The Kelly Gang Unmasked / by Ian McFarlane

[Kim Allen Scott]

One thing about the outlaw Ned Kelly; few people are neutral in their opinion of him.  Some, like myself, have a juvenile fascination with his legendary exploits and tend to find something heroic in what one writer has described as a “homicidal clown.”  Others dismiss him as a bloodthirsty thug, like my dear wife who consistently refers to the image on my Paddy’s Market souvenir t-shirts as “stupidhead.”  Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between, but after reading this book I am beginning to come around to my wife’s assessment of the Iron Outlaw.  Ian McFarlane has put together a remarkable study here that draws on his twenty-one year’s experience at the Victoria Public Records Office.  McFarlane views the Kelly story from the position of an archivist, and as such he has little patience with those legendary episodes which have no documentation within a recognized repository.  His effective critique is that most of the Kelly story simply cannot be substantiated by any documentary evidence, and what evidence remains puts Ned and his mates in a very, very bad light.  As an archivist myself, I found McFarlane’s approach to the story very compelling, and I think this book should be required reading for anyone who is interested in Australia’s most famous bushranger.  Perhaps you will come away from the book agreeing that Ned was, indeed, a “stupidhead.”