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Home , Fred Schepisi, Ian Jones (author), Ned Kelly, Ned Kelly (play), Our Sunshine, Robert Drewe

RIDES AGAIN … AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

by Brian McFarlane

A friend of mine tells of the family legend that her great-grandmother, a settler with many children of her own, delivered Ned Kelly.

y three-year-old smaller version of this with a clock set grandson points in the torso. At the Olympic Games in to a small garden in 2000, one of the most striking statue of Ned features of the opening ceremony was Kelly, about 1½ a parade of figures wearing the instantly metres high, in a recognizable Kelly armour. Such is the Mtown to the south-east of persistence and pervasiveness , and knows of the Kelly legend over the who it is intended to be. last 150 years. A stall at the Mornington market on a Wednesday As with most legends, it is in November 2005 was almost impossible to sepa- substantially stocked with rate out the factual from artefacts relating to the the fanciful, or to get an Kelly saga, including a unprejudiced, historically life-size recreation of reliable account. the armour One recalls and a ISSUE 41 SCREEN EDUCATION

LEFT FROM TOP: A PAINTING FROM ’S NED KELLY SERIES (1946); 24 as Ned Kelly in Reckless Kelly (1993). ABOVE: Ned Kelly (Photo: Carolyn Johns). RIGHT FROM TOP: (1906); THE KELLY GANG (1906); THE KELLY GANG (1920) the great director John Ford’s line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’, presumably because that is what most people will want to hear. In the Kelly country in north-eastern , one finds a huge (i.e., six-metres high) statue celebrating Ned’s pre-emi- nence in Glenrowan where he was finally caught, its size perhaps signifying that he is the township’s only claim to distinc- tion. There is a different sort of monu- ment in Mansfield. In the latter’s main street is a memorial: ‘To the Memory of the THREE BRAVE MEN who lost their lives while endeavouring to capture a band of armed criminals in the Wombat Ranges, Near Mansfield, 26th October 1878. This Monument is erected by sub- scription, from the inhabitants of Victoria and . AD 1880.’ Here, and on several gravestones in Mansfield dating back to that time, the Kelly gang is simply referred to as ‘armed criminals’. A new book, Alex Castles’ Ned Kelly’s Last Days: Setting the Record Straight on the Death of an (Allen & Unwin, 2005), queries the validity of the legal processes that led to his hanging.1 ISSUE 41 SCREEN EDUCATION

25 AL 2002 rsal P ict u res I nternation © Uni v e What then are we – and, for the pur- pose of this essay, are films – to make of these conflicting responses? I shall be mainly concerned here with the two most recent Kelly films, those made in 1970 and 2003, with a glance at Yahoo Serious’s spoof Reckless Kelly (1993), but to do so it seems necessary to place them briefly in several wider contexts. ‘Icon’ and its adjective ‘iconic’ are two of the most overworked and misused words today, but if we take an iconic figure to be one having widely exemplary status, then clearly Ned Kelly is ‘iconic’ in the Australian context. Who else is so famously Australian? Perhaps only and Nellie Melba: well, Brad- man has a song written about him, Melba has a dessert named for her, and Ned Kelly has given rise to a simile (‘As game as …’). Who else so potently conjures up the essence of Australianness, as it is stereotypically conceived, involving such qualities as doggedness, populist appeal, and lack of deference for such Establishment as the nation may boast? A film which takes on Kelly will have to come to some sort of terms with such national mythology.

In the case of Ned Kelly, there is a formidable intertextuality which involves novels, plays, operas and ballet and paintings, even a large tapestry,2 as well as filmed interpretations of the Kelly gang’s exploits. Films can be usefully appraised in a cross-medial context of this kind, but it may well be claimed that film has not yet really made its definitive ISSUE 41 SCREEN EDUCATION

LEFT: played the Aussie outlaw in Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly (1970) ABOVE: Ned Kelly (Photo: John Tsiavis) RIGHT FROM TOP: PHILIP 26 BARANTINI, ORLANDO BLOOM, IN Ned Kelly (Photo: Carolyn Johns); ORLANDO BLOOM IN Ned Kelly; NED; Abe Forsythe in Ned © Universal Pictures InternationAL 2002

mark in its representation of Kelly and his gang and what they stand for in the national history/mythology. Two of the more recent literary versions are ’s (1991) and ’s The True Story of the Kelly Gang (2000). Both novels are stylistically bold, both are told in the first person, and both are strongly pro-Kelly. According to the film’s credits, Drewe’s book pro- vided the basis for the most recent film Ned Kelly (, 2003), which approaches its narrative in essentially

