Remembering Kelly

The story of the Irish Australian bushranger Ned Kelly has become paradigmatic for the selective retelling of history as folk legend, and for the ideological processes by which social memory may be reworked into the fabric of a nation's founding cultural myths. As John Ryan among others has pointed out, the 1880s, a period of radical nationalism in Australia, allowed Ned Kelly to be brought into conjunction with a number of more or less compatible legends (101). Among these were the twin legends of the ‘noble bushranger’ and the ‘noble convict’: victims both of a palpably unjust penal code, these figures could be grafted – with the help of a little historical sleight of hand – onto a long line of morally ambivalent ‘good badmen’ whose romanticized outlawry embodied libertarian ideals within an oppressive colonial system (102–03). To these might be added a number of legends surrounding Irish nationalist insurgency, not forgetting the now-stereotypical ‘bush legend’ itself with its virtues of endurance and self-reliance, and its celebration of mateship as a marker of loyal adherence to the bushman's code (106). These legends, needless to say, have been endlessly re-interpreted and challenged, with revisionist accounts variously puncturing the Kelly myth by stressing the vicious criminality of the gang, stripping them of their (self-)glorified guise as frontier-society ‘Robin Hoodlums’ (Greenway); by using the camp theatrics of some gang members to upset the standard narrative of rugged male adventure-heroism; and by emphasizing the racism underlying Kelly's mythicized status as a ‘moral European’ (Rose), a racism now generally acknowledged as being built into the structure of the so-called ‘Australian legend’ itself.

As with other mythic narratives surrounding oppositional figures such as the outlaw, the Kelly legend continues to depend on a manipulation of collective memory more notable for its strategic omissions than for its ‘keeping alive [of] pasts that story [has] obliterated’ (Hamilton 14), and for its highly selective reading of a number of often far from reliable historical sources. At the same time, the sheer quantity of Kelly material currently available on the market testifies not just to the durability of the legend, but also to its continuing profitability as a commodity circulating within an increasingly globalized memory industry.