5 - The Medievalism of Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly

Summary

The story of Ned Kelly has been part of the Australian cinematic experi¬ence since the early days of cinema. His image, captured in photographs and illustrations, had already been romanticized to depict a national hero, but the films contributed to the continued mythologizing of what has been referred to as a ‘quintessentially Australian story’. This valorization of a criminal has not always been well received, and dissenting opinions by critics such as Graham Seal and Doug Morrissey point towards the significant body of historical records to in-dicate that Ned Kelly and his gang were violent criminals and not the heroes they have become in the public imagination. These objections are largely ignored within modern popular culture where Ned's heroic status is stoically maintained. From being the subject of a sympathetic portrayal in a Booker Man Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey, to being showcased as a national symbol in the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony, the historical Ned has been side-lined for the charming battler Ned, a symbol of the Australian spirit. Historian Geoffrey Serle suggested that the Kelly Gang were ‘the last expression of the lawless frontier in what was be¬coming a highly organized and educated society, the last protest of the mighty bush now tethered with iron rails to Melbourne and the world’. By describing Ned in this way, Serle evokes a romanticized Wild West narrative, and certainly the archetype of the bushranger and the western outlaw have a lot in common, not least that they tend to pin their claim to sympathy on a link to the medieval outlaw, Robin Hood. M.I. Ebbutt, a commentator from the early 1900s, states:

it was therefore natural in these latter days that a class of men should arise to avail themselves of the unique opportunities of the time – men who, loving liberty and hating oppression, took the law into their own hands and executed a rough and ready justice between the rich and the poor which embodied the best traditions of knight-errantry, whilst they themselves lived a free and merry life on the tolls they exacted from their wealthy victims. Such a man may well have been the original Robin Hood, a man who, when once he has captured the popular imagination, soon acquired heroic reputation and was credited with every daring deed and every magnanimous action in two centuries of ‘freebooting’.