more conventional fashion than Drewe’s © Universal Pictures InternationAL 2002 ‘snapshots’ account of Kelly’s outlawry, starting at the Glenrowan pub and then lighting on influential ‘moments’ leading up to this. Carey’s book assumes Kelly’s semi-literate, unpunctuated but eloquent voice in a series of ‘letters’, presented as ‘parcels’ of documents held at the State Library of Victoria (now home of the Kelly armour), and supposedly written to Kelly’s daughter. This Booker Prize- winner is intensely sympathetic to Kelly (‘I’m sure you know I have spilled human blood when there was no other choice at that time I was no more guilty than a soldier in a war’).3 Since the novel is in the first person, there is no ‘objective’ viewpoint in which to place Kelly’s own. Drewe locates Kelly’s outlaw career in his poor Irish selector’s background, and in obliquely adumbrated psychological roots relating to the ‘soggy father’4 he more or less despised and the mother ISSUE 41 who had his life-long devotion – and his

anger for her marrying George King, who SCREEN EDUCATION in Carey’s book had also fathered a child by Ned’s own light-of-love, Mary Ahearn.

There have been several plays based on the exploits of the Kelly gang, with titles such as The Kellys, Outlaw Kelly and The 27

© Universal Pictures InternationAL 2002 Kelly Gang; the latter, the first known, doxically revered, not only in Victoria but which may have initially run to forty or was performed in 1889. The best-known throughout the continent.’9 And a little more minutes (and subsequently seems is Douglas Stewart’s play, Ned Kelly, later: ‘The Nolan legend is itself a rich to have been increased to at least an first performed in 1942 and published in one. He can be interpreted as the pro- hour.’16 The remaining nine minutes can 1943, reaching a wider audience when it letarian young man in rebellion against be viewed on video,17 and it is histori- was republished in Penguin Books’ Three a bourgeois world.’10 And most recently, cally very revealing of the state of film Australian Plays in 1963. It is a not wholly reported the sale, at a Christie’s art in that pioneering era: the narrative successful attempt to blend the realist auction in Melbourne, of Nolan’s Ned is conveyed largely by means of a static and the poetic, which may account for Kelly Triptych for $133,595, two legends camera. The action happens in long shot its not being much performed in recent converging expensively.11 within the frame as captured by a fixed years. Somewhat talky and static, it camera, and there is no suggestion of probably had its most notable staging by The fact that there is now an exhaustive editing to highlight, for instance, a face or the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust Encyclopedia devoted entirely to Ned gesture, or to comment on connections in Sydney in 1956, with Leo McKern, in Kelly and those whose paths he crossed, between shots. Sets are rudimentary, pre-Rumpole days and girth, as Ned. The and with a vast bibliography, suggests and much of the meaning is necessar- Penguin editor wrote: ‘Here all the birds the kind of hold he has exerted on the ily related in the inter-titles. But it needs in the bush of the “Australianist” legend national imagination. There is also a sub- to be remembered that this film derives come home to roost – the underdog and stantial permanent display of Kellyana from the very earliest period of feature his fight against society; the ambiguous in the State Library of Victoria’s exhibi- filmmaking, and, within the constraints rebel seen as lawless hero; the collision tion, ‘The Changing