Ned Kelly(c. 1854-12–1880)

Edward Kelly was born at Beveridge in the Victorian goldfields country of Australia in December 1854, eldest son of John Red Kelly, a Tipperary transported convict who had served his seven years for stealing two pigs at Moyglass and had taken his ticket-of-leave in Van Diemen's Land in 1848, and Ellen Quinn of the County Antrim Quinns. The Kellys, Quinns and Lloyds together formed the central network of the Irish-Catholic selector families of the Wallan, Greta and Eleven Mile Creek selections in the north-east Victorian high country, the small-tenant farmers who took up the post-1862 land selection acts in the face of the established squatter pastoral interest that ran the country on long-lease leasehold.

His father died of dropsy in 1866 when Ned was eleven, and the family moved to the Eleven Mile Creek selection near Greta. He was charged at fifteen with assaulting a Chinese hawker (acquitted), at sixteen with horse-stealing for which he served three years in the Pentridge Stockade (1871 to 1874), and from 1878 with the killing of three Victoria Police troopers at Stringybark Creek in the Wombat Ranges on the twenty-sixth of October 1878. The Kelly Gang (Ned, his younger brother Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart) were proclaimed outlaws under the Victorian Felons Apprehension Act and through the next twenty months conducted a sequence of bank raids and country movements across the north-east Victorian country that became the most-followed news story in Australia.

The Euroa bank raid of December 1878 and the Jerilderie raid of February 1879 (where Kelly dictated the eight-thousand-word Jerilderie Letter, the political manifesto of the gang's grievances against the Victorian police and the squatter system, to a captured bank clerk for posting to the Melbourne newspapers) made the Kelly Gang a symbol of the Irish-Australian-selector grievance against the Victorian colonial establishment. The Letter, recovered and first published in full only in 1930, is on every modern Australian literature syllabus as the first sustained Irish-Australian working-class prose document.

He stood with the Gang at the Glenrowan Inn on the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth of June 1880 in the home-made suits of plough-mouldboard armour they had had forged the previous winter at the Greta blacksmith's, intending to derail a police train and take a hostage. The plan miscarried; the Gang held the inn under police siege through the night of the twenty-seventh, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart died in the police fire, and Ned, who had stepped out of the burning inn in the armour at dawn on the twenty-eighth in an attempt to draw fire from his brother, was brought down by police shots to the unarmoured legs. He was tried in October 1880 at the Melbourne Supreme Court under Sir Redmond Barry, was convicted of the murder of Sergeant Michael Kennedy at Stringybark Creek, and was hanged at the Melbourne Gaol on the eleventh of November 1880, three weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday.

The Glenrowan armour is held at the Victoria State Library at Melbourne, the most-visited single artefact in any Australian museum collection. Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series of twenty-seven paintings (1946 to 1947, now at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra) is the central modern Australian artwork. Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang won the Booker Prize in 2001 on the strength of its rendering of the Jerilderie Letter prose into a sustained novel-length narrator's voice. The Kelly name in modern Australian folk memory carries the weight of Glenrowan and the dawn stand in the armour, the central single Australian foundation legend of working-Irish-Catholic identification against established colonial authority.