introduction in full

1. The importance of the Jerilderie Letter

When the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne on 11 November 1880 a baffling and frustrating reign of outlaw terror (as the authorities saw it) finally came to an end. Together with his gang, Kelly had stolen horses, robbed two banks and killed three policemen. As an Irish-Australian, Kelly saw this villainy as an inevitable response to injustices dealt out to his kind by the Anglican political and social ascendancy in the colonies. With this stand and because of his daring actions, he cultivated a certain popularity around the country and, temporarily, had at his disposal an armed following in north-eastern Victoria. A previously unheard-of amount of public money was expended on his capture, and even while the months of bumbling and incompetent pursuit of Kelly and his gang were in progress an existing play was hurriedly altered so as to deal with the gang's exploits and retitled for the Melbourne stage. Some of Kelly's own writings and speeches were reported at second hand or summarised in newspapers. After his trial and sentencing, thirty thousand people in Melbourne signed a petition begging the Governor for a reprieve – but to no avail. After Kelly's execution, bushranger plays were banned for fear of public unrest. This delayed the public myth-making till the appearance of Kelly Gang plays on the stage from 1897, but in the following decades bushranger films, whether or not about Ned Kelly, were regularly banned.

The early fascination with outlawry in Australia, which in fact preceded Kelly, and admiration for its daring principal exponent began to re-emerge but in a different form in the 1940s with Sidney Nolan's series of Ned Kelly paintings, Douglas Stewart's play Ned Kelly and a revived interest in early bushrangers. It was related to the renewed fascination with the Australian 1890s, especially the myth of the stoic bushman of the outback. The appearance in 1929 of J. J. Kenneally's The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and their Pursuers, the first sympathetic account, had signalled the turn, and, during 1930, newspapers in Melbourne and Adelaide serialised Kelly's self-defence, his Jerilderie Letter, its first public appearance, within a popular-historical narrative about the gang's exploits.

The newspaper printings (which adapted or bowdlerised the Letter's wording at will), and then the more influential printing in Max Brown's biography Australian Son in 1948, were not derived from the original but from a government clerk's copy of the Jerilderie Letter that contained some misreadings and normalised the presentation, making the Letter seem more conventionally literate than it in fact was.

Misrepresentation has been the hallmark of many official and historiographical dealings with outlaws, and although – as recent museum exhibitions and biographic and folkloric scholarship have shown – we now have considerable historical distance from 1880, the phenomenon of outlawry and what it represents have not entirely subsided into a safe emotional neutrality. From an editorial viewpoint fidelity to the historical document, in this case the Jerilderie Letter, must be maintained or every interpretation based on it is corrupted. Outlawry must be allowed its own graphic forms; or, at least, what forms it does take should not be misrepresented, if only for fear that historical evidence will be suppressed with it.

2. Aim of the electronic edition and collaborative study

Making an accurate edition of the original Jerilderie Letter publically available has not been a feasible aim until recently because, until 1992, it was assumed lost and even then its whereabouts were not disclosed. But ever since the State Library of Victoria came into possession of the Letter in 2000 and almost immediately posted an electronic facsimile on the internet, together with a hastily assembled transcription, the prospect of moving towards an accurate scholarly edition became real.

The present electronic edition, prepared by Paul Eggert with initial assistance from Joe Crowley, is designed to answer that need but in a way that will allow for a growing body of elucidation and interpretation of it to take place in an electronic environment while simultaneously guaranteeing the authenticity of its text.

Why is this important? Printed texts are fixed; a new act of typesetting and printing is required to bring about textual change. Provided interpreters cite their edition accurately there is no need for concern. Not so in the electronic realm, however, where textual alteration is nearly effortless, where copying a file from one file format to another can bring about unintended change and where authenticity may depend on the precise configuration of the proprietary software and hardware being used. (And all this assumes that the file has actually remained accessible over an extended period of time.)

The problems of archiving and access in relation to electronic files are being addressed by various public and private bodies. The Electronic Collaboration in Humanities Research project is aimed, on the other hand, at guaranteeing the precise textual authenticity of texts that are subject to a continuing tradition of interpretation.

The standard computing paradigm is to introduce interpretation into the text file itself: to mark it up according to a declared 'grammar' for the electronic document. This method is designed to promote rigour and versatility of later use, but it runs the risk of inadvertent corruption of the text. The Electronic Collaboration project in contrast stores interpretation in external, 'stand-off' files. When one or more is introduced into the text file (for instance, to modify its graphic appearance, to add explanatory notes or to elucidate a difficult or contested passage) an authenticity check is automatically carried out. The introduction of the stand-off files is temporary and the underlying, basic textual transcription is unaffected. (For a technical description of the process, which is called Just In Time Markup, see our papers.)

