In an odd coincidence, Ireland was on the receiving end yesterday of separate addresses from not one but two famously uncompromising Australians. Prime minister John Howard delivered his in the Dáil, an event covered elsewhere in this newspaper. But being unable to come here in person, for obvious reasons, Ned Kelly made his presentation in writing, writes Frank McNally.
The Jerilderie Letter, part of which has just gone on display at the James Joyce "House of the Dead" in Dublin, has been called Kelly's "manifesto". Not that he was planning to stand for election when he wrote it. In fact, the 56-page document was composed shortly before he robbed a bank in the town of the same name, and was intended for publication only in the local paper.
The aim was partly to explain the circumstances that had turned a minor bushranger into the most wanted man in Australia; partly to predict the consequences (blood-curdling) if the authorities did not relent in what he saw as their persecution of his family and of the dirt-poor settlers of North-East Victoria in general.
In the event, the editor opted to leave town when the Kelly gang arrived, so the letter was not published in the little that remained of the gang-leader's lifetime. It's doubtful whether it would have made any difference anyway, because by 1879 Kelly and the law seemed bound for final confrontation. Indeed the bank robberies were planned partly to fund the home-made armour that the gang felt necessary for its future dealings with the police.
Inverting the universal prayer for peace, Kelly later turned ploughshares (stolen, as it happened) into 80-pound suits of war. And he was wearing the iconic iron costume when, 16 months after Jerilderie, he walked out of the besieged Glenrowan Inn for his final stand. Police bullets bounced off the armour, but the suit didn't cover everything. Shot 28 times from the knees down, there was still enough of him left to hang in November 1880.
The Jerilderie letter is not quite the Book of Kells. But it's a treasured historical document, on permanent display in Melbourne, where the State Library of Victoