Ned Kelly

Jake: OK, so tell me about Australia. Do you have any similar folk heroes there?

Shirley: Well Jake, in Australia, one of our most famous - a kind of black folk hero, is Ned Kelly from the Kelly gang and he was a real life person who in the-I don’t know, about the 1850’s I guess was kind of a modern day Robin Hood. So he used to rob the people and he would give some of his profit I think to the needy or to the town’s people.

Jake: Some of his?

Shirley: Some of it. Not all though. He wasn’t quite as virtuous as the image of Robin Hood is. I don’t know how virtuous Robin Hood was, but- and also he was considered a bandit and an outlaw so the police were always chasing him and in the end he was killed by a policeman that was quite famous.

Jake:So this story isn’t exactly as clean as the Robin Hood story? They get killed at the end and they probably, they’ve done also some bad things in order to also provide to the poor, but do they clean the story up for children and make a children’s version of this?

Shirley: Well, I don’t know if they clean it up for children. You know, I suspect these days that a lot of the fame of Ned Kelly and the Kelly gang is because, you know, attributable to the tourist industry. There are lots of towns that have claimed either the place where he died or the place where he was born or the place he hid out, and all of those small towns have tourist attractions, but I guess as you said earlier, Australia being a young country in terms of its white history like America, we’re only about 200 odd years old then we don’t have that many heroes to call on so I guess people who have stood out in our history take on sort of heroic image or at least become famous in their own right.