The result of this approach is to enable the collaborative interpretation of an electronically stored textual transcription to accrete naturally over time as new insights are reached or disputed – without danger to the text's authenticity. In its initial state, the Jerilderie Letter e-edition and study contains interpretative files contributed by:

•     John McQuilton (historical and biographical commentary)

•     David Lee (linguistic register of the Letter)

•     Paul Eggert (textual commentary)

•     independent scholar Joe Crowley (general)

Interpretation in the print realm does not normally concern itself with the appearance of the text: it is left to physical bibliographers and editors to do that, and what they do precedes the publication and therefore the interpretation. For the electronic realm we need to expand our notion of what interpretation is, since all files need interpretation to be viewed at all on a browser. Interpretation is therefore conventionally taken to mean manipulation of parts or all of the file: its appearance and its enrichment by, say, linking to other relevant files. The Electronic Collaboration system accommodates this basic form of interpretation and deals equally well with higher-level commentary on individual passages and with the reporting, say, of newly discovered or newly relevant facts. But because the logic of the project is to be work-centred it is unknown as yet whether it will evolve also into a suitable publishing vehicle for the more wide-ranging interpretative essay of which the journal or electronic journal is presently the normal site.

A logical development of the project will, however, be the provision of the alternative versions of the Jerilderie Letter (described in section 3), each of which has its historical importance or interest, together with a provision for the automatic collation of their variant wordings.

3. What is the Jerilderie Letter?

Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter was an answer to the colonial press, which had painted him as a notorious villain after his shooting dead three pursuing policemen at Stringybark Creek in north-eastern Victoria. This had followed an incident when a drunken Trooper Fitzpatrick went to the Kelly farmhouse to arrest Ned's brother Dan on a charge of horse-stealing, according to oral tradition molested their sister Kate Kelly, was possibly shot in the wrist by Ned, promised not to prosecute, but soon after laid a charge of attempted murder against Ned, his brother and mother. This was in April 1878; Ned ran for it. He had already served two gaol sentences but had been attempting to stay out of trouble. His mother was now imprisoned on the attempted murder charge. This was the last straw, and so he turned to horse stealing on a large scale. His offer to give himself up in return for her release was ignored. From then on, he was on the run with his gang; the murder of the three policemen at Stringybark Creek followed; then came two daring and well-planned bank robberies at Euroa and Jerilderie; then the gang's last, defiant stand against the police at Glenrowan in the armour they had fashioned from the steel mouldboards of ploughs; then Ned's capture at Glenrowan, trial, and finally his hanging.

In the Jerilderie Letter, he wanted to defend his own actions and to expose the corruption of police such as Fitzpatrick in the small country towns: police who, he believed, worked in collaboration with the rich, large landholding class (the so-called squatters) to frustrate the legitimate aspirations of small landholding selectors. Recent drought had increased the pressures. In this situation, horse- and cattle-duffing (rustling) and other forms of small-scale illegal activity were fatally attractive. He was frustrated; he and his class were oppressed. He found ready support amongst them once he was outlawed, but he could not get his voice heard.

He and his gang rode into the town of Jerilderie in southern New South Wales in February 1879. Apart from holding up the whole town and robbing the bank with both flair and effectiveness, and probably with some at least temporary gratitude from those whose mortgages the bank held but which he tore up, Kelly also wanted to see the printer of the local newspaper. This man had been editorialising about the town's insufficient number of policemen needed to protect it against the recent upsurge in bushranger activity. Kelly not only substantiated his fears but wanted him to publish a 56-page manuscript. He said he had some instructions to give the printer, who had slipped away.[1] The bank's teller Mr Living offered to pass on the manuscript, and Kelly trusted him to do so. In fact, he passed it on to the Victorian police as soon as he could, riding out of town that day for Deniliquin where he could catch the train to Melbourne. On his way to Deniliquin he stayed overnight at the hotel of a Mr Hanlon who made his own copy of the manuscript and retained it. In Melbourne, by 1880, the original manuscript had been copied again by a government clerk so it could be used as evidence in Kelly's trial. That copy, still at the Victorian Public Record Office,[2] became the basis for all publications of the Jerilderie Letter until 2000 when the original manuscript was handed over to the State Library of Victoria. Within ten days it was published on the Library's website and attracted 10,000 hits within a week. The rapid transcription of the manuscript by library staff was achieved by scanning to computer the edition of the government clerk's copy of the Letter published as an appendix to Max Brown's account of Ned Kelly in 1948, and then correcting the transcription against the manuscript.[3] This transcription appeared in printed form in 2001, the same year that the Hanlon copy surfaced, went to auction and was purchased by the National Museum of Australia.[4]

The original manuscript is written in a clear hand and shows some other signs of being a fair copy. The hand has very similar though not identical characteristics to an extant letter written and signed by Joe Byrne, one of the gang. He had had the benefit of a few years of schooling and was considered something of a penman. Ned Kelly himself had had less, and the only extant letter signed by him has very different characteristics. The Jerilderie Letter has almost no paragraphing, and although its spelling is only occasionally awry, the writer has little notion of punctuation whether rhetorical or syntactic. The narrative is roughly chronological but often goes off on tangents, and the writer has little notion of how much assistance readers will need to understand the associative connections it makes and the people it suddenly introduces.

