The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly

Author:Ned Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Australian history
ISBN: 9781921921926
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

A NOTE ON SOURCES

There is a wealth of primary sources about the Kelly gang, including regional court records, police department correspondence, Selection Files relating to the various Land Acts, and not least the Kelly Collection held in the Victorian Public Record Office. There are, however, three main primary sources that deal with the raid on Jerilderie. They agree about key events but conflict over details and the characters of the individuals involved.

William Elliott, a schoolteacher, serialised his account in the Jerilderie Herald some thirty years after the event. This was reproduced as an appendix in H. C. Lundy’s Jerilderie: 100 Years (Jerilderie Shire Council, Jerilderie, 1958). Elliott was preoccupied by criticism that Jerilderie’s inhabitants had been ‘cowardly’ in allowing four ruffians to take over their town. He portrays the male inhabitants behaving bravely and heroically.

Kelly is a figure completely in command—any sign of rage or panic on his part is either not mentioned or explained away as mere ‘bluff’.

The Reverend J. B. Gribble, another eyewitness, wrote ‘A Day with Australian Bushrangers’ for the English periodical Leisure Hour in 1885. He relates the depredations carried out in the Australian hinterland for his audience at ‘Home’, and provides a markedly different bias—conditioned by the traditional image of the cut-throat bushranger.

Finally, there are reports, based on interviews with eyewitnesses, that appeared in the Melbourne newspapers in the days following the raid. Although they are sketchy and at times contradictory, these articles provide a clear image of the correspondents’ most immediate and vivid impressions after the hold-up.

I have found Douglas Morrissey’s PhD thesis, Selectors, Squatters and Stock Thieves: A Social History of Kelly Country (held in the Borchardt Library, La Trobe University) to be the most meticulous and exhaustive study of the cultural realm that Kelly occupied.

Other notable secondary sources include: Colin Cave’s Ned Kelly: Man and Myth (Cassell, North Melbourne, 1968); Ian Jones’ Ned Kelly: A Short Life (Lothian Books, Port Melbourne, 1995); Keith McMenomy’s Ned Kelly: The Authentic Illustrated Story (Currey O’Neil Ross, South Yarra, 1984); John McQuilton’s The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: The Geographical Dimension of Social Banditry (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1979); and Charles Osborne’s Ned Kelly (Anthony Blond, London, 1970).

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