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Journal of Australian Studies

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Instilling postcolonial nostalgias: Ned

Kelly narratives for children
a
Clare Bradford
a
Deakin University , Victoria
Published online: 27 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Clare Bradford (2012) Instilling postcolonial nostalgias: Ned Kelly narratives for
children, Journal of Australian Studies, 36:2, 191-206, DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2012.674545

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2012.674545

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 Journal of Australian Studies,
Vol. 36, No. 2, June 2012, 191
206

Instilling postcolonial nostalgias: Ned Kelly narratives for children

Clare Bradford*

Deakin University, Victoria

This essay examines books for children focusing on Ned Kelly and the Kelly gang,
published from 2000 to 2011. Drawing upon theories of narrative, memory and
nostalgia it analyses the narrative strategies and visual images through which
these texts position readers, and their investment in formulations of the
Australian nation. The essay argues that these books function as exercises in
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restorative nostalgia, producing palatable versions of Kelly as an Australian hero,

and articulating connections between the Kelly legend and Australian national
identity. By foregrounding Kelly’s Irishness and by representing him as a ‘‘good
badman’’, these Ned Kelly narratives for children, which range across fiction,
non-fiction, picture book and play script, reinscribe versions of national identity
which occlude more complicated narratives. In particular, their emphasis on
struggles between Irish and English settlers, and between selectors and squatters,
displaces Indigenous histories, colonial violence, and systemic discrimination
against those deemed outsiders to the nation.
Keywords: Ned Kelly; children’s literature; nostalgia

Since Peter Carey published his Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly
Gang in 2000, scholarly interest in the cultural significance of Ned Kelly has
significantly increased, resulting in many essays over the last decade across the
disciplinary spectrum, including literary studies, sociology, cultural studies and
studies in visual arts.1 Scholars have scrutinised the vast amount of Kelly material in
literary texts and contemporary popular culture, including songs, films, television
programs, books and websites. However, almost no attention has been paid to
versions of the Kelly legend in a large and influential field of cultural production:
Ned Kelly texts for children.
If Graham Huggan is correct in his view that ‘‘the Kelly legend continues to
depend on a manipulation of collective memory’’,2 it is also the case that most
Australians are introduced to the Kelly legend as children, frequently in classroom
settings, through non-fiction and fiction texts, films and television programs which
reflect and advocate views about Australianness and about the implications of the
past for the present. A spike in such publications for children has occurred during the
last decade, during which more than ten books on Ned Kelly have appeared, several
of which have been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book
Awards. These texts often serve as classroom resources, the most recent of them
offering versions of the Kelly legend which cater to the emphasis on Australian

*Email: clarex@deakin.edu.au
ISSN 1444-3058 print/ISSN 1835-6419 online
# 2012 International Australian Studies Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2012.674545
http://www.tandfonline.com
 192 C. Bradford

history in the National Curriculum established by Kevin Rudd in 2008 and

implemented by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority
(ACARA). Phase 1 of the History Curriculum was published in 2010 for
implementation in 2011,3 and it is not surprising that over the last few years authors
and publishers should have sought to capitalise on the requirement, articulated in
the National Curriculum Board’s Shape of the Australian Curriculum: History,
that ‘‘students will learn about Australia’s national symbols and key historical
events’’.4
The implementation of the National Curriculum, and its focus on Australian
history is entangled with the ‘‘History Wars’’ which raged from 1996, when John
Howard’s Liberal/National coalition came into power, until Howard lost office and
departed from politics in 2007.5 The historian and educationalist Tony Taylor
describes Howard’s view of history as embodying a ‘‘benevolent and assimilationist
narrative’’6 whose fundamental emphasis is on the progress and success of the
Australian nation, with minimal attention to Indigenous dispossession, the White
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Australia policy, and debates over multiculturalism. When Howard decided, in 2006,
to implement a new approach to history teaching in Australian schools, he instigated
a history ‘‘summit’’ to develop a ‘‘national, narrative-based and stand-alone (i.e., not
integrated into social education) approach to Australian history in primary and
secondary schools’’.7 However, by 2007 the Guide to the Teaching of Australian
History in Years 9 and 10 launched by education minister Julie Bishop made it clear
that the earlier intention to introduce history teaching into the primary curriculum
had been abandoned. The Rudd government’s interventions into curriculum
development reinstated history as a distinct area of study in primary schools as
well as secondary schools.
In this context of dissension and debate over what constitutes a national history,
Ned Kelly narratives for primary school-aged children occupy a space strangely
remote from the History Wars and their effects on curriculum development. The
texts on which I focus in this essay have appeared since 2000 and comprise a spread
of genres and textual modes: Carole Wilkinson’s non-fiction title Black Snake: The
Daring of Ned Kelly (2002); the play script The Iron Outlaws (2007), written by Anthe
Crawley; Carole Wilkinson’s Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter (2007); the picture book
Ned Kelly and the Green Sash (2010), written by Mark Greenwood and illustrated by
Frané Lessac; Sophie Masson’s novel The Hunt for Ned Kelly (2010); and Melanie
Guile’s Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang (2011). My investigation of these texts considers
the modes and narrative strategies they deploy in order to engage young readers, and
the subject positions they afford. Specifically, I analyse the extent to which these texts
deploy Ned Kelly narratives to propose and advocate versions of Australia and
Australianness. One might expect Ned Kelly narratives for children to reflect some of
the sturm und drang of the History Wars since, as Anna Clark notes, debates over
history education constitute ‘‘part of the continuing struggle to define the nation’s
heritage and legacy.’’8 However, the most recent of the Kelly books for children,
those by Greenwood and Lessac, Masson, and Guile, promote versions of Ned Kelly
strikingly similar to those presented in books published during the height of the
History Wars (Wilkinson’s Black Snake and Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, and the
play The Iron Outlaws).
The explanation for the apparent immunity of children’s Ned Kelly narratives
from national debates over the past is to be found, I believe, in the powerful influence
 Journal of Australian Studies 193

