Ned’s Women: A Fractured Love Story
Clare Wright and Alex McDermott
August 17
In the June edition of Meanjin, Clare Wright and Alex McDermott take apart our national myths to reveal the women of the Ned Kelly legend – Ann Jones, one of our earliest female publications and owner of the Glenrowan Inn, and Ellen Kelly, Ned’s tough and beloved mother. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page.
Just as Hollywood has given us a Ned who looks awfully like Heath Ledger with mutton chops, so the dream factory has also taken care of his love life. Enter Naomi Watts: a golden-haired girl with nice dresses and an upturned button nose, daughter of a rich, much hated squatter. Thanks to the classic costume drama money shot, we have Ned and his fictitious lady lover in a passionate embrace, set against the backdrop of rugged bush terrain and a perpetually setting sun. Heath needs Naomi to sustain the prevalent fable of Australian eroticism: the refined, stuffy young aristocrat has her narrow existence, lonely heart and bridled libido liberated by the rough bushman nomad drover Irish-Aussie fair-dinkum hero type. Lady Chatterley’s lover transplanted to the Antipodes. History porn.
But how’s this for a dramatic set up? We’re inside the Glenrowan Inn, scene of the Kelly Gang’s ‘last stand’, with 25-year old Ned about to climb into his armour, having a dance and a cuddle with a woman old enough to be his mother. The woman Ned’s got in his arms has stopped the prisoners from escaping. ‘You can’t leave yet,’ she tells them at the door. ‘Ned’s going to give his lecture.’ Who’s running the hold-up here? The widow’s son outlawed or the tough old bird handing out the brandy and gin?
You might not get it past a Hollywood executive, but the truth of the matter is that no apocryphal squatter’s daughter is ever going to get near the surprising, sordid and subversive truth of what happened in the Glenrowan Inn on the night of 28 June 1880, of what made Ned Kelly and his world tick.
The significant women in this story were not refined, but rough. Not young, but old enough to bear the scars of thorny experience. Not lonely but swathed in community and kin (at times to their advantage, at other times to their great detriment). Not sexually repressed but sexually active, expressive and even aggressive.
Any truly gutsy Kelly story is going to want to do something pretty wild with Ann Jones, the pragmatic proprietress of the Glenrowan Inn, and Ellen Kelly, Ned’s beloved mother. Their origins may have been practically identical—illiterate, poor Irish Catholic girls—but their paths diverged radically. Their differing yet intersecting lives illustrate the extraordinary richness of colonial experience, where people might encounter crushing poverty or blinding opportunity, and commonly a violent amalgam of both.
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Comments
18 Aug 10 at 12:03
I love this account of Ellen Kelly and Ann Jones and the Glenrowan siege and its aftermath. If only the movies would move past the stereotypes and do justice to the real stories. The emotion is all there – all those children and babies dying – and the swashbuckle is there too – horses and guns and gold. I’ve been fascinated by Kate Kelly and would love to hear more about her. Thanks for a riveting read!
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