Face of Victoria’. of what was film practice at the time, it between the capitalist enterprise of the The most significant items here are ‘the is vigorous and fresh-looking. No doubt cities, and its conformist compulsions Letter’, dictated by Kelly and the success of this film, re-released with with the private enterprise of the bush; written by his associate , an at- extra footage in 1910, encouraged the the epic themes of endurance and of tempt to offer their version of the events spate of films on related themes during wandering in vast, hostile landscapes.’5 that ultimately led to Ned’s capture and the next five years, until the banning of The film versions, as we shall see, take trial, and the supreme icon: the armour the genre by the New South up – and perhaps in some instances itself, or all of it that the Library has been Wales Police Department in 1912, as an idealize – such issues. able to buy.12 That the Kelly exploits official response to the romanticizing of should occupy so prominent a place in the . So, though there are novels, plays, op- this exhibition is yet another pointer to eras and ballet scores on the subject of their centrality in Australian mythology. There were at least three further early the ‘Kelly Outbreak’ as it has come to be Kelly films,18 all produced and written known, the most nearly definitive images What, then, has film made of all these by , who, Welsh-born, to date are not to be found in these or rich pickings? The short answer is worked in American films before moving in the several film and television ver- probably: not enough. Certainly, there to in 1919.19 Southwell’s first sions but in Sidney Nolan’s great series is as yet no film image that displaces in two20 starred Godfrey Cass, whose father of paintings,6 first exhibited in the late the mind Nolan’s images of the black- ‘was a gaol governor, first at Beech- 1940s. ‘The simplicity yet overwhelming visored figure against the harsh ochre worth, then at Melbourne Gaol, where power of Nolan’s black helmet – some- landscapes. In considering here the most he officiated at the hanging of Ned Kelly times with the sky beyond visible through recent feature films deriving from the in 1880’.21 Cass had played Ned Kelly the eye-slit, at other times bloodshot Kelly story, the last context in which they on stage, as well as in The Kelly Gang eyes – has made it the quintessential should be placed is the long history of its (1920) and When the Kellys Were Out Kelly image.’7 One of such paintings (it cinematic representation. (1923). The former, ‘substantially com- preceded the series proper) is held at plete’ according to Pike and Cooper’s Melbourne’s Heide Gallery in Heidelberg, As most people must now know, the The system of asterisks though there seems Victoria; it is called: ‘Ned Kelly “Nobody Story of the Kelly Gang, made by J. and to be only a little over two minutes in the knows anything about my case but N. Tait, which opened on Boxing Day video collection, is described by them myself”, 1945’, the series itself having its 1906 in Melbourne, is regarded as the as ‘almost naively ambitious’ and ‘the permanent home in the National Gal- first secular feature-length film13 made film carried a laborious warning against lery, .8 The black square of the in Australia. Pike and Cooper describe it the temptations of outlawry’ presumably helmet has itself passed into the nation’s as ‘The longest narrative film then seen to ‘mollify the censors’.22 In the surviv- ISSUE 41 iconography, creating its own legend as in Australia, and quite possibly in the ing footage, Ellen Kelly’s image is that 14