of collective memory. Kelly functions within Australian popular culture as a national

symbol, an idealised figure mythologised as a ‘‘true Australian’’ and associated with
the twin stereotypes of the independent and forthright bushman, and the convict
underdog battling the oppression of the penal code. As I will argue, contemporary
representations of Kelly in children’s literature sustain and reinforce these stereo-
types, positioning children to acquiesce to narratives of nationhood which displace
other, more difficult stories about the destruction of Indigenous cultures and the
displacement of Indigenous peoples. This selective remembering (and forgetting) was
endemic to Australian children’s literature until the 1970s, when Indigenous authors
began to publish works for children, and non-Indigenous authors and illustrators
increasingly turned to the colonial past in order to address ideologies of race in
contemporary Australia.9 Ned Kelly narratives for children have, however, been
impervious to such revisionist approaches to the past.
In his influential work Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (1992), John
Stephens remarks that of all fields of writing for children, historical fiction for
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children ‘‘can be most radically ideological’’.10 Stephens argues that the ideological
work carried out by historical fiction for children is masked by its propensity for
using history to project larger-scale principles and ideas, and by the implication, still
common in discussions of children’s literature, that historical narratives simply forge
truths out of historical facts. Since Stephens made this observation, some historical
fiction for children has evidenced the self-reflexive and sceptical style of fiction
characteristic of what Linda Hutcheon describes as ‘‘historiographic metafiction’’;11
but in the main historical works for children sustain the illusion of a seamless
connection between narrative and history.
One of the most powerful ways in which children’s books engage their readers is
narrative point of view. By presenting historical events and characters through the
perspective of a young first-person narrator, or by filtering them through the eyes of
a focalising character, children’s books routinely position readers to align with
characters. Non-fiction historical writing for children often deploys the strategies of
fiction to engage readers with the past, claiming cause-and-effect relationships
between events and offering interpretations of characters’ actions. Indeed,
Wilkinson’s Black Snake incorporates fictive interludes in its ostensibly non-fiction
narrative through passages beginning with the words ‘‘What if you were there. . .’’
which comprise first-person accounts of events through the perspectives of fictive
and historical figures. And in Guile’s Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, Guile’s non-
fiction account of Kelly’s life is interspersed with what are termed ‘‘graphic pages’’ by
Roberto Fino,12 in which selected events are narrated in a comic book format
featuring speech bubbles, sound effects and captions.
In Postcolonial Nostalgias, Dennis Walder points out that one of the most
enduring metaphors for memory is that of ‘‘a kind of impression made upon the
mind, such as that made by a stylus upon a piece of wax’’.13 Memories are inscribed
in narrative as well as other forms of representation including visual arts, drama and
poetry. Ned Kelly narratives for children can be seen as inscriptions of memories,
themselves derived from the multifarious sources which have influenced the writers of
these texts, and from networks of affect and nostalgia. For memory does not belong
‘‘to the individual alone, any more than it can belong to the community or collective
alone’’,14 so that Ned Kelly narratives are produced not simply by authors but by the
 194 C. Bradford

communal and national modes of memory and nostalgia which surround the figure
of Kelly.
Walder’s treatment of nostalgia is particularly pertinent to Ned Kelly texts for
children. First, children’s texts are always shaped by the desires and preoccupations
of the adults who produce them,15 and frequently incorporate nostalgia for imagined
childhoods. Second, historical fiction often invests the past with qualities desirable in
the present. Walder distinguishes between two types of nostalgia: reflective and
restorative. The difference between them, he says, is that:

restorative nostalgia focuses on nostos [returning home], and tries in spite of history to
reconstruct the lost home, or homeland; whereas reflective nostalgia thrives on algia
[pain or longing], the longing itself, but ‘‘wistfully, ironically, desperately’’.16

The contemporary Ned Kelly texts for children which I discuss belong to the
category of restorative nostalgia, since their narratives are underwritten by collective
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memories based on nationalistic agendas which re-imagine colonial Australia as a

simpler, less complicated version of contemporary Australia. These texts portray
Australian society as a two-tiered political system comprising rich (English) and poor
(Australian-Irish) citizens, allowing for a view of Kelly as underclass hero, oppressed
by reason of his ethnicity and class.
In his essay ‘‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History’’, Patrick Hutton
traces scholarship dealing with the relationships between collective memory and
national identity, referring to the influence of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s
The Invention of Tradition (1983), Maurice Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory (1992),
and Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (1984
92). Hutton points out that myth and
ritual are used to ‘‘create a public memory in which citizens were meant to believe’’.17
Public memory of Ned Kelly has been forged through narratives, images, and the
processes of memorialisation visible in the places frequented by the Kelly gang,
where models and displays evoke ‘‘the presence of the past . . . reshaped by the social
contexts into which it is received’’.18 The children’s books I discuss rely heavily upon
visual images (photographs, maps, illustrations) to create and sustain a sense of the
solidity and reality of the past. By drawing on the specifics of Kelly’s life they
transmute these details into collective memories, drawing these shared memories into
the contemporary settings where children read, listen to or act out stories about
Kelly, and presenting them as narratives of national identity.
All the texts I discuss purport to provide readers with the evidence they need in
order to determine for themselves how Ned Kelly should be viewed. Many such texts
present themselves as discussion-starters, inviting individual reflection as well as
classroom debate. Wilkinson’s Black Snake concludes as follows:

Historians still sift through the evidence and debate the unanswered questions. Did Ned
shoot Fitzpatrick? What were his plans at Glenrowan? Was he a bad man or a saint?
People will go on talking about Ned Kelly for a long time to come.19

The distinction here between the first-name appellation ‘‘Ned’’ and the surname
‘‘Fitzpatrick’’ is entirely consistent with the tenor of the book, which attributes
motivations and emotions to Kelly while treating policemen and other historical
figures as colourless or one-dimensional existents in Kelly’s story. The opposition
 Journal of Australian Studies 195

