[1] The Melbourne Argus reported Mrs Gill, the printer's wife, as saying that Kelly said to her: 'All I want him for is to see him to explain it ['this letter, the history of my life'] to him': qtd in [G. Wilson Hall], The Kelly Gang; or, The Outlaws of the Wombat Ranges (Melbourne: privately published, 1879), p. 138.

[2] Kelly Collection, VPRO, Melbourne: this and other Kelly items at VPRO are also available in facsimile and in transcription at  http://nedonline.imagineering.net.au/main.htm

[3] The Jerilderie Letter at SLV is MS 13361; the website address is www.slv.vic.gov.au. Ian Jones had published two pages in facsimile in 1992 in The Friendship that Destroyed Ned Kelly (Port Melbourne). An edition of the Letter prepared by Joe Crowley as part of a BA Honours thesis at the University of Queensland appeared in the 'new' edition of Ian Jones, Ned Kelly: A Short Life (South Melbourne: Lothian, 2003). This was based on some limited access to the original prior to its being turned over to SLV. At a ceremony at Jerilderie in  February 2004 (the 125th anniversary), Jones revealed the previously undeclared identity of the anonymous donor: his wife and research-collaborator Bronwyn Binns, who died in 2003. Max Brown, Australian Son: The Story of Ned Kelly (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1948).

[4]  Alex McDermott's edition, The Jerilderie Letter (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2001) took its text from the SLV website transcription. Hanlon transcription: sold 31 July 2001 by Christie's of Melbourne to the National Museum of Australia, Canberra: collection no. 2001.15.4.

[5]Jerilderie Letter, ed. McDermott, misreads the Letter's manuscript as 'bullock's skin' (as had the government clerk's copy and thus Max Brown's transcription).

[6] Journalist J. M. S. Davies's 'The Kelly's Are Out: New Kelly Gang History' (serialised November–December 1930, Melbourne Herald) bowdlerises the last phrase to: 'like grass in a paddock' (28 November 1930, p. 15). Davies's history also appeared in the Adelaide Register as 'New History of the Kelly Gang'.

[7] The McDermott edition misreads as '...and my orders...obeyed.'.

[8] Kelly Collection, VPRO, Melbourne.

[9] Herald, 18 December 1878; Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 19 December 1878.

[10] The foul papers must also have been drawn upon by the sympathiser who sent a 16-page letter to the Melbourne Herald which published substantial sections of it on 4 July 1879; and the Beechworth Advertiser reprinted the article on 12 July: see Ian Jones, Ned Kelly: A Short Life (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Lothian, 1995), pp. 202 and 374. This is the standard biography. Much of the biographical and historical information in this Introduction comes from it.

[11]  Qtd Jones, Short Life (1995), p. 314. Writing this letter himself was out of the question due to gunshot injuries Kelly had sustained at Glenrowan: his right hand had been crippled and his left arm withered from the injuries.  This letter deals mainly with the events at Glenrowan.  In Ned Kelly: A Century of Acrimony (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1980), John Meredith and Bill Scott conveniently present Kelly's nine known letters.   A reading of all the letters shows the freshness and lack of inhibition of the Jerilderie Letter. Those prepared in gaol prior to his hanging represent a continuation of a habit of composition – dictation – witnessed by the Cameron and Jerilderie Letters.  The voice is less filtered than in the letter prepared by Gaunson (dealt with below), but is rendered in conventional if less elaborate syntax and with correct punctuation.  (I have not compared the original manuscripts, each of which Kelly has signed with an X and is countersigned as attested.) Presumably these appeals for clemency would at least have been read back to him before signature and may represent fair copies, the culmination of a longer process.

[12] Two school inspector's records show that, for his age (10 and 11), he was literate in terms of the expectations of the time (Jones, Short Life, pp. 18–19); but his schooling was brief and it is likely that his capacity to read, as a man, outstripped his capacity to write. His only extant piece of writing, a letter written the age of 15, is halting and misspelt, barely literate (facsimile in ibid., p. 57). If the 'penman' Joe Byrne's functional but error-ridden standard of literacy in the Jerilderie Letter is the touchstone, then clearly Ned could not write an extended piece of literate prose.

[13] See page 18; and Jones, Short Life (1995), p. 101.

[14] The speech, as reported by Mr Tarleton the bank manager at Jerilderie, is retailed in Wilson Hall, The Kelly Gang, pp. 139–40.

[15] For a transcription of the courtroom conversation, including Barry's puzzlement about the attractions of the outlaw life and the 'spell cast over the people of this particular district' by Kelly's gang, see Justin Corfield, The Ned Kelly Encyclopaedia (Melbourne: Lothian, 2003), pp. 477–9. Kelly replied to Barry's pronouncement of his sentence ('. . . hanged by the neck until you be dead . . . May the Lord have mercy on your soul.'):  'I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there, where I go.' Barry, already ill, would die twelve days after Kelly was executed.