SCREEN EDUCATION it reinforces the already existing one. As world’, adding that ‘For five weeks it of saintly maternal figure which seems Chris Wallace-Crabbe has written: ‘… the ran to packed houses at the Athenaeum to be at some odds with most versions artist found a human subject who lifted Hall … and then moved to other thea- of this tough mother of ten, selector and him to greater heights: the nineteenth- tres’.15 The film no longer exists except sly-grog purveyor. century larrikin-bushranger, Ned Kelly, in fragments, and damaged ones at energetically errant son of a transported that: William Routt writes that ‘About When the Kellys Were Out, incomplete, 28 convict, hanged for murder but para- nine minutes survive out of the film, with ‘major gaps’, was criticized for its historical inaccuracy. However, it is son’s British-funded Ned Kelly, starring rowan a year later. No one much liked the arguable that none of the Kelly films has Mick Jagger, in 1970. film then or later but it is in some ways been overly concerned with this, more more adventurous than the 2003 film often playing for sympathy for the anti- In an interview in 1992, British director which was more popularly received. It hero, the underdog, in opposition to a Karel Reisz told me: opens in the , in col- cruel judiciary and its supporting police our so desaturated as to be almost sepia force. In this 1923 film, Southwell in fact What happened was that Albert and I monochrome, with a title, THE END, and goes to some lengths to portray Ser- formed a company [in the early 1960s]. with Ned washing his hands and comb- geant Kennedy as a family man, and the Albert at that time had an Australian ing his hair, then making his way to the intertitles refer to his ‘plucky fight against girlfriend, Zoë Caldwell, who said, ‘Why scaffold, attended by a priest, a photog- overwhelming odds’ at the Stringybark don’t you fellows make a film about Ned rapher, and his mother (Clarissa Kaye) ‘massacre’ of October 1878. The film Kelly?’ We asked David Storey [I suspect warning him: ‘Mind you die like a Kelly.’ lingers over his death, cuts to an ‘insert’ Reisz may have meant David Mercer This opening sequence is followed by a shot of his little child, and returns to the here] to write a script and we went to title, THE BEGINNING, as the narrative prone Kennedy who says to Kelly: ‘If I Australia to look for locations. It took us episodes begin to dramatize how Ned ask you to fix up my wounds, it’s for the about fourteen months to prepare it. Dav- has been brought to the scaffold. sake of my wife and kiddy.’ Whether this id Storey’s script was very good, but very springs from Southwell’s genuine feeling dark. When we delivered it to Columbia, The film is unusually sparse in dialogue for Kennedy or is just his way of get- who had commissioned it, I remember and its action is often linked on the ting round the censorship problem that Mike Frankovitch [vice-president of Co- soundtrack with which either would have ensued from idealizing the lumbia’s production arm from 1963] said, promote the exposition or intensify the Kennedy gang is problematic. Historian ‘I’ve commissioned a western and you’re shifts in mood, from, say, the tranquillity Weston Bate, writing of ‘the Kelly saga’, giving me Macbeth. I’m not making this. of ‘The Pleasures of a Sunday After- claims that ‘the police … engendered Goodbye.’27 noon’ to the plangent romanticism of local distrust and contempt similar to ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ (sung by that experienced on the goldfields’,23 Albert Finney had starred as Reisz’s Glen Tomasetti), which accompanies the while Wallace-Crabbe, though not in rebellious hero in Saturday Night and movement from the indoor knees-up to justification of their actions, says: ‘The Sunday Morning (1960), and must have Kelly’s alfresco meeting with Caitlin, to police were nothing more than the other seemed very probable casting for Ned the melancholy strains of Jagger’s ver- side of a proletarian coin.’24 Southwell’s Kelly – if an English actor was to be sion of ‘’. These last version of the Kelly saga, the talkie considered – but the proposed produc- balladic interpolations also offer some (1934), was made tion was abandoned. When the idea of criticism of the Kellys in the song about on location in the Blue Mountains and in a Kelly film was refloated, the director Lonigan’s widow (‘They say that Ned Sydney’s Cinesound Studios, and was was Reisz’s ‘New Wave’ colleague Tony Kelly ain’t never done wrong … /Tell banned in New South Wales for over a Richardson, stage and screen director that to Lonigan’s widow’) as well as the decade. One critic found it ‘unedifying, of Look Back in Anger (stage 1956, film jocularity of ‘Blame it on the Kellys’ (sung unconvincing, and often laughable …’25 1959, with its protagonist the seminal re- over a montage in which they rob a din- bellious youth figure, Jimmy Porter), and ner party, an English riding-party, a bank There were plenty of other films about Mick Jagger was chosen as Ned. This and a funeral procession). Then, as the anti-establishment protagonists, and caused a good deal of controversy in film is nearing its end, the gloomy prog- indeed this has been a continuing motif Australia, but, given that the film was go- nosis of ‘In the Shadow of the Gallows’ in Australian cinema until the present ing to need a ‘name’ to have any chance is heard, in a dialogue-free sequence in day,26 but nearly two decades passed of international success, it was perhaps which the setting changes from a forest before the next one to focus specifically shrewd to cast one of the period’s icono- to the snow-covered high country. One on Kelly. This was The Glenrowan Affair clasts to portray a comparably rebellious reviewer who did not care for this narra- (1951). Shot on locations around the figure of nearly a hundred years earlier. tive strategy dismissed it as ‘an ambling, Victorian town of and in studios In his own way, Jagger was as much a folkloric approach to [the] hero’s grim in Sydney, the director, Rupert Kathner, focus for anti-establishment fervour as outlaw existence,’28 but this seems to appeared as treacherous Kelly came to be in his. miss Richardson’s point: this Ned is be- under the too-cute pseudonym of Hunt ing presented as a hero, not as a Angels. The film was severely reviewed Jettisoning (Storey’s or) David Mer- piece of detailed characterization. ISSUE 41 and had only limited screenings. Whether cer’s screenplay in favour of one jointly

