After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Ned Kelly: Australia's Notorious Outlaw

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Ned Kelly is a murdering, bank-robbing, Australian folk hero. What is the true history of this mythic figure? And how did an outlaw - or bushranger - rise up to become a symbol for a new nation?Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling are joined by Meg Foster, an award winning historian of banditry and author of Boundary Crossers: the hidden history of Australia's other bushrangers.Edited and produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. I'm Ellis James. And I'm Colin Murray. And we are the hosts of Everything to Play For. Our next two parters all about the mighty Leicester City and their rise to become Premier League champions in 2016.

They did the unbelievable despite being 5,000 to one outsiders. This story has got it all. Dilly dings and dongs and of course, Jamie Vardy's infamous party. Follow everything to play for wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Anthony and Maddie. My name is Christina Hoag and I stumbled across After Dark as I was looking for a podcast to listen to recently while I was doing some painting. And I'm now a devoted fan. I love how you find these dark little corners of history to bring to life. I now live in Santa Monica, California, but I was born in New Zealand and grew up mainly there and in Australia, where everyone knows the story of Ned Kelly, the Bush Ranger. And I wondered if you'd ever thought of doing an episode on him. I think he'd be a great fit for After Dark.

In the meantime, I'll be listening. This is the history of the murdering, bank-robbing Australian folk hero, Ned Kelly. The story of Ned's life is so overburdened with drama and myth-making that it's hard to know where to start, or whose version of the tale to tell. Let's begin then on the day that Ned became an outlaw or bush ranger. Accounts of this day differ but they all agree that the man at the centre of it all was a police constable called Alexander Fitzpatrick. Now if Ned was telling this story he'd tell you Fitzpatrick had a puny, cabbage-hearted

looking face and was never heard to be one night sober. Whether that's true or not, we know that on the afternoon of the 15th of April, 1878, Constable Fitzpatrick set out alone for the Kelly House in order to arrest Dan Kelly, brother to Ned, for horse-stealing. The house was several hours' ride from town, and Fitzpatrick must have known it was dangerous to go there alone. But go he did.

Fitzpatrick says he found Dan Kelly with his cutlery in hand about to have his dinner. Dan asked if he could finish his meal before coming to the police station. Constable Fitzpatrick agreed. Mrs Kelly, mother to Dan and Ned, began arguing with Fitzpatrick. All of a sudden, Ned Kelly himself appeared, and without a word fired a gun at Fitzpatrick. He missed, but Mrs. Kelly took the chance to hit Fitzpatrick over the head with a fire shovel and Ned fired again. This time the bullet lodged in the policeman's wrist. Fitzpatrick passed out. When he came to, Ned forced Fitzpatrick to dig the bullet from his

own hand with a sharp penknife and, in return for sparing his life, to promise never to tell anyone that Ned had shot him. Under a fine starry moonlit night, Fitzpatrick rode back to town. Not for one moment of his long and lonely journey did he consider keeping his word. Ned Kelly had shot a policeman, and he would be hunted down and made to pay. When they heard Fitzpatrick had squealed, Ned Kelly, his brother Dan, their friends Joe Burn and Steve Hart took to the bush. The'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And today we are getting into the legend of Ned Kelly. Now our guest joining us to take us through this history is Dr Meg Foster, who is a historian

of banditry and author of Boundary Crosses, the hidden history of Australia's other bush rangers. Meg is a winner of the 2024 Australia Broadcasting Company's prestigious Top 5 Media Placement for Early Career Academics. And so we are especially delighted to have her on the show today. Meg, welcome to After Dark. Thanks so much for having me. It's good to be here. You're very welcome. And you're joining us from Australia, where I think it's about six in the evening. We're recording here quite early in the morning.

Yes. Yeah, it's about 6pm in Sydney. Well, we're very grateful. Before we get into the story of Ned Kelly himself, can you give us a sense of what Australia looked like in this moment? Yeah, so Australia in the 1870s, very different to today. But it had also come a long way since British colonisation in 1788. So almost a hundred years had passed. We've got several colonies. So there's New South Wales, there's Victoria,

there's Van Diemen's land, now called Tasmania, Queensland. So these are all separate British colonies, but there's a long established tradition of kind of an inheritance of the convict times. So if we go right, right back to 1788 British colonisation, convicts were sent to Australia in the first fleet. By the 1840s, convictism had ended, but we actually see its legacies continuing. So Ned Kelly's father, for instance, was actually a convict himself. But we can see this kind of merge of a kind of new national consciousness.