‘‘bad man or saint’’ implies that there exists no more nuanced view of events and
characters than this binary opposition. Similarly, the play The Iron Outlaws
concludes with the words of the narrator, who poses these questions:

Was Ned a cold-blooded killer? Or was he forced into breaking the law by the actions of
the police? Now that you have seen the evidence, it is time for you to decide.20

The ‘‘evidence’’ referred to here is that of the play itself and the book’s introductory
pages, where the ‘‘Kelly gang’’ is depicted as a group of loyal best friends who
manifest ‘‘great bravery’’ during what is referred to as ‘‘the siege at Glenrowan
Inn’’.21 The binary logic of these ‘‘Yes/No’’, ‘‘Either/Or’’ formulations enforces a
view of Ned Kelly as ‘‘good badman’’, a figure related to the sturdy Australian
mythologies which, according to Huggan, attach to the ‘‘twin legends of the ‘noble
bushranger’ and the ‘noble convict’: victims both of a palpably unjust penal code’’.22
These Ned Kelly texts for children interpolate the figure of the ‘‘good boy’’ into the
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trajectory of Kelly’s life, implying connections between his childhood and his
formation as a ‘‘good badman’’.
The texts I discuss offer an array of paratextual features including historical
notes, timelines, reference lists, glossaries and maps.23 In this way they make truth
claims, calling upon concepts of historicity and accuracy. At issue here, however, is
not the extent to which their accounts of Kelly’s life are accurate, but rather their
imaginings of Ned Kelly and the uses they make of him. As Stephens notes, historical
fiction for children is driven by ‘‘the novelistic requirements of shapeliness,
meaningfulness, and especially of closure’’.24 That is, historical fiction relies for
shapeliness on features such as the ordering of events, the use of parallels between
incidents and characters, the deployment of telling details to build suspense and
maintain reader interest, while meaningfulness is conveyed through language, images
and narrative strategies. In the Ned Kelly texts, shapeliness and meaningfulness are
inseparable from larger questions about the significances of the Kelly legend in
postcolonial Australia.25 Narrative closure in children’s texts is often the point where
ideological positions are most evident. The story of Ned Kelly self-evidently
concludes with his death, but these Kelly narratives typically achieve closure by
implying or stating ‘‘truths’’ about Ned Kelly and his place in Australian history. A
particularly blatant instance of this effect occurs at the end of Wilkinson’s version of
the Jerilderie Letter:

[The Jerilderie Letter] is now owned by the State Library of Victoria. A transcript of the
letter is on the library’s website for the world to read. At last Ned is able to defend
himself. Thousands and thousands of people have read the letter across Australia and
around the world. Many of them agree that Ned suffered injustice.26

The ‘‘At last’’ in the third sentence implies that the Jerilderie Letter can now be read
unproblematically as Kelly’s defence against the charges laid against him. This view
of the letter builds on the weight of the historical commentary which accompanies
Wilkinson’s version of the Jerilderie Letter and on the way she has reshaped the
letter. It is bolstered by her claim about the persuasive effect of the letter on ‘‘many’’
of those who have read it. The postcolonial nostalgia visible in this text promises
what Walder describes as a ‘‘desire for origins, for unmediated experience’’;27 evident
 196 C. Bradford

in Wilkinson’s insistence that her version of the Jerilderie Letter offers a ‘‘real’’ and
unmediated textual experience of Ned Kelly.
This construction of the Jerilderie Letter is consistent with the narrative
approaches of the other texts I discuss, all of which position readers to align with
the young Ned Kelly and to perceive events and historical figures through his
perspective. Here visual images play a crucial role. As Susan Martin points out, Kelly
has become ‘‘an extraordinarily physical figure’’,28 familiar to Australians through
photographs, his death mask, the armour he wore, fictional and filmic representa-
tions. Most recently, Australian media outlets have paid close attention to the
identification of Kelly’s bones by the staff of the Victorian Institute of Forensic
Medicine. Instead of the mature man who appears in media images, books for
children and young people commonly represent him as a boy. Thus, the cover of
Black Snake presents a close-up image of a young Ned Kelly, his face framed by the
shape of the helmet he wore at Glenrowan in 1880. The helmet is rendered
transparent, with Kelly’s eyes looking directly out from a rectangular frame which
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evokes the visor. His face is that of a boy of around twelve, with wavy brown hair
clinging to his forehead and an expression of wary resolve. This attractive, boyish
face is set against the background of an old, hand-written document, gesturing to
notions of accuracy through its allusion to the Cameron and Jerilderie Letters. The
cover design of Black Snake thus transparently seeks to engage readers of around the
age of the Ned Kelly on its cover. The boy’s face set within the man’s helmet fuses
child and man, and the imagery of old documents gives weight to the book’s claim to
authority.
Wilkinson’s version of the Jerilderie Letter implies a somewhat older readership
of a document described in the introduction as ‘‘a glimpse of the man beneath the
armour*a man loyal to his family, but brutal to those who have crossed him’’.29 The
cover image and Dean Jones’s illustrations invest Kelly’s figure with a brooding
romanticism. Ned Kelly looks challengingly out at his audience from the book’s
cover, wearing clothes (a white shirt, red waistcoat, green jacket) which suggest a
country squire rather than the son of a struggling Irish family. His stance claims the
land on which he is shown; looking at him from below, we are positioned to regard
him as powerful, the lurid sky and silhouetted land enhancing the romantic glow that
surrounds him. The pages which flutter about him echo the design of his helmet,
linking the Jerilderie Letter with the events of his final shootout. Elsewhere in the
book he is depicted in black and white, a brooding figure dictating the letter to Joe
Byrne. Again viewers are positioned to look up toward his face, which is lit by
candles, as if toward a towering figure endowed with symbolic significance.
The images of Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter accord with the observations made by
the historian Eric Hobsbawm about what he terms ‘‘social bandits’’, outlaws from
peasant or marginalised populations regarded as heroes and signifiers of resistance
to a corrupt and unjust society.30 Presented as a larger-than-life figure who
dominates the settings in which he is depicted, the Ned Kelly pictured in The
Jerilderie Letter might be any such romanticised and glamorised outlaw, from Robin
Hood to Pancho Villa.
The picture book Ned Kelly and the Green Sash offers an analeptic account of the
events which led to Kelly’s death, its brevity and narrative directness suggesting that
its implied audience comprises children younger than those who might be expected to
access the more extended prose of Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter. The cover image
 Journal of Australian Studies 197