the public was simply tired of the Kelly authored by director Richardson and In its use of these ballads and of the SCREEN EDUCATION gang’s (mis)deeds or whether the long Australian Kelly authority and television landscape, superbly lit and composed in sleepy decades of the 50s and 60s in producer , the British company Gerry Fisher’s glowing cinematography, which so few Australian features were Woodfall, which had been set up by Ri- Richardson’s Ned Kelly often reminds made are responsible, there was no chardson and playwright John Osborne, one of the aural and visual pleasures of further film focusing on this icon of Aus- began shooting in New South Wales in Robert Altman’s nearly contemporane- tralian rebelliousness until Tony Richard- July 1969, and was premièred at Glen- ous revisionist western, McCabe and 29 Mrs Miller (1971). Fisher’s is perhaps contemporary British reviewer consid- and the idea of the loving family man. the one indisputable triumph of the film. ered that ‘Jagger never seems quite big He is then shown offering to ‘break’ the Again and again the eye is ravished by enough to dominate the film and carry it horse belonging to English landowner images of the demanding but austerely with him … even at his best in the heroic Cook (Nicholas Bell) rather than have beautiful countryside. While the open- moments near the end of the film, he Cook shoot it – Cook shoots it anyway, ing ballad sings of how ‘They turned him seems a slightly wooden performer.’29 and our sympathies with Ned are further out of Gaol in 1871’, the All right, Jagger is no great shakes as strengthened. When Ned needs Cook’s camera tracks the flora and fauna in their an actor, but he has a sort of charisma wife Julia () to provide him innocence of the drama of (in)justice; and which transcends a wonky Irish accent with an alibi – he was busy making love later, the long shot of Ned sitting among and an often-stilted delivery. Fisher to her at the time Sergeant Fitzpatrick ghost gums, reading, then seeing (and frames him in ways that make the most claims Ned shot at him – she refuses: stealing) a ghostly bull, briefly suggests of his presence; he is, for instance, often ‘That’s impossible. I’d be disgraced.’ an outback Bayeux. When he returns photographed from low angles, espe- This becomes another example of Ned’s home after his time at Beechworth, there cially towards the end when the myth-en- Irish innocence betrayed by English is an echo of John Ford’s majestic The shrinement is at its most intense, and his duplicity. He is, at every turn, depicted as Searchers (1956), as the long-missed own rendering (repeated near the end) of a justified rebel, which may or may not one is greeted by sisters who run to meet ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, in the commu- be the case, but it makes less for holding him and the mother who peers through nication medium he is most at home in, drama than a didactic apologia. Heath the hut’s curtains. Near the end, the film creates an authentic flicker of hero-victim Ledger, undoubtedly a better actor than makes its own contribution to the store recognition. Tony Richardson, fresh from Jagger, is imposing enough but some- of Kelly legend with a great shot of Kelly, his angry young man’s re-telling of The how less memorable than Jagger, and in full armour, emerging out of the mist Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), may it may be that the film insists too much walking along the railway line to confront not have made a ‘successful’ film of his on his nobility of purpose. Almost at the the police. folktale version of Kelly, but it is more film’s start we see his boyhood rescue of daring and more provocative than the a friend who nearly drowns, and it ends I’ve concentrated my attention here conventional, better-received 2003 take with the image of the young Ned hav- on the aural and the imagistic impact on the tale – and those are surely two ing the green and gold sash he’d been of the film rather than giving a con- qualities one has a right to expect of a awarded tied round him as ‘proof that nected account of its narrative. This is Kelly film. I’ve saved life as well’. partly a matter of emphasizing the film’s strengths, and partly because the events Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly is an Austral- Jordan opens on a montage of guns it canvasses are the well-known ones ian/French/UK/US co-production, based and horsemen and, in Oliver Stapleton’s we expect: for example, Ned’s early on Robert Drewe’s novel, Our Sunshine, cinematography, achieves some styl- career as a bare-knuckle fighter; the but not in general opting for its impres- ish vistas with horsemen on mountain treachery of Constable Fitzpatrick who sionistic narrational mode with its highly skylines and a muted authenticity in arrests Ellen Kelly for ‘attempted murder’ individual rendering of Ned’s own first- interiors. The forest scenes evoke such when she intervenes as he lays hands person voice. While embracing the major Australian painters as Frederick McCub- on her daughter Kate; the ‘massacre’ of incidents of the Kelly story, and clearly on bin (take a look at his affecting paint- ; the planning of the the side of the rebellious Irish selector- ing, ‘The Lost Child’ and the famous train derailment at Glenrowan and how son asserting the rights of the underdog triptych, The Pioneers)31 while austere it is thwarted. It is more important to in the face of a corrupt police force, an alpine vistas recall Fred Williams’s bleak consider not just what happens next but English landowner class and an oppres- landscapes, without creating images as the kind of film and hero Richardson and sive judiciary, the result, as one reviewer striking as those that dominate the earlier his collaborators are presenting. If it is has said, ‘is neither as rousing nor as film. However, cinematographer Sta- short on the conventional excitements of moving as might have been expected’.30 pleton and production designer Steven the western genre, with which it has of Despite looking well and despite a more Jones Evans have potently evoked the course points in common, it is interest- than competent cast ( is iconography of the western on many ing for the ideological shading its British effortlessly commanding as Superintend- occasions: while a dance is going on filmmakers bring to it. As one of the key ent Hare, Ned’s final antagonist), the film inside, a lone rider emerges in the street figures of the ‘angry young man’ school is no more than routinely entertaining outside; or later when Ned and Joe enter of British stage and screen, Richardson without being memorable. town as romantic heroes (‘The country ISSUE 41 not surprisingly stresses the element of belongs to us and we’ll go wherever we