It's 20 years before the Australian colonies federate, but there's still a sense that people who are born in the colonies have a distinct national identity, a distinct sense of self. And so people like Bush rangers like Ned Kelly are really articulating something quite unique, this kind of connection to place to the land in what we now call Australia. But that that motion of respectability I mentioned before is quite important, because this was one of the reasons that politicians argued that there should be independence of Australia from Britain that would kind of left the convict stain behind, we'd left that criminal past behind.

And so as a kind of mature outpost of Britain, we could actually take matters into our own hands and look after our own affairs. Bush ranger really undercut that, especially the fact that Bush rangers like Ned Kelly were born on colonial soil. They were native and I'm using this inverted commas is how they refer to themselves. They were native to Australia. And so the fact that they were the most likely people to become Bush rangers kind of undercut that sense that really we should have this type of independence. So there are a couple of things going on, a tension between respectability, but then

a kind of legacy of those convict times and a bit of a hang up on crime. So let's talk then Meg about the Kelly family specifically. You hinted there that Ned's father was a convict and that's how he had arrived in Australia. But give us a little bit of a, or what we now call Australia, but give us a bit of a broader context of the Kelly family, where they had come from and what they found themselves, the situation they found themselves specifically in once they had arrived. Yeah, so the Kelly family has roots in Ireland, and that's something that is really emphasised in the myth and the legend of Ned Kelly today. He had Irish roots. It's something he actually

mentioned in his letters to the police and his justification for his turn to crime, there's the oppression of being Irish. That's a really big part of things. So both of his parents were originally from Ireland and there's a really strong sense that not only were Ned Kelly's parents, but his relatives by blood or through marriage were all in the same area of the colony of Victoria. And so there's this real sense that there's almost like a clannishness to the Kelly family. They have these Irish roots, they feel downtrodden by the well-to-do classes in society, but also the English. So there's definite reference to that English versus Irish tension there.

But they are also of the lower working classes. So there are a few intersecting factors going on there. There's Irishness, there's lower class, but there's also that sense of kind of a community, a clannish lifestyle, looking to your own, looking out for your own that really kind of sets the family apart. What do the Kelly family do? How do they make a living for themselves? Lae Yeah, so the Kelly family were small scale selectives. They had a small parcel of land and they tried to work the land. That was

the kind of official narrative. Ellen Kelly, Ned Kelly's mother, also was known to sell sly grog, so have a bit of a kind of outback pub, but an illicit one, it was under the radar, so to speak. But the main way that the Kelly family seemed to have made their livelihood was through cattle theft, horse theft in particular. And so there are real debates even among the historical community today as to whether the Kelly family were really supported in the area that they lived in, or whether in fact they were feared in the local area for people

outside of their family because they would take the horses and cattle of their neighbours and it was easier to keep quiet than to kind of to have their wrath fall upon them. And so the idea that Ned Kelly is some type of freedom fighter, that he's fighting against oppression, that he is the oppressed, that that's the language he uses, that he and his family are oppressed, is really kind of undercut when we look at actually how they are oppressors of their neighbours who weren't actually part of their family. And tell me this, we mentioned in the narrative at the very beginning that Ned was a bush ranger. Now, I would conjure up this idea of somebody living this kind of idyllic life in the outback and they

have a ranch maybe and some cattle and it all sounds very nice, but that's not what's going on here. Can you tell us, for those of us who don't know, including me, what a bush ranger actually is? Yes. So the first point to get across bush rangers are criminals. They're not park rangers. I've had someone say that to me before. You mean a park ranger? No. These are people who are breaking the law.

