern Victoria, where Irish-Catholic farming families struggled against larger pastoral interests and what they considered hostile police. His father John Kelly died in 1866 when Ned was 12. The family moved to Eleven Mile Creek near Greta. Kelly had several minor brushes with the law in his teens and was imprisoned for three years for receiving a stolen horse in 1871 (the horse had probably actually been stolen by his older neighbour). The Kellys' growing feud with the local police intensified after Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick was shot in the wrist at the Kelly home in April 1878 (the circumstances remain disputed). Ned and his brother Dan went on the run.

The 1878 to 1880 outlawry produced a series of infamous incidents. The Stringybark Creek police killings of October 1878 saw Ned, Dan, and Joe Byrne ambush a police party, killing Constables Scanlan and Lonigan and Sergeant Kennedy. The Euroa bank robbery of December 1878 netted about 2,000 pounds and made the gang famous. The Jerilderie raid of February 1879 included Kelly dictating the 8,300-word Jerilderie Letter, a manifesto of grievances against the police, the squatters, and the Anglo-Protestant establishment. The final Glenrowan siege of 27 to 28 June 1880 saw the gang wearing home-made plate-iron armour (including helmets shaped like rectangular buckets) in a planned ambush of a police train. The plan failed when the schoolteacher Thomas Curnow warned the police. Three gang members were killed in the shootout. Kelly was captured and stood trial in October 1880 before Sir Redmond Barry, who sentenced him to death.

Kelly has become one of the most contested figures in Australian history. Some treat him as a folk hero who stood up to an unjust colonial state on behalf of the rural Irish-Catholic poor. Others see him as a violent criminal who killed police officers. His famous last words on the gallows were 'such is life'. The Kelly armour is held at the State Library of Victoria. Sidney Nolan's 1940s Ned Kelly paintings and Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2001 Booker Prize winner) have shaped modern memory.