SCREEN EDUCATION Irish Catholic semi-poverty striving to get This film works almost too hard at solicit- like’); or as riders approach a homestead a foothold in English Protestant com- ing our sympathy for Ned: immediately in a way that again recalls The Search- parative affluence. after the sequence that accompanies the ers or Shane (1952) and countless other credits, in which Ned is seen racing off westerns. But I don’t mean to imply Which brings us to an assessment of a stolen horse, he is seen saying grace that the film’s ‘look’ is merely derivative. Mick Jagger’s presence in the film – as in his parents’ shack, establishing early, There is also a freshness in its response 30 one rebel hero representing another. One that is, a background of Catholic piety to the wild life of the Kelly country – to birds and snakes, and to rock surfaces Ned (2003) seems scarcely to have been It is not that such sentiments are intrinsi- and twisted trees – and the image of the seen. Perhaps its timing was off: it was cally wrong, or even that Ned Kelly armoured Ned emerging from the gloom released in the same year as Jordan’s wasn’t in earnest about them; in this at Glenrowan to meet his captors draws film. An online reviewer opened her series, however, they are undermined by superbly on Robert Drewe’s description: review with: ‘Irreverent, risky and highly inferior acting, some crudely predictable inventive, there’s plenty of Ned-foolery in editing, a musical score which is utterly He moves off into the smoky dark, rolling this crazy spoof on the Ned Kelly story.’32 derivative (of westerns, Marlboro ads, with the armour weight, boots crunching The point of noting these burlesques even, in facetious moments, of sitcoms), frosty gravel. The frost is clamping down is chiefly to draw attention again to the and by a relentless determination to air- the mist and gunsmoke clouds close to tenacity of Kelly lore: a legend needs to brush everything about the Kellys (even the ground. Bullets snaking low, hissing be thoroughly established before it can the interiors of the rough family home through the dewy grass … Coming and be mocked and survive the mocking. look like something from The Little House going, lumbering and invisible, deflect- on the Prairie.) There is a potentially ing and absorbing bullets – he may as At the time of writing, I do not think Ned interesting comparison between (treach- well be made of smoke – he sees all this. is available on either video or DVD. Nor, erous) Constable Fitzpatrick’s words to (pp.166-7) as far as I can discover, are any of the Ned: ‘As I see it, us Irish have got to stick television versions: Ned Kelly, the 1960 together’ and the Californian George For the most part, Jordan’s film has telemovie for the ABC, starring Ken King, who recalls how the US republic not sought to reproduce Drewe’s tone, Goodlet, who went on to play Superin- declared war 102 years ago; both, that though the novel itself in some ways tendent Nicholson in Tony Richardson’s is, have grounds for seeing Britain as the (including its impressionist sketching of 1970 film; the teleplay,The Trial of Ned oppressor, but the simplistic screenplay episodes and the mix of first and third Kelly (1977), starring John Waters as Ned resists developing such a political issue person) seems intensely cinematic. At (the text of the Roger Simpson screen- in anything other than the broadest, most this crucial moment, though, the film- play was published);33 or the mini-se- conventional oppositions. makers seemed to have been conscious- ries, The Last Outlaw (1980), made for ly inspired by the writer. Pegasus Productions and Channel 7. The Perhaps the best way into a study of Ned latter is the only one of the three that has Kelly on film is by way of a commend- These two movies – from 1970 and 2003 been available for this study, and it is one able recent documentary, Besieged: The – are the main film representations of the of the least interesting versions of its pro- Ned Kelly Story (2003), directed and Kelly saga. One ought, though, to note tagonist’s life and hard times. Running produced by Gregory Miller and Barrie that there have been two parodic re-tell- to four episodes of 100 minutes each, it Dowdall. This attempts an even-handed, ings in the cinema in recent years. Yahoo seems interminable and the writers, Ian roughly chronological account (apart Serious’s Reckless Kelly (1993) has a Jones and Bronwyn Binns, have filled out from starting at the Old Melbourne Gaol certain amount of sophomoric fun with the time between the action episodes with an image of