The Jerilderie Letter Read Free Page B

remoter stock routes, the majority of Kelly’s neighbours, whether Welsh, Irish, Scottish or English, seem to have done their best to put their northern-hemisphere politics behind them. The imperial imperative gave them notions of a shared identity, the idea of being British. This notion was cultivated in public processions and on fete days, and co-existed with the desire to make one’s way in a colonial world in a sober, industrious and respectable fashion.
    Kelly’s rhetoric of larrikin defiance may have been unassuageable and obviously drew from an established cant—that of the outlaw and Irish rebel—but it was not representative of the experience of most selectors in the region. It was specific to those whose lives marched to a different drum.When not in ‘college’ (as Pentridge Gaol was nicknamed) the likes of Ned Kelly expected to have money in their pockets, fast horses to ride, and flash clothes to display. There was more to life, they thought, than the drudgery of farming. ‘I never worked for less than two pound ten a week,’ Kelly declares in the Jerilderie Letter, ‘since I left Pentridge.’
    But Kelly might have found sympathetic readers in the city. An alarmed report in the Herald on Monday 11 November 1878 spoke of the ‘pernicious effect the evil example set by the Kelly ruffians’ had been having on the larrikins of Melbourne. This ‘all absorbing topic’ was being discussed on street corners each day and, to the consternation of the reporter, ‘the opinions expressed have been invariably in favour of the outlaws and against the police’. This culminated on Sunday evening, when a man ‘had collected quite a number of young people, of both sexes, around him in Bouverie Street, Carlton, and wassinging a street song, in which the Kellys featured as heroes and the authorities in the light of oppressors and tyrants’.

    It’s hard to imagine how the Jerilderie Letter, with its unforgettable command of an irrepressible species of invective, could ever have become anything but famous:

    The brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splawfooted sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police who some calls honest gentlemen but I would like to know what business an honest man would have in the Police as it is an old saying It takes a rogue to catch a rogue and a man that knows nothing about roguery never enter the force…

    The letter leaves us with a very different impression of Ned Kelly from the one we are usually given. It tells the story of a violent man living a violent life, yet articulates a highly acute sense of honour and integrity. The letter is punctuated by an urgent need for revenge, articulated through its visceral images, wordplay and metaphors. Its language seethes with menace. ‘By the light that shines pegged to an ant-bed,’ Kelly declares of those who help the police, ‘with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be cool to what pleasure I will give some of them.’
    This document provides the emotional blueprint that was to guide the trajectory of Kelly’s outlawry, which culminated, sixteen months later, in the drama of Glenrowan. He attempted to derail a train packed full with police, blacktrackers and journalists. And here, finally, he donned the heavy armour, made from stolen ploughshares, which was to become the iconic signature-pieceencasing the myth that was once a man. The seeds of this future event are already apparent in the letter, where it is announced that ‘in every paper that is printed I am called the blackest and coldest blooded murderer ever on record But if I hear any more of it I will not exactly show them what cold blooded murder is but wholesale and retail slaughter something different to shooting three troopers in self defence and robbing a bank…’
    This