So people who engage in robbery with violence, or at least the threat of violence, and they live in the bush to escape from the law. That is their way of surviving. Bush ranging has a history, it has a history that starts with the convict era where convicts would run away from their masters, from settlement. And the only way they could really survive was through robbery because they didn't have much of an understanding of the bush. It was a very different environment to what they were used to in Britain, especially if

they were from an urban area coming to the other side of the world, somewhere immensely different, was quite shocking for some convicts. But by the time that Ned Kelly's operating, there's a sense that actually these so-called native born, these descendants of convicts, ex-convicts, and free settlers had more of a sense of an affinity with the bush. Even though the

environment was harsh, they could really make it their own. And I think that's something we can really see playing out in the Kelly story. Even though the newspapers very often condemned what was happening, condemned the Kelly's actions, they couldn't really veil that sense of, I guess, kind of pride or a sense of achievement in the fact they were able to survive in these harsh elements for the extent of time that they did. And they possessed excellent horsemanship and were actually able to make the bush an ally. And so that's something that really sets Bush ranges apart. But for a cultural touch point, I usually say that American listeners might be familiar with cowboys. It's kind of the equivalent. They're outlaws, they're on the run, they're robbing to survive, but they're engaging in all these different crimes

that could be, you know, breaking into someone's house and stealing goods, or it could be murder. And that's what we see in the case of Ned Kelly as well. Meg, tell me this, you made the comparison there to cowboys in America and of course, one of the elements of that history is this encountering, often violently so, between the white colonial settlers on that land and the Native Americans. In Australia, there are First Nations people already living on this land in the Bush right, so Australia, there are First Nations people already living on this land in the bush, right? So do the Kelly's come into contact with First Nations people? Is there a conflict there? Do they work together? What's that relationship like?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And even the fact that you've raised it to an Australian audience would be seen as quite unique. We usually in the national mythology in Australia separate First Nations history from Bush ranging. But as you've kind of intimated, that's not actually how the history played out. So we should say at the get-go, Australia had and has First Nations people. They have unceded sovereignty over the land. They were never any treaties and they fought back to actually keep their country. But through a combination of violence and disease, First Nations people didn't have immunity to a lot of European diseases. The population was greatly depleted by the time we come to 1880 and Kelly's on the scene. I guess I should try to dispel the notion that there are solely remote Aboriginal people living in the kind of wilderness versus the kind of settlers in built up towns.

That is not the case at all. There's a real breadth of different experiences of First Nations people at this time. There were still remote communities. There were some areas where Europeans hadn't kind of penetrated the environment yet. But there were also Aboriginal people who had been living in cities and urban centres and were kind of well-known personalities in certain locations too. And so there's a really wide array. But First Nations people really did play a pivotal role in the hunt for Ned Kelly through these native, this is the language of the time, native police trackers who were sent down from Queensland. And there were reports from the time that Ned Kelly in particular was

more fearful of these Aboriginal trackers than he was the white police who he saw as kind of bumbling and inept. But these Aboriginal trackers he called, and this is a quote from a newspaper article, little black devils, that he was very, very concerned were actually going to hunt down him and his gang on the run. And you could see why First Nations people had incredible ability to live on the land. It's their country. Of course they know the land.

But one point I would really like to note is that the one real big difference if we're looking at, say, First Nations trackers and their ability to live off the land and the kind of skills they have versus how the white male Bush ranger is perceived is that the white Bush ranging man is seen to have a real talent to be able to live in the Bush. It's meant to be a hard one skill set

that really sets them apart and actually naturalizes their presence. They're kind of at one with the bush. The way that First Nations people in general and Aboriginal trackers in particular are perceived is very much they're not praised for these skills. It's seen as a kind of a biological trait, something that shows that they're part of a quote, primordial race. So it's this really racialized, really discriminatory language.

And it really is used to have this double-sanded. You've got First Nations trackers who are renowned for their skill and their aptitude and are so feared by the Kellys. And yet they're not seen as really worthy of praise because it seemed to be an innate characteristics rather than a hard-won skill set. You're painting this vision for me of this very complex society that's not really one whole. And within that, as you say, there are these very different, very varied experiences and very different levels of power and autonomy within the land, relationships to the land

are changing constantly and evolving and mean different things to different people. And it's fascinating within that that we've got people being recruited by institutions of power, by the police force and potentially turned against each other. And then you've got people like the Kellys living completely outside of those same structures of power and posing different threats to them. So let's go now to our second part of the story and let's hear a little bit more about the Kellys and what life was like for Ned Kelly in particular out in the bush. In October 1878, six months after they had fled to the bush,

the cold, hard logic of death fell onto the Kelly Gang. At a place called Stringybark Creek, they caught a group of policemen hunting for them. Shots were fired, three police were killed, one got away. Knowing now that there was no way back, the gang embarked on a series of sensational raids. I could tell you about them, these daring bank robberies at places called Yorua and Geraldiri, stealing thousands from right under the police's noses, burning mortgage documents to free poor farmers from debt, entertaining hostages with feats of horsemanship before galloping back into the bush. But instead

