introduction in brief

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.

CONTINUE TO SECTION 3 IN INTRODUCTION IN FULL

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).