Imagining Ned also includes Kelly’s death mask, the Snider Enfield rifle he wielded in his bank hold-ups and hostage taking, and his famous iron armour and helmet, made from plough blades. He and the gang wore these in the last shoot-out with police at Glenrowan northern Victoria – and Kelly’s chimney like head protection looks nothing like Nolan’s instantly recognisable horizontal box.
There’s also the famous Jerilderie letter, from the State Library of Victoria collection, renowned for its wildly poetic language and a description of the police as “a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed, big bellied, magpie legged, narrow hipped, splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords.”
It’s also an 8,000 word manifesto dictated by Kelly to fellow gang member Joe Byrne in 1879. Alongside cataloguing the police persecution meted out to Kelly and his family and justifying the killing of three policemen in a forest ambush as self defence, the letter demanded justice for the poor and downtrodden.
It was this political dimension to Kelly’s deeds and utterances that made him a folk hero in his lifetime, according to the exhibition’s co-curators, Leanne Fitzgibbon and Tansy Curtain. “It wasn’t just about hurting the rich and giving to the poor,” says Curtain, “he had these great ideas, in the Jerilderie letter in particular, of starting a new republic for Australians. He talked about the oppressed cultures within Australia and of overthrowing those oppressors.”
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/apr/01/imagining-ned-exploring-the-truth-and-myth-behind-australias-che-guevara
or is it all April Fool’s day stuff? oppressed cultures, Bill. Speak for them...
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