It is a baffling document if read without editorial assistance and historical and biographical annotation. But the struggle of a voice to be heard, to which its mangled syntax and bumblingly amateur presentation poignantly testify, is clear enough. We don't know what instructions Ned Kelly wanted to give the printer, what licence to change, correct or regularise its text he would have required or allowed; but in view of the effort that the composition of an 8,000-word piece of prose would have involved and in view of his own earlier and later efforts in this regard, we can be fairly sure that Kelly wanted people to be able to read his self-defence in his own words.

4. What the Jerilderie Letter is about

Ned Kelly starts the narrative with an incident when he is still a boy. He is accused, perhaps unfairly, by a travelling salesman (or hawker) McCormack of taking a carthorse and using it to help a friend of Ned's called Gould, another hawker who resented the arrival of the McCormacks in his territory but whose cart had become stuck in the mud during very wet weather: 'the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places' (p. 1: references are to the present edition). They returned the horse, but later Mrs McCormack 'turned on me . . . I did not say much to the woman as my mother was present but that same day me and my uncle was cutting calves Gould wrapped up a note and a pair of the calves testicles and gave them to me to give them to Mrs McCormack . . . consequently McCormack said he would summons me . . . he said I was a liar & he could welt me or any of my breed I was about 14 years of age but accepted the challenge and dismounting when Mrs McCormack struck my horse in the flank with a bullock's shin it jumped forward and my fist came in collision with McCormack's nose and caused him to lose his equillibrium and fall postrate' (pp. 3–4).[5] The net result of all this was that Ned found himself serving a six-month sentence in prison. He was only fifteen years old.

From then on he was a marked man from a dubious Irish family that the police would keep a close eye on. It is to what he regards as the vindictive behaviour of the police that Kelly draws attention again and again in the Jerilderie Letter. Soon after having served this first sentence there is a scene where a Constable Hall – who, unbeknown to Kelly, wants to arrest him – grabs him, finds himself in the dust, aims his revolver at the young Ned and pulls the trigger. The gun misfires: 'I threw big cowardly Hall on his belly I straddled him and rooted both spurs into his thighs he roared like a big calf attacked by dogs and shifted several yards of the fence I got his hands at the back of his neck and trid to make him let the revolver go but he stuck to it like grim death to a dead volunteer he called for assistance to a man named Cohen and Barnett, Lewis, Thompson, Jewitt two blacksmiths who was looking on I dare not strike any of them as I was bound to keep the peace [as a condition of his recent release from prison] or I could have spread those curs like dung in a paddock' (pp. 9–10).[6]

The prevailing tone of the Letter is one of indignation; some of its invective is memorable; yet it is relieved at moments by humour: Fitzpatrick, Kelly remarks dryly at one point, 'is very subject to fainting' (p. 36), which is of course a jibe at his courage and therefore at his manhood. But despite being if anything over-endowed with a stereotypically Irish sentimental connection to his mother and despite being a man who was slow to take revenge, it is clear that something clicked in Ned's soul when she was gaoled after the Fitzpatrick incident: 'the Police got great credit and praise in the papers for arresting the mother of 12 children one an infant on her breast' (p. 24).

His objection to the police throughout is on the personal level: he despises them first and foremost as men. He dwells at length on the Fitzpatrick incident and then on the pathetic efforts of the highly paid police who have been chasing him and his gang, prepared to shoot him dead without even knowing him. Our last few TV generations have perhaps become too hardened to the sight of violence and too used to the anonymity of big-city living to appreciate this objection. Yet there is something old-fashioned, but at the same time honest and direct, even admirable, about it. Ned Kelly could not think structurally about the nature of social oppression or, except in a fairly crude way, strategically. He is at the very opposite end of the political scale to a Talleyrand: he is more in the tradition of boozers who savour their grudges in the pub but never get to the point of action – except that Kelly was soon to take the next decisive step.