shows Kelly’s helmet, his eyes looking out from the slit of his visor. The opening
double-page spread of the narrative represents Kelly in the condemned man’s cell, a
window behind him showing blue sky and a bird on the window’s ledge. This image
juxtaposes the figure of Kelly and the image of the window. Kelly looks wistfully
toward the bird, as if longing for the freedom it signifies, so positioning readers as
sympathetic observers of his imprisonment. The narrative opens as follows:

I do not pretend that I have led a blameless life, or that one fault justified another, but
the public, judging a case like mine, should remember that the darkest life may have a
bright side, and after the worst has been said against a man, he may, if he is heard, tell a
story in his own rough way. . . .31

As this excerpt indicates, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash implies readers capable of
negotiating language which presents as un-modern although intelligible; the
illustrations provide cues which enlarge on the verbal narrative. Having introduced
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the figure of the adult Ned Kelly in his cell, the narrative turns to Kelly’s first-person
account of his childhood and to the ‘‘bright side’’ of his identity. Frané Lessac’s
illustrations, painted in an artfully naı̈ve style, construct the young Ned Kelly as the
son of a poor family, living in a ‘‘ramshackle hut with a bark roof and dirt floor’’.32
The narrative hinges on an incident when Kelly was a schoolboy, when on his way to
school he observed a classmate, Richard Shelton, trying to retrieve his hat from a
river. The boy slipped in and vanished in the rapids. Ned Kelly saved him and
returned him to his parents, who owned the Royal Mail Hotel. In their gratitude they
gave Kelly a sash ‘‘made of green silk with gold bullion fringes that glinted in the
firelight’’.33
In Ned Kelly and the Green Sash there is a ritualistic tenor to the language which
describes how Richard Shelton’s father gives Ned Kelly the sash: ‘‘Wear it with pride
. . . as an emblem of your courage’’.34 The green sash is also, as his father reminds
him, ‘‘shamrock-green . . . the colour of Ireland’’.35 In the illustration showing this
moment, Esau Shelton stands in the Kelly home, while Kelly’s father ties the sash
around the boy’s waist, his mother looks on, and his young siblings peer through the
curtain. The sash is a multivalent signifier, since it draws attention both to Ned
Kelly’s bravery and also to the social and economic divisions between British and
Irish-born Australians. Green and gold, it stands out as the brightest element in the
drab room, which evokes the previous illustration, where the setting is the Sheltons’
home. The furnishings of this room and its orientation are homologous with those of
the Kelly home (fireplace, windows, door, table) but its decorative elements
(chandelier, photographs, hat-stand, carpet) and its outlook on land owned by the
Sheltons instantiate the divisions between the two families and their relative
positions in the world. The most powerful significance of the sash in Ned Kelly
and the Green Sash lies in its function as a symbol of the heroic child folded into the
figure of the virtuous bushranger. The emphasis on its link with Irish nationalism
further evokes class struggles between an Irish underclass and British ruling class,
producing a highly-coloured and attractive picture of an Australia forging national
identity out of just such a class struggle.
The green sash appears later in Ned Kelly and the Green Sash in images of Kelly’s
capture at Glenrowan. One of the book’s most arresting images shows Kelly, lying on
the floor of Glenrowan station, tended by a doctor. The vibrant colour of the green
 198 C. Bradford

sash, now bloodstained, leaps out from the more sombre tones of the rest of the page.
The text reads:

I ran my bloody fingers through the silk sash wrapped around my waist. Once it was an
emblem of courage*proof even my dark life had a bright side.36

The book’s illustrations, showing flat figures looking straight out from the page,
avoid realist strategies such as perspective and colour-shading and suggest folk art or
medieval paintings. Like the atmospheric and romantic images of Ned Kelly’s
Jerilderie Letter, they insert Kelly into history, but their stylised, static illustrations
also produce a curious stillness, as though introducing the Kelly story into mythic
time. These illustrations bear no ironic undertones which might draw attention to the
partial and contingent nature of history. Instead, they function as restorative
nostalgia, transforming history into myth by evoking ancient, traditional forms of
representation. At the same time they focus on the figure of the heroic boy,
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presenting Kelly as a model of bravery to be emulated by readers. The final page of

the book affords a reminder of the tensions that attend constructions of national
heroes: here, arranged in the folds and turns of the green sash, are vignettes showing
Ned Kelly’s victims, uncannily incorporated into the signifier of heroism constituted
by the sash.
Like the illustrations, the verbal narrative of this text constructs two lines of
signification, treating Kelly as a mythical figure and also insisting on the valency of
the myth for young Australians. From its first pages, the narration of Ned Kelly and
the Green Sash anticipates and accounts for the violence of Kelly’s life:

I was raised on the banks of a winter creek. Home was a ramshackle hut with a bark
roof and dirt floor. . . . My father was a convict who could ill afford another brush with
the law and my uncles and cousins were no strangers to crime. I soon learned the tricks
of their trade*a chook here, a pig there. . . . The traps said we were Irish riffraff, drawn
to trouble like maggots to a summer’s day.37

