Ned Kelly and the Limits of State Control

At the gallows the criminal was in the peculiarly privileged position to influence the narrative of his or her very own death. The criminal’s final words, actions and demeanour was an uncontrollable and unpredictable element of the spectacle that could shape its very legitimacy.

Ned Kelly was raised in Victoria’s High Country but was in and out of prison after he first got into trouble with the law at age fourteen for assaulting a Chinese man. A subsequent altercation with a policeman at the Kelly family home led Ned and his brother to take to the bush. Between 1878 and 1880 the �Kelly Gang’ were fully fledged bushrangers, robbing banks and homesteads (among other exploits). Earlier on they killed three policemen at Stringybark Creek who had been sent to arrest them. At their final showdown with police in the town of Glenrowan two years later, three of the Kelly Gang were killed. Ned Kelly—clad in his now-iconic homemade metal armour during the confrontation— was arrested soon afterwards and sentenced to hang.^[346] Newspaper reports from the time indicate that Kelly died a �clean’ death on the scaffold and that he complied with the requests of his religious advisors as well as the sheriff and executioner. Moreover, his was a private execution. No one but officials and journalists were present at the hanging with members of the public completely excluded from the scene. As far as Ned Kelly's death was concerned, it was an execution to the letter, the best the state could hope for by the standards of the day.

It goes without saying that the execution of Ned Kelly had a long- lasting impact on the cultural memory of Australia. It started with Kelly's final words being reported in the colonial press. These last words—�Such is Life'—have since floated out of the cellblock window and into the public vernacular.^[347] Moreover, Kelly's execution gave rise to a peculiarly Australian turn of phrase—�As game as Ned Kelly'— which connoted �the ultimate in bravery'.^[348] As an example of usage, Father John Brosnan was the Catholic comforter to Ronald Ryan in 1967 (the last criminal to be executed in Australia) and used it to describe his final moments. Brosnan commented on the �courage' of Ryan; how his �step did not falter' as he mounted the gallows and looked the executioner squarely in the eye.^[349] At the conclusion of Brosnan's eyewitness account he wrote that: �Murderer or not, the condemned man died well, “like a Kelly”, as they say'.^[350] The symbol of Ned Kelly has since entered the Australian popular psyche, not as an index to punishment or triumphant state power, but as a celebration of �Australianness' itself. When stage performers at the Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony in 2000 were playfully dressed in Kelly-like tin armour one historian suggested that, �it is probably fair to say that Ned Kelly meant nothing more for many young people than some­thing uniquely Australian, like water tanks, windmills, kookaburras and kangaroos: things that evoked the bush'.^[351]

For those who know the story well, the reasons for Ned Kelly's execu­tion living on in the Australian consciousness are obvious enough. He was an Irish Catholic who felt short-changed by the Anglo-Protestant orthodoxy of the day and positioned himself in opposition to the local police and wealthy landowners. Many Victorians, especially those of the High Country, identified with such sentiments and it caused them to take a lesser view of the very real crimes the Kelly Gang committed.