In the Letter he warns that, in the absence of justice from the government, he may be 'compelled to show some colonial stratagem' (p. 19). At the end of the Letter, having advised the rich squatters around Greta to sell out and donate a percentage of their money to the widow and orphan fund, he warns: 'neglect this and abide by the consequences, which shall be worse than the rust in the wheat in Victoria or the druth of a dry season to the grasshoppers in New South Wales I do not wish to give the order full force without giving timely warning, but I am a widows son outlawed And my orders must be obeyed' (p. 56).[7]

By now he must have been pondering the idea of moving beyond bank robberies to a full-scale confrontation with the police; he may already have hit upon the idea of achieving a technological superiority over the police by the use of the armour; and conceivably, although there is no documentary evidence to prove it, he may have been intending to take his next opportunity to declare a republic for north-eastern Victoria. There were only the two bank robberies, and then there was Glenrowan, which was his attempt to lure the police into a trap and gun them down. He had had the rails lifted at Glenrowan so that the special police train would be derailed. Thomas Curnow managed to warn the police of this, which led directly to the brutally successful siege by the police of the Glenrowan pub where the gang was holed up. Kelly had armed supporters close at hand ready to go into action, but he did not use them. The threat of an insurrection continued for some months after his hanging. No wonder the Letter was suppressed after Living brought it to Melbourne. It would not be published for fifty years.

5. How the Jerilderie Letter was composed

It has been assumed that Ned Kelly dictated the letter to Joe Byrne, and that therefore it is still essentially in his voice; but the situation cannot be so simple. On the occasion of the Gang's earlier bank robbery at Euroa, Byrne was seen by witnesses to be writing in red ink a long document while the gang waited at the Faithfull's Creek homestead that they had taken over prior to the robbery. This stint of writing would have produced one or both of the two copies of what is now known as the Euroa or Cameron Letter. It was sent to Donald Cameron MLA whose question in Parliament on 14 November 1878 criticising the police conduct of the search for the Kelly gang must have given hope to Kelly that Cameron would see justice done, possibly by having the Letter published. The second copy went to a superintendent of police, John Sadleir. The Cameron copy was itself copied by a government clerk, and this copy is the only one now extant.[8] This Letter is about 3,500 words long.

In the event, Cameron was advised by the police not to allow it be published; but it was shown to reporters, and one newspaper, the Melbourne Herald, did paraphrase it at length, and this report was re-published by a Beechworth newspaper the next day.[9] However, Kelly's criticisms of the police were omitted, and his bid to get the Jerilderie Letter published probably arose from this frustration. Doubtless the authorities would have seen the suppression of the Cameron Letter as only prudent.

Comparison of the text of the Cameron Letter to that of the Jerilderie Letter reveals much common material and similar wordings. The likelihood is, therefore, that there was a rough copy – or at least, in editorial parlance, foul papers – from which the Cameron Letter was either developed by Joe or copied out. The foul papers must have been retained by the gang but reworked, possibly orally, and then probably by Ned and Joe in collaboration, to produce the Jerilderie Letter.[10] This letter can be said to embody Kelly's most developed intentions for the text of his self-defence. The voice offers itself as Kelly's: it is his self-defence, no one else's; and it is abundantly clear that he wanted his own words published, at the point of a gun if necessary. This is authorship, close and personal. In a letter to the Governor of Victoria, dealing mainly with the events at Glenrowan, that he dictated six days before he was hanged in November 1880, Ned Kelly concluded: 'I should have made a Statement of my whole Career but my time is So short on earth that I have to make the best of it to prepare myself for the other world.'[11] His Jerilderie Letter had not been published nor called as evidence at his trial.

Even ignoring Joe Byrne's role in it, the Jerilderie Letter cannot be regarded as self-expression pure and simple. It was meant to be an intervention in a print culture. Semi-literate Ned was a trusting man who granted print more power and more purity of purpose than it actually had.[12] He knew he was the subject of descriptions and listings in the Police Gazette; and at one stage before being outlawed he had called in at the Wangaratta office of the Ovens and Murray Advertiser to complain about the contents of a paragraph dealing with him and his friends.[13] He became especially bitter about how he was characterised in the newspapers after the Stringybark Creek massacre of the three policemen. He evidently believed that people only had to be acquainted with the facts of an unjust situation to demand that redress be taken. And he took the opportunity of both the Euroa bank robbery and the one at Jerilderie to deliver long, impromptu speeches to the people whom he had bailed up until the robberies were completed. On both occasions the gang were, rather like actors, dressed up in disguises for the occasion: it was almost an entertainment. He went over much the same material as in the Jerilderie Letter, according to the witnesses, in some of whom he inspired admiration despite their being forcibly detained by the gang.[14]

Ned Kelly lived at the interface between oral and literate cultures: he knew he had to cover both bases as well as he could; but at least in the oral culture he was not at a disadvantage. The court recording of his conversation at the age of only twenty-five with Chief Justice Redmond Barry after Barry had just sentenced him to death shows that Kelly could handle himself well and with dignity, despite the gravity of the situation.[15] He inspired loyalty amongst the members of his gang, his wider family clan, and amongst the poor settlers in north-eastern Victoria where he lived and roamed.

PAUL EGGERT

AUTHOR BIO

PAUL EGGERT (p.eggert@adfa.edu.au) is director of the Australian Scholarly Editions Centre at the University of New South Wales, Canberra where he is Professor of English (asecentre.org).