Ned Kelly’s chained feet the legend, updating it to include issues with innumerable static domestic scenes clanking along a metal corridor). Kelly of environment and corporate greed. and sentimental asides. The series bears tends to resist balanced judgments and The Glenrowan Hotel is the home of the this caption: ‘All characters, events, to excite eager partisanship, but these Kelly family and it is built on Reckless names, dates and places in this series documentarists, drawing considerably on Island in a national park. Ned’s project is are drawn directly from fact’, but that is Ian Jones’s research and on-screen testi- to rob banks so as to buy the land and no guarantee of dramatic viability. Even mony, have admirably sought to present prevent a large bank from taking it over more than most of the representations conflicting opinions.34 An early voice-over and selling it to the Japanese. His Robin considered above, this one sanitizes the wonders: ‘Who was Ned Kelly? Was he Hood-style antics lead to his becoming Kelly gang. From the outset, they are a hero or a murderer? A terrorist or a a Hollywood star in a film called ‘The depicted as high-spirited lads, with Ned revolutionary?’ Study of the representa- Christian Cowboy’, and it is perhaps apt as a fresh-faced respectful boy, a good tions adduced in this essay may suggest that Ned fetches up in the home of the son who promises his widowed mother, that there is no clear-cut answer to these great legend-creator of the twentieth ‘Some day I’ll build us a decent place’, questions. century. Oh, enough about its mad plot. then as a hard worker trying his hand at It has just about enough energy to see felling trees. Later, when his gang has The interest in the Kelly phenomenon it through, enough jokes at the expense killed the three policemen at Stringybark, continues unabated. In December 2004, of whatever comes to mind (such as we are asked to accept his claim that ‘It the Old Melbourne Gaol was the site ISSUE 41 the absurd appearances of emus and was a fair fight, nothing I looked for’, and for the launch of the Ned Kelly Touring 35 dodging about the Hotel in worst of all is a long speech he makes in Route. As recently as 16 July 2005, SCREEN EDUCATION a sly parody of the way they were once the Jerilderie pub in which the screenplay Alex Castles’ new book was reviewed used in international films set in Aus- doggedly tries to mythologize him as he in the Age with the heading: ‘Such is tralia). Following the success of Serious’s intones sentiments such as ‘Where one injustice’, echoing Ned’s famous last previous scattergun comedy, Young poor man is abused and oppressed, a words.36 Two weeks later, the Age had Einstein (1988), this later film had at least dozen will arise to help him.’ the front-page headline, ‘Kelly expert some exposure, whereas Abe Forsythe’s takes a stand against “poisnonous” new 31 book’, with Ian Jones taking the late 9. The State Library of Victoria’s exhibi- 19 Ina Bertrand, ‘Southwell, Harry’ in Oxford Castles to task.37 And on 3 July 2005, tion: ‘The Changing Face of Victoria’; Companion, op. cit., p.465. there was an article in the Melbourne 10. Two books about Sidney Nolan: Ken- 20 Fragments of these two films are also Age which announced that ‘The Federal neth Clark et al, Ned Kelly (London: preserved on the Video, Bail Up! There are 2 Government has added the Glenrowan Thames and Hudson, 1961); Elwyn minutes 7 seconds from the earlier, and 17 site of Ned Kelly’s last stand … to the Lynn/Sidney Nolan, Sidney Nolan minutes 19 seconds from the later of the two National Heritage Register’.38 This was to – Australia. films. coincide with the 150th anniversary of the 11. Mansfield Historical Society’sTrag - 21 Ina Bertrand, ‘Cass, Godfrey’ in Oxford Com- ‘siege and bloody battle’ at Glenrowan. edy at Stringybark Creek, 2000, and panion, op. cit., p. 58. For a man once thought by some to be other brochures from the North East 22 Pike and Cooper, p.96. a common thief and murderer, and by Victoria Information Centres. 23 Weston Bate, ‘From Eureka to Ned Kelly: A others a heroic defender of the poor and Police Force Out of Step with Society’, in oppressed, Kelly might feel rather wry Endnotes Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 75, No. 1, about the scene of his ‘last stand’ now 1 Alex C. Castles, Ned Kelly’s Last Days: Set- p.88. being classified as protected ground. In ting the Record Straight on the Death of an 24 Wallace-Crabbe, op. cit., p.90. ways not always easy to explain, Kelly Outlaw, Allen & Unwin, Melbourne, 2005. 