Here the narrative identifies poverty, family history and oppression as key
components in Kelly’s identity, enforcing a sense of the ‘‘them and us’’ dichotomy
which informs representations of Kelly and which emphasises that he is the victim of
discrimination because of his Irishness, his convict connections and his lower-class
affiliations. The episode recounting the act of bravery where Kelly saved Richard
Shelton suggests that, like so many other figures in children’s literature, he is poor
but possesses a core of virtue, which is nevertheless insufficient to withstand the
oppression meted out to the Kelly family.
The book’s narrative plays on the concept of the wronged and oppressed Irish:
‘‘the forces of the law plotted against me’’.38 This oppression is located firmly in the
domestic spaces of the Kelly home, where ‘‘those fat-necked unicorns insulted my
mother and frightened my sisters’’.39 In Greenwood’s version of events, Ned’s father
is unjustly imprisoned, becomes ill in the cramped prison conditions, and dies
prematurely. By sketching this chain of cause and effect, the narrative connects the
family’s misfortune directly to the oppression they suffer as ‘‘Irish riffraff’’. Ned
Kelly is, then, a victim: ‘‘My character could not be painted blacker but my
conscience is clear. Circumstances forced us to become outlaws’’.40
 Journal of Australian Studies 199

This deterministic treatment of Kelly’s life is replicated in Wilkinson’s Black

Snake, where the non-fiction component of the book is presented through the
authoritative perspective of a well-read expert judging the reliability of various
accounts of events. In addition to this chronological narrative, Wilkinson inter-
sperses brief sketches of key characters, describing Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve
Hart in terms which emphasise what they have in common with their contemporary
readers. Thus, Dan Kelly is compared with ‘‘a modern teenager . . . concerned about
the way he looked and dressed’’,41 while Steve Hart is said to have been ‘‘attracted by
the idea of being a fugitive on the run from the police. No doubt he thought it
sounded like a more exciting life than splitting fence posts’’.42 The effect of such
interpretations of characters and events is to identify ‘‘truths’’ which transcend time,
enabling readers to read past events in the light of their own experience. Historical
and cultural shifts such as the invention of adolescence in the 1950s, and radical
changes in how children are viewed, are swept away in the narrative’s insistence on
‘‘universal’’ truths about children and young people. In this way Black Snake inducts
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child readers into the circuits of social memory which construct Ned Kelly as an
Australian legend, masking this ideological treatment by representing the Kelly gang
as ‘‘like you’’.
The Iron Outlaws combines an account of Ned Kelly’s life with a play to be acted
by children. It commences with the following summary: ‘‘Although he was hanged
more than 120 years ago, Ned Kelly is as infamous today as he was in the late 1800s.
Many people think of him as a merciless killer. Others see him as the victim of police
prejudice against the entire Kelly family’’.43 The interpretive frame of the story is,
however, quite explicit: the Kelly family is said to have been ‘‘the target of a bullying
police officer’’,44 and the account ends as follows: ‘‘Ned was captured, tried, and
hanged in 1880, despite a petition signed by thousands of Australians to save his
life!’’.45 The exclamation mark at the end of this sentence emphasises Kelly’s
popularity, the support of those who signed the petition, and the sense that his
execution occurred despite the wishes of ‘‘thousands of Australians’’. Readers are
thus invited to align themselves with the Australians who signed the petition, as
though not to sign it might be construed as unAustralian. The play uses some of
Kelly’s words, taken from transcripts of his trial and from the Jerilderie Letter. What
appears on the page as self-serving rhetoric defending acts of violence functions
within the context of the play as truth-telling. For instance, the play includes this
defence of Kelly’s shooting of Sergeant Kennedy: ‘‘Yes, I shot Sergeant Kennedy. But
which do you think was best, that I should shoot him or that he should shoot me?’’.46
By this stage in the play, Kelly has so consistently been treated as a victimised, heroic
figure, that the question is rhetorical. Again, when Ned is seriously wounded:

McIntyre: (to Ned) We’ve got you at last, you brute! Now we’ll see justice done!
Ned: (weak but full of contempt) Justice, bah! There never was such a thing as justice in
the English laws, but any amount of injustice to be had.47

Through stage directions such as ‘‘weak but full of contempt’’, the script shapes
performance. Here it plays to national mythologies which pit an independent and
egalitarian Australia against a rigid, classist and oppressive Britain. The play’s
treatment of Kelly’s trial develops a similar contrast, treating Sir Redmond Barry as
an exemplification of English law and the ascendancy of the English over the
 200 C. Bradford

Irish-Australian community. When the judge calls on legal traditions of evidence and
accuracy, Ned Kelly lays claim to the equality of British and Irish-Australian, rich
and poor, at the ‘‘higher court’’ of divine judgement:

Ned: I do not fear death, and I am the last man in the world to take a man’s life away. I
am not a murderer, but if there is an innocent life at stake, then I must take some action.
Barry: Your statement is wicked and untrue. How dare you question the evidence of the
witnesses!
Ned: I dare say the day will come when we shall all have to go to a higher court than this.
Then we will see who is right and who is wrong.48

To read this exchange on the page is one thing; to speak the words of Kelly and
Barry, or to hear them as an audience, is quite another. The performative nature of
drama endows dialogue with particular efficacy as young people ‘‘become’’ historical
figures or participate as audiences. The dialogue of the play thus powerfully positions
actors and audiences to sympathise with Ned Kelly as a brave and oppressed
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Australian hero.
Similarly, Wilkinson’s version of the Jerilderie Letter seeks to introduce readers to
‘‘the real Ned Kelly’’. In her introduction, Wilkinson announces that she seeks to
‘‘make Ned’s words clear without losing his wonderful turn of phrase, his unique
style or his wicked sense of humour’’.49 This entirely partisan view of Kelly’s idiom is
bolstered by Dean Jones’s highly-charged illustrations. In editing the Jerilderie Letter,
Wilkinson has reduced it from well over 7,000 words to somewhat under 4,000. She
has omitted lurid details such as Kelly’s account of delivering a parcel of calves’
testicles to Constable Fitzpatrick’s wife, and has removed some of his graphic
language, as well as clichéd expressions such as ‘‘held on like grim death’’.50 The
most striking difference between the Jerilderie Letter and Wilkinson’s version of it is
that Wilkinson has deleted most of Kelly’s ranting accounts of police brutality and
corruption, and has minimised his grandiloquent promises of revenge. By reducing
Kelly’s verbiage and inserting punctuation she has produced a version both ‘‘suitable
for children’’ and misleadingly coherent. She retains some of the colour of his
language in passages such as:

They [his family] had no alternative but to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct
of a parcel of big, ugly, fat-necked, wombat-headed, big-bellied, magpie-legged, narrow-
hipped, splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords*better known as
Officers of Justice or Victorian Police.51

Children reading the heavily-doctored and edited language represented as that of

‘‘the man beneath the armour’’52 will have no sense of the longueur of much of the
Jerilderie Letter but are encouraged to admire the bravura of Kelly’s language.
While all the Ned Kelly texts for children are intended for school and library
markets, Sophie Masson’s The Hunt for Ned Kelly caters most directly to teachers.
This novel, in the ‘‘My Australian Story’’ series published by Scholastic, comes
with teacher notes available through the Scholastic website.53 Like the ‘‘Dear
America’’ series in the United States and the ‘‘Dear Canada’’ series in Canada
(both published by Scholastic) the ‘‘My Australian Story’’ series is aimed at
children in the later years of primary school, and commissions well-known authors
to write books based around historical events such as the rum rebellion and
 Journal of Australian Studies 201

Cyclone Tracy, as well as individuals including Don Bradman and Ned Kelly. The
novels in these series are written in the form of journals or diaries maintained by
protagonists.
As Kim Wilson points out, Scholastic gains credibility for these series by
commissioning highly-regarded authors, and the books are marketed as truthful,
reliable and ‘‘authentic’’ accounts of the past.54 However, the ‘‘My Australian Story’’
books, no less than the ‘‘Dear America’’ and ‘‘Dear Canada’’ series, rely upon and
reproduce mythologies of nationhood which position young readers to acquiesce to
dominant narratives of national identity which recast the past in the light of
contemporary values. As Wilson notes, ‘‘Values and ideologies, human actions and
reactions are not transhistorical; they are contingent on the historical context of the
era and are radically different to the present’’.55 Like the other novels in the various
Scholastic series, The Hunt for Ned Kelly is presentist in its interpretation of the past,
affording the illusion of historical memory while underplaying the radical difference
between past and present.
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The novel is shaped by two narrative trajectories common in children’s literature:

a Bildungsroman tracking the progress of the narrator, twelve-year-old Jamie Ross;
and a mild version of romance, comprising Jamie’s account of the romantic
attachments formed by his nineteen-year-old sister Ellen. After the death of their
father, a photographer, the two travel from Melbourne to Beechworth, where Ellen
seeks to develop a career taking photographs of houses and local identities. The
novel is set between 1879 and 1880, tracing the last two years of the life of Ned Kelly
through Jamie Ross’s perspective. The fact that the siblings are orphans is
downplayed in favour of the excitement of the new life they pursue, unhindered by
adults.
In an early episode during Jamie and Ellen’s buggy-ride from Melbourne to
Mansfield, their vehicle is bogged on a muddy track. They are rescued by two
‘‘smartly dressed, bearded young men’’56 who set their buggy back on the road and
direct them to Mansfield. These young men, who introduce themselves as Mr
Thompson and Mr Cook, are in fact Ned Kelly and Joe Byrne, a subterfuge evident
to readers from various cues, but hidden from Jamie. Like a young detective Jamie
listens in to conversations, searches for newspaper and other accounts of the Kelly
gang, meeting ‘‘Mr Thompson’’ and ‘‘Mr Cook’’ on two further occasions before he
realises their true identities. Later, when Jamie returns to Melbourne with Ellen, he
begins work as an errand-boy at The Age, and observes the flurry of excitement as
reporters receive news of Kelly’s capture and the deaths of Joe Byrne, Dan Kelly and
Steve Hart. Finally he attends Kelly’s trial, where Kelly looks directly at him and
mouths his name.
Intertextual references play an important part in shaping readers’ perceptions of
Kelly. On Jamie’s first encounter with ‘‘Mr Thompson’’ the two discover their
common love of the novel Lorna Doone. In representing Kelly as a sensitive and
literary man, the novel reinscribes the myth of the ‘‘good badman’’, tortured by the
acts of violence he has perpetrated. Jamie Ross and Ned Kelly are linked through
their admiration of Lorna Doone, as though Jamie represents the boy concealed
within the tough exterior of the highwayman. Intertextual allusions in The Hunt for
Ned Kelly also draw upon discourses which link the fictional text to a wider societal
context. On the day before Kelly’s execution, Jamie hears someone singing a song:
 202 C. Bradford

Ring a ling high, ring a ling low,

Sing of pain and sorrow,
Ring a ling high, ring a ling low,
Ned Kelly dies in the morning.57

These plaintive words, which echo in Jamie’s mind and prevent him from sleeping,
invest the death of Kelly with personal, social and national significance, implying the
processes of production and reception where the Kelly legend is created and
sustained.
The most recent text I consider, Melanie Guile’s Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, is
also the most overtly nationalistic. Its account of Ned Kelly’s life concludes as
follows:

