Such is Life

Frank Devine in yesterdays Australian

AS somebody who considers Ned Kelly a murderous thug and an embarrassment to us Irish, and deplores his counterfeit image as a romantic Australian hero, I am delighted to learn the cops are still on his trail. One cop, especially.

So am I. Forever romanticised by the literati, I decided years ago that Kelly was nothing more than a murdering thug and deserved no hero status. Devines article tells of an ex-AFP Detective, Martin Leonard, who has pursued the real story of Kelly with a passion.

….towards the end of 1995, he read Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. This set him to thinking that somebody should write a book about the fabrication of Ned Kelly. Why not himself?

With a months leave he established himself at the National Library and produced a 9000 word interim report that has been recently aired in the December issue of the Australian Police Journal. Amongst other matters Leonard garners contradictory evidence on the matter of the Policeman Kelly murdered;

Kelly claimed he killed Kennedy as a mercy, because he was in agony from multiple gunshot wounds. This account has been disseminated in Kelly fables. But Leonard cites the report of Dr Samuel Reynolds, who inspected Kennedy’s decomposing body on the site five days after his death. He concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a single shot and had been shot from close range standing up. One of his ears was missing. Reynolds was equivocal about the cause of this but an Argus reporter who inspected the body was certain the ear had been sawn off with a knife. Leonard canvasses the likelihood that Kennedy was handcuffed to a tree, tortured and then killed.

Fits the Kelly image better than the one we’ve been fed for a very long time. I look forward to the book and in the meantime if anyone can point me to a free copy of the Australian Police Journal article I figure it would be a good read.