25 The Argus, 15 October 1934. clearly matters in the history of Austral- 2 Based on a Sidney Nolan painting, and hung 26 Think of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith ian iconoclasm, even, perhaps, by some in the Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria. (, 1978), Breaker Morant (Bruce who might have quaked at his approach. 3 Peter Carey, The True Story of the Kelly Gang, Beresford, 1980), (Peter In 1958, cultural commentator A.A. Phil- Faber and Faber, London, 2000, p.25. Faiman, 1986), in their different ways all at lips wrote: ‘Despite our uneasy shame 4 Robert Drewe, Our Sunshine, Macmillan, odds with establishment values. about him, Ned Kelly still lives.’39 That is Sydney, 1991, p.17. 27 Author’s interview with Karel Reisz in London, undoubtedly still true today. 5 H.G. Kippax, ‘Introduction’, Three Australian 1964. See Brian McFarlane (ed.), An Autobi- Plays, Harmonsworth et al, Penguin Books, ography of British Cinema, Methuen/British Brian McFarlane is the editor, compiler 1963, p.17. Film Institute, London, 1997, p.478. and chief author of The Encyclopedia of 6 See Elwyn Lynn and Sidney Nolan, Sidney 28 Jan Dawson, ‘Ned Kelly’, Monthly Film Bul- British Film, the second edition of which Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Sydney & letin, August 1970, p.159. was published in September 2005, and his London, 1979, pp.58-71. 29 Margaret Tarratt, ‘Ned Kelly’, Films and Film- edited collection The Cinema of Britain and 7 Justin Corfield, The Ned Kelly Encyclopedia, ing, August 1970, p.41. Ireland was published in May 2005. • Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2003, p.366. 30 Geoffrey MacNab, ‘Ned Kelly’, Sight & Sound, 8 All but one of Nolan’s Ned Kelly series were November 2003, p.56. Resources painted in the dining-room at Heide. 31 This triptych was bought by the National Gal- 9 Chris Wallace-Crabbe, ‘Nolan, Kelly and Co.’, lery of Victoria in 1906. (Publication details given in endnotes are in Read It Again, Salt, Cambridge, 2005, 32 See Louise Keller at: http://www.urbancine- not repeated here.) pp.84-5. file.com.au/ 10 ibid, p.87. 33 Roger Simpson, The Trial of Ned Kelly, with 1. The 1970 and 2003 film versions 11 ‘Nolan’s Kelly legend sells for more than an introduction by Ian Jones. Heinemann of Ned Kelly: both are available on $130,000’, The Age, 23 August 2005. Educational Australia (Australian Theatre video and DVD. The DVD of the later 12 Wallace-Crabbe, op. cit., p.93, reports that Workshop), Richmond, Victoria, 1977. film has some useful ‘extras’ which ‘one of Ned’s shoulder pieces was bought at 34 Besieged: The Ned Kelly Story, Film Projects, discuss the place of Ned Kelly in auction in July 2001 by the State Library of Potts Point, New South Wales, 2003. popular culture. Victoria for $170,000’. 35 Jonathan Green, ‘On tour with the Kelly 2. The video of Reckless Kelly (1993). 13 The Salvation Army’s production, Soldiers of gang’, The Age, 8 December, 2004. 3. The documentary Besieged (2003), the Cross, predated it by six years. 36 Christopher Bantick, ‘Such is injustice: Why available at Film Projects Pty Ltd, PO 14 Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Ned should have got off’, The Age, 16 July Box 580, Potts Point, NSW 2011. Film: 1900-1977, Oxford University Press, 2005. 4. The video compilation, Bail Up!, from Melbourne, 1998 (rev. ed), p.5. 37 Larry Schwartz, ‘Kelly expert takes a stand the National Film and Sound Archive. 15 ibid, pp.6-7. against “poisonous” new book, The Age, 1 This contains the existing fragments 16 William D. Routt, ‘The Story of the Kelly August 2005. from the early Kelly films. Gang’, in Brian McFarlane et al, The Oxford 38 Kenneth Nguyen, ‘Ned Kelly’s last stand takes 5. Justin Corfield’sThe Ned Kelly En- Companion to Australian Film, Oxford Univer- an official place in history’, The Age, 3 July ISSUE 41 cyclopedia, which has an immense sity Press, Melbourne, 1999, p.473. 2005. 17 39

SCREEN EDUCATION bibliography. Video, Bail Up! The Bushranger on Australia’s A.A. Phillips, ‘The Australian Romanticism 6. The novels, Our Sunshine by Robert Silent Screen (1906-1928), National Film and and Stewart’s Ned Kelly’, The Australian Drewe, and The True History of the Sound Archive, 1996. Tradition. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1958, Kelly Gang by Peter Carey; 18 On the foregoing video, there is a ten-minute p.105. 7. Harold Stewart’s play Ned Kelly, in fragment, possibly filmed near with Three Australian Plays. amateur actors, and possibly pre-dating the 32 8. Arthur Phillips, The Australian Tradition. Tait film.