Over the years, the name of Ned Kelly has come to represent the underdog who stands
up against the rich and powerful. It is an idea that appeals to a country founded by
convicts, and has become associated with Australia’s identity as a nation.58
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This view of a unified nation defined by its convict origins, its resistance to authority
and its advocacy on behalf of those oppressed by the ‘‘rich and powerful’’ is a
seductive one, since the figure of Ned Kelly, so much larger than life, readily morphs
into a metaphor for the nation.
The ‘‘graphic pages’’ which present key episodes in Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang
exemplify how non-fiction for children shades into fiction. Roberto Fino’s comic
book-style reduces events to a single interpretation presented as ‘‘real’’. Thus, his
depiction of the death of the policemen Lonigan, Scanlon and Kennedy at
Stringybark Creek casts Kelly as an unwilling killer forced into heinous actions. In
the sequence depicting the death of Kennedy, for instance, the captions and speech
bubbles show Kelly first shooting Kennedy, then apologising to him: ‘‘You’re a brave
man. I’m sorry I shot you’’.59 In the next panel, Dan Kelly says ‘‘We’ve got to go,
Ned. McIntyre will bring more police’’, to which Kelly replies ‘‘But we can’t just
leave him like this’’.60 The following panel, with its red sound effect ‘‘BANG’’, shows
Ned Kelly shooting Kennedy, then using his own coat to cover Kennedy’s body. This
sequence is, of course, a highly speculative account of these events. More
importantly, Fino’s version builds on the ‘‘good badman’’ characterisation of Ned
Kelly which pervades Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang: ‘‘a tough and ruthless criminal’’
who ‘‘could also be gentle, polite and trusting’’.61
The Kelly narratives I have considered are strikingly similar in their constructions
of Australia. The account of the founding of Australia at the beginning of Ned Kelly
and the Kelly Gang is typical of their formulations of nationhood:

The story of modern Australia starts on 26 January 1788. On that day, Captain Arthur
Phillip arrived in Sydney Cover from England with the convict ships of the First Fleet.
The new settlement brought disaster to Australia’s Indigenous peoples because the
newcomers took their land. This event marks the beginning of Australia as we know it
today.62

The ‘‘beginning of Australia’’ is, then, contingent upon the ‘‘disaster’’ wrought upon
Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, who are, by implication, expunged from the story
of the nation. The other Kelly texts, too, are silent on Indigenous cultures and
 Journal of Australian Studies 203

peoples except for a reference, in Wilkinson’s The Daring of Ned Kelly, to the black
trackers employed by the police to search for the Kelly gang. In one of the fictive
first-person accounts incorporated in this text, Senior Constable Charles Johnson of
Violet Town describes how the trackers first discovered signs of the Kelly gang and
then claimed to have lost the trail. Johnson’s view is that the trackers, knowing the
direction taken by the Kelly gang, have feigned ignorance in order to save themselves
from danger in a possible ambush. But this account opens up the possibility that the
trackers are co-opted by the Kelly gang, so aligning themselves with the nation’s
excluded. Whether marginal or absent figures, Indigenous peoples and cultures are
treated as irrelevant to the Australia identified with Ned Kelly in these texts.
Immigrant groups, apart from the Irish, are also invisible in the Kelly narratives,
apart from cursory references to Joe Byrne’s familiarity with the Chinese mining
camps around the Woolshed Valley. None of these books refers to the Chinese
hawker or goldminer, known as Ah Fook, whose accusation of assault occasioned
Kelly’s first brush with the law. Indeed, young readers would almost certainly gain
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the impression that during the 1870s and 1880s Victoria was populated entirely by
English and Irish Australians. In ‘‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction’’,
Huggan speculates that the emphasis on Kelly’s Irishness in contemporary versions
of the Kelly legend constitutes a ‘‘form of collective repression that shifts the
problems of a rapidly changing multi-ethnic society back into a romantically
‘Celticised’ past’’.63 Huggan goes on to disavow this explanation, arguing that
Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine (1991)
deploy deconstructive strategies to ‘‘counteract those nostalgia-ridden narratives of
sanctified victimhood which continue to block access to Australia’s colonial past’’.64
However, the children’s texts I have considered, all published since 2000,
reinscribe exactly such ‘‘narratives of sanctified victimhood’’. In the guise of offering
evidence which will equip child readers to make their own judgements, they
strenuously propose versions of a virtuous, wronged and oppressed Kelly. Nor do
these texts show any signs of the deconstructive strategies deployed in Carey’s and
Drewe’s novels as well as in contemporary Australian historical fiction more
generally. Instead, these versions of Kelly narratives for children propose an idealised
Australian identity devoid of complexity and diversity, where simplistic concepts of
fairness occlude the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the systems of
discrimination which have produced typologies of racism all too visible in Australian
society, in paternalistic treatment of Aboriginal people, and suspicion of those
marked as others because of their skin colour, clothing or religions.
The fact that these texts are intended for children does not in itself explain their
reinscription of what Walder describes as ‘‘white settler nostalgia’’,65 since many
Australian texts for children and young people offer sharp critiques of race relations
and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.66 It is not the case, either, that children’s
texts are necessarily simple in thematics or style; even books for the very young
commonly deploy narrative and linguistic approaches which embody the playfulness,
the radical intertextuality and the irony of postmodernity.67 One explanation for the
simplistic nationalism of Kelly narratives of the last decade perhaps lies in the
cultural anxieties which have attended the History Wars in Australia since the 1990s.
Authors and publishers producing children’s texts to be used in classrooms may well
seek to avoid covering difficult or controversial topics. Yet this explanation does not
 204 C. Bradford

account for the high significance attributed to the Kelly legend in these books, or
their nationalistic fervour.
Perhaps these Kelly narratives for children speak most directly to the struggle, as
Walder says, to ‘‘survive in the present*a time not only of the end of empires but of
increased globalisation, ethnic tension, and national self-questioning [which] creates
a widespread need to redefine the self’’.68 Directed to young readers who will be
tomorrow’s adults, these books may be read as restorative nostalgias which flatten
out the past, producing a Ned Kelly palatable to young Australians and incorporat-
ing this figure into conceptions of nationhood. What is lost in these texts is an ethics
of remembering which acknowledges histories of conflict, oppression and discrimi-
nation and which addresses child readers with respect.