I want to read from some letters that Ned and the gang worked on while they were in the bush and deposited in towns on each of their raids. More than any story of daring do, these letters give us a picture of the man Ned Kelly really was. They're dozens of pages long and every page drips with Ned's wild imagination. Paragraph after paragraph is full of his seething hatred of the police,

who in one unforgettable rant he describes as a parcel of big, ugly, fat-necked, wombat-headed, big-bellied, magpie-legged, narrow-hipped, splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords. And of course his nemesis, Constable Fitzpatrick, who Ned claims shall be the cause of greater slaughter to the rising generation than St. Patrick was to the snakes and frogs in Ireland, whilst he, Ned, thanks God that his conscience is as clear as the snow in Peru. What is going on here? Who is the wild poet in the outback with a heart made of the pure snows of Peru and whose

enemies have the heads of turnips and wombats? the wild poet in the outback with a heart made of the pure snows of Peru and whose enemies have the heads of turnips and wombats. And, might I point out, we definitely still have frogs in Ireland. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to see the newly built Duomo towering above you in Renaissance Florence? To feel the spray of Caribbean waters on your face as you sail into the pirate port of Nassau. I'm Matt Lewis, host of the Echoes of History podcast, and if like me you want to get a taste of time travel into the worlds of Assassin's Creed, join me every week as we explore the real life stories and events that inspire the locations,

the characters and the storylines of this legendary game franchise. We'll be talking to historical experts to uncover the secrets of the past before stepping into the animus to delve into how these moments are recreated. So whether you're a history fan, a gamer or just someone who loves a good story, Echoes of History has something for you. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I absolutely love Ned's way of speaking, writing. It's very poetic. It's very silver-tongued. May I give us a sense? I think it's fair to say that

Ned despises the police force in Australia in this moment. And of course, he's actively working against them and living, as we said, outside of those bounds of legality and so-called respectability. But tell me a little bit more specifically about the police. Who are they made up of other than turnip-headed Irishmen? It seems to be the description, right? There were a lot of Irishmen in the police force. So that's the first thing to kind of get across. And this is where, once again, those boundaries become a bit blurry, because one of the things that Ned is saying is the reason he's oppressed is because of his Irishness, his Irish ancestry, as you've kind of very eloquently pointed out in that letter, he uses it in the actual written response he has to justify why he's taken to the bush.

And yet the police force are very often Irish. Many of them came over after serving in the Irish constabulary. So there used to be a lot of different police forces in Victoria prior to 1853. So there were about, I think it was six or seven different forces, but in 1853, they all came together. They formed one force, but they really wanted that force to be a professional, very polished force.

And so they literally recruited people from Ireland and sent them over. I mean, look at the name Fitzpatrick. Could you get a more Irish name? And so the idea that we have of it's kind of like Irish-net against the English authorities is really undercut by the fact that the force is so Irish. Some of the force in Victoria may have also come from New South Wales because New South Wales originally encompassed Victoria as well. And there's an even more murky kind of story there. Originally

convicts and ex-convicts could be part of the police force. And I should say as well that actually New South Wales consolidated its forces a lot later in the 1860s. But one of the main reasons was that they were trying to really distance themselves from those convict roots and to try to separate out criminal affiliations because although police officers may have known the local community, they were often being bought off or they were trading in stolen goods themselves. And so this idea that we have that there is the police representing legality and the Kelly's representing lawlessness is really undercut by the fact that the force could be quite corrupt.