Notes
1. These include Graham Huggan, ‘‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and
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Abuses of Ned Kelly,’’ Australian Literary Studies 20 (2002): 132
41; Susan K. Martin,
‘‘Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang, and Ned Kelly in Australian
Fictions,’’ in Fabulating History: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, ed. Andreas
Gaile (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) 301
17; Bruce Tranter and Jed Donoghue, ‘‘Ned Kelly:
Armoured Icon,’’ Journal of Sociology 47 (2010): 187
205; Anne Marsh, ‘‘Ned Kelly By
Any Other Name,’’ Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 57
65; Nathanael O’Reilly, ‘‘The
Influence of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang: Repositioning the Ned Kelly
Narrative in Australian Popular Culture, The Journal of Popular Culture,’’ 40 (2007):
488
502.
2. Huggan, ‘‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction,’’ 132.
3. ACARA, Australian Curriculum, http://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/curriculum.html,
accessed July 20, 2011.
4. National Curriculum Board, Shape of the Australian Curriculum: History, May 2009,
p. 8, http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Australian_Curriculum_-_History.pdf ,
accessed July 20, 2011.
5. For an account of the History Wars, see Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History
Wars (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004).
6. Tony Taylor, ‘‘Howard’s End: A Narrative Memoir of Political Contrivance, Neoconser-
vative Ideology and the Australian History curriculum’’, Curriculum Journal 20.4 (2009),
320.
7. Taylor, ‘‘Howard’s End,’’ 320.
8. Anna Clark, Teaching the Nation: Politics and Pedagogy in Australian History (Carlton:
Melbourne University Press, 2006), 166.
9. See Clare Bradford, Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature
(Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001).
10. John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (London: Longman, 1992),
202.
11. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York:
Routledge, 2002) 105
23. Suzanne Ferrier’s 1984 picture book Ned A Leg End, a
carnivalesque account of Ned Kelly’s life and times, is an early instance of historiographic
metafiction for children. Recent Ned Kelly books for children are far more reverential and
less playful than Ned A Leg End.
12. Melanie Guile, Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, ill. Roberto Fino (South Yarra: Macmillan
Education, 2011).
13. Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (London,
Routledge, 2010), 6.
14. Walden, Postcolonial Nostalgias, 46.
 Journal of Australian Studies 205

15. Those who produce children’s texts (authors, illustrators, publishers, editors) are almost
always adults, so that children’s literature tends to disclose the fears, anxieties and politics
of adults.
16. Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias, 11. Here Walder quotes Svetlana Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
17. Patrick Hutton, ‘‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,’’ The History Teacher, 33.4
(2000), 537.
18. Hutton, ‘‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,’’ 537.
19. Carole Wilkinson, Black Snake: The Daring of Ned Kelly (Fitzroy Vic: Black Dog Books,
2002).
20. Anthe Crawley, The Iron Outlaws: The Story of Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang (Auckland:
Clean Slate Press, 2007) 27.
21. Anthe Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 9.
22. Huggan, ‘‘Cultural memory in postcolonial fiction,’’ 132.
23. Here I follow Gérard Genette’s definition of the paratext, which comprises elements
within the book (peritext) such as chapter titles, prefaces, notes and so on, as well as those
outside the book (epitext), such as book catalogues, author websites and teaching notes.
See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge
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University Press, 1997).

24. Stephens, Language and Ideology, 206.
25. The term ‘postcolonial’ throughout this essay refers to the conventional meaning of the
word in postcolonial theory, as covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process
from the moment of colonization to the present day’, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and
Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
(London: Routledge, 1989), 2.
26. Carole Wilkinson, Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, ill. Dean Jones (Fitzroy Vic: Black Dog
Books, 2007), 54.
27. Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias, 9.
28. Susan K. Martin, ‘‘Dead White Male Heroes,’’ 305.
29. Wilkinson, Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, 2.
30. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: New Press, 2000).
31. Mark Greenwood and Frané Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash (Newtown NSW:
Walker Books, 2010).
32. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
33. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
34. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
35. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
36. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
37. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
38. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
39. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
40. Greenwood and Lessac, Ned Kelly and the Green Sash.
41. Wilkinson, Black Snake, 40,
42. Wilkinson, Black Snake, 41.
43. Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 2.
44. Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 4.
45. Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 5.
46. Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 19.
47. Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 25.
48. Crawley, The Iron Outlaws, 27.
49. Wilkinson, Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, 2.
50. The Jerilderie Letter. Project Gutenberg (Australia), http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/
0400761.txt, accessed 27 July, 2011.
51. Wilkinson, Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, 45.
52. Wilkinson, Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, 2.
53. ‘Curriculum Resources’, Scholastic, http://www.scholastic.com.au/schools/curriculum/in-
dex.asp, accessed 29 July 2011.
 206 C. Bradford

54. Kim Wilson, ‘‘‘Are They Telling us the Truth?’’’ Constructing National Character in the
Scholastic Press Historical Journal Series, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 32
(2007): 129
41.
55. Wilson, ‘‘‘Are They Telling us the Truth?’’’ 139.
56. Sophie Masson, The Hunt for Ned Kelly (Lindfield NSW: Scholastic, 2010), 15.
57. Sophie Masson, The Hunt for Ned Kelly, 189.
58. Guile, Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, 26.
59. Guile, Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, 13.
60. Guile, Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, 13.
61. Guile, Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, 8.
62. Guile, Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang, 4.
63. Huggan, ‘‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction,’’ 138.
64. Huggan, ‘‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction,’’ 139.
65. Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias, 21.
66. See, for instance, Bradford, Reading Race, and John Stephens, ‘‘Positioning Otherness:
Language and Narrative Strategies in Australian Young Adult ‘Multicultural’ Fiction,’’ in
Belonging and Exclusion: Case studies in Recent Australian and German Literature, Film
and Theatre (Newcastle UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009) 133
46.
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67. See, for instance, Deborah Stevenson, ‘‘‘If You Read This Last Sentence, It Won’t Tell You
Anything’: Postmodernism, Self-Referentiality, and The Stinky Cheese Man,’’ Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly 19 (1994): 32
4; David Lewis, Reading Contemporary
Picturebooks (London: Routledge, 2001).
68. Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias, 4.