They could be composed of the same people, they could be in similar families. And when we look at the extent that the police force is actually composed of people experiencing real hardship in many instances. They're paid appitants, they have to live in very remote areas, they can be moved around at the will of someone above them. There's not a lot of respect in the local communities very often for their office. They have to deal with not only bush strangers, they have to deal with snake bites, they have to deal with lost children who are wandering around in the bush. They often served administrative roles and really remote outposts as well. So the lot of a police officer is actually not one that you would sign up for unless you had

another option and that's something that I think we really need to bear in mind when trying to recreate the world of which the Kelly's were a part. It's not quite as clear cut as we might think. world of which the Kellys were a part. It's not quite as clear cut as we might think. I want to follow up with two questions, one of which relates to the letters themselves. The first part being, do we know that Ned Kelly himself actually wrote all of this, or was this some kind of collage of different thoughts, or is it literally just his work? And what does it tell us about him then, or the idea of him? What do these letters tell us about him? We don't think that Ned Kelly actually wrote these. We're pretty sure that one of the other

gang members did, in part because it's unclear whether Ned was fully literate, whether he could actually read and write. And when you listen to the letters, it seems like something someone's saying. It's got that kind of rhythm to it. It's this kind of accumulation there. And so it seems very likely this was actually transcribed. And so that's the easy question. What this can tell us about Ned Kelly, that's a bit of a trickier one, especially because we're not entirely sure, as you say, whether this is a composite, whether it's members of the gang kind of, you know, shouting their two cents worth, or whether this is actually solely Ned Kelly's voice that we're hearing. What we can see very clearly is a real sense of grievance. But we can also see this real performativity, right? Ned Kelly is pretty unique. Not many Bushrangers left letters for the public

or for the police, articulating their grievances, stating that they have been wrong, stating that they're actually resisting an injustice essentially. And so I think that's what we can see more. I don't know if it tells us about Nathalie's authentic self, but what we can see through the letters is his performance, his sense that he is trying to reach an audience, he's trying to get supporters on his side. And this proves really pivotal when he's actually out in the elements

and he needs people to pass on information about where the police are. He needs people to give him food and other resources. He needs people to hide them occasionally. And so by creating this kind of mystique in his own time, this type of narrative of being a hero of the oppressed for fighting back against injustice, we can really see that this is maybe not necessarily a reflection of his true self, but definitely he has a keen awareness of his audience. And he's willing to try

to play that in order to get what he needs. So on the one hand, we've got this incredibly charismatic, actively myth-making man and his gang who are out in the bush, hiding, moving around, committing their crimes, escaping from justice, whatever that looks like in reality. And then we've got the police, we've got Fitzpatrick following them. Do we know much about their movements, about the people chasing the Kellys? Do we know what that chase would have entailed? What did that look like? Loha- Messy, I think is the short answer. It looked very messy. There wasn't a lot of coordination in the police pursuit. You had some people who were locals trying to volunteer, trying to hunt the Kelly's down. You also had imported police

officers as we saw. We have the native trackers from Queensland who come down. But the story of the police chase is really a story of misinformation in some instances, deliberate misdirection in others. So while the police and the authorities were definitely trying to recruit locals to feed them information, and there may have been some people genuinely thinking they were helping. Just imagine that you're there in the bush, you're at this time, you hear that the Kellys are about, you're really concerned about yourself, you're living in a remote property.

You can imagine how that anxiety would actually lead to imagining danger as well. You thought you saw Ned Kelly here, you thought you saw his tracks, you heard that his brother might be in this spot, you heard they might be getting supplies from this person. It's hard to say what is genuine misdirection on the part of the local population and how much is this climate of real fear and tangible anxiety is really cutting through and clouding people's judgment as to where the Kelly's are and where the police and the kind of roving parties should be looking.

And of course, all this tension is going to come to a head eventually and Ned Kelly cannot be on the run forever. So we're gonna hear the last part of our story. The world's first ever feature film was not shot in the Hollywood Hills, but in the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. This early film, the story of the Kelly Gang, is an hour long, and its climax comes with Ned Kelly's last stand.

The film is damaged and often impossible to make out, but from behind the blots and scratches emerges a scene that seems like a fairy tale gone wrong. Police with rifles are shooting at a figure moving awkwardly towards them. This is Ned Kelly. He's wearing a gigantic heavy metal helmet and breastplate with a dirty long coat on top of it all. He looks like something out of Monty Python,

but it seems to be working as under a hail of bullets, the original Iron Man marches on towards the police, returning their fire as he goes. Then, suddenly, Ned Kelly collapses against a log, and the police pounce on him, pinning him to the ground. The blots and burned out sections of the film fill the screen once again. The incredible thing about this section of the film is that it is essentially more or less accurate.

Ned Kelly really did go down in a blaze of gunfire in a suit of armour that he had made himself. Now there is more to come for Ned as he was dragged off to be tried and executed. But this is the abiding image of him that has become emblazoned on the national memory of Australians and people across the world. Given this dramatic account, it's not hard to understand how this bushranger became a national hero. Okay, I am looking at a photo of the armour. I don't really know where to begin because Anthony, what you just said there in the narrative about it looking like Monty Python, I think

is completely fair and accurate. It seems to be one almost curved sheet around the torso. And then we've got this really bucket-y helmet with two isolates cut and you've got these shoulder pads, I think, and then almost like a little sort of modesty skirt going on at the bottom, which is an extension of the torso armour, presumably to protect things in lower down regions. And it's remarkable to me that this exists. Meg, this is remarkable. Where is this item now? Can people see it? Meg Whalen Yeah, so the original Nekeli suit of armour is one of the prized items in the State Library Victoria. There's a whole area dedicated

to it. It's very carefully preserved and restored. But you're completely right about the curved sheet of metal. They actually stole ploughs and then refashioned them. So if you look very closely at some of the images, you can actually see the stamp from the brand of the ploughs that they actually repurpose. It's also incredibly heavy. I think we should really emphasize that. It's not very practical. And as you've kind of motioned through this, like a little bit of a skirt area to protect people's privates, but your legs are completely exposed. And that's, that became a real issue. That's one of the reasons why Ned Kelly couldn't escape.

They just shot him in the legs. This is a very dramatic piece of history and a piece of film that we're talking about there. But what do you think it tells us about what the Kellys come to mean to Australia, Australians, and why has he, Ned Kelly, and the family more generally been adopted so wholeheartedly and emotionally actually? Because it's very emotive this for a lot of people, right? What lies behind that, do you think? Yeah, there are definitely a few things going on there. The first is some very strategic forgetting. So we need for Ned Kelly to be a symbol of the oppressed fighting the oppressor. We really need to forget that he is a murderer, a mass murderer in fact. He killed police officers and in the lead-up

to the siege at Glenrowan, this shootout that we've been discussing, he actually intended to kill more people. There was a special police train that was traveling to Glenrowan and he had the tracks pulled up. So the idea was he wanted to derail this whole train and it wasn't just police on this train. There were civilians, there were photographers, there were at least two women. The newspapers were really big on emphasizing the fact there were ladies on the train. So he actually had the intention of killing more people. And in this shootout as well, he had hostages in this pub, and who also ended up dying. And so this is very conveniently either left out of the Ned Kelly myth or it's put to the sidelines. We justify, well, it's not his fault he was forced

into this situation. So the first thing is strategic forgetting. The second thing is the timing. So Ned Kelly is actually one of the last Bush strangers in Australian history. Some people say the last, he wasn't the last, but he was executed in 1880 and then by the time Federation comes around in 1901, there's this really unique moment where the new Australian nation has been officially inaugurated and people start looking for symbols. Who is going to represent our nation? How do we define ourselves? They needed something that kind of showed something distinct, something uniquely Australian,

but also that represented a connection to this broader white male Anglo world. And it should be said on record that actually Australia being a white man's country is one of the reasons that the Australian colonies federated. Australia wanted to control its own immigration law and one of the first laws that was passed was the Immigration Restriction Act which did exactly what is implied. So the Bush Ranger comes in as this really unique symbol. The real threat of Bush ranging had ended largely with Nick Kelly in 1880. Bush Rangers became something of myth, of memory. They could

be romanticized because they weren't that threat. You weren't going to encounter one in your travels. And so then this really rose-tinted glasses view of the Bush Ranger as a representative of justice, as a force of this rough and ready raw form of justice could actually come to represent the nation writ large. And so this is the reason why Ned Kelly comes into being as this real national symbol at this pivotal moment. And I should also say, I mean, in my own interest, this is my research area, but I look at Bush rangers who are people of color. So there were First Nations Bush rangers, there were Chinese, African American. Fact that we commemorate and celebrate white Bush ranging men like Ned Kelly and not these

other Bush Rangers, it's not an accident. It is a very deliberate choice. And it is because the Bush ranging myth comes about at this pivotal moment where white Australia is really being born. And so this is the reason why we have Bush ranges as a national symbol. But to go to your point, Anthony, you're completely right in that there's this emotional connection to Bush ranges today. If you were to ask the average Australian why they celebrate Bush

Rangers like Ned Kelly, no one would mention race. They would say that he was representing the underdog. They would say that he was a great guy. They would say that they was representing the underdog. They would say that he was a great guy. They would say that they thought that the police were out for him. So the thing with symbols, especially symbols from history, is that over time they get emptied of their substance as real people, as messy, complex people who have, you know, good and bad in them. And they become this kind of empty signifier who can be filled with whatever people want. And so people who actually hold a lot of power in society

can identify with Ned Kelly just as much as people who are lower working class and actually oppressed or marginalised in different ways. There are First Nations people in the Northern Territory today who actually have incorporated Ned Kelly into their dreaming stories. So they're kind of their origin stories, their stories of connection and spirituality. They see Ned Kelly as a resistance fighter. They see him as someone fighting back against colonization. And in these same stories, Captain Cook, who so-called discovered Australia, and I'm putting that in inverted commas, is actually seen as a symbol of colonisation, of the coloniser. He is the kind of evil character in these stories.

And I think this is just one example, but it goes to show that there is a real expansive capacity for all sorts of Australians to engage with the Ned Kelly story in myriad different ways. But what I find particularly interesting is how that kind of different interpretation stacks up against what we know of the history of who this man was as a person. Samer- Meg it's been so wonderful to talk to you and just before we leave listeners with that brilliant rundown of the way that Ned Kelly has shape shifted throughout history. I want to ask you about your interest in banditry and the history of banditry more generally. And is it that process you described, that emptying of substance from

these historical figures and that transformation into symbols? Is that what interests you transformation into symbols. Is that what interests you about people who live, commit crimes and die on the edge of society? Is that what interests us all? Is that romanticisation what draws us to these figures, do you think? I mean, I can only, I guess, speak 100% for myself. But I am interested in bandits because of that movement between different spaces. I mean, my book is called Boundary Crosses for a reason. They cross boundaries.

And in doing so, they actually bring to light a lot of their flaws, their fragility, the porousness of different boundaries. So many things we've come to think of as certain, as fixed, as immutable, that history had to happen the way that it happened. That's really undercut when looking at figures like bandits, especially the very profound sense of fear, uncertainty, the idea that society itself might be undercut, the idea that there might be uprisings as there were concerns of in the early convict period with convict bush ranging, for instance. concerns I've in the early convict period with convict bushranging, for instance.

So we really see bandits as a way to kind of access these hidden histories, these counter histories, these moments of rupture. And that rupture can really tell us something really unique about past societies and different worlds that we wouldn't otherwise have access to. Well, I suggest that we all run out and get a copy of Boundary Crossers, the Hidden History of Australia's Other Bush Rangers by Dr.

Meg Foster. Meg, it has been a real pleasure to listen to this with you guiding us through. It's just been so fascinating and enlightening, I think, and has brought things into this history that people feel they might have known a little bit about, but have brought things in from the edge, like the inclusion of the First Nations people, which I think people have so easily overlooked. So thank you so much for sharing this history with us. You can find other episodes in our back catalog wherever you get your podcasts, but until next time, thank you so much for listening and sleep tight. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like when our estrogen levels

drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. I'm Ennis James. And I'm Colin Murray. And we are the hosts of Everything to Play For. Our next two parters all about the mighty Leicester City and their rights to become Premier League champions in 2016. They did the unbelievable despite being 5,000 to 1 outsiders.

This story has got it all. Dilly dings and dongs and of course, Jamie Vardy's infamous party. Follow everything to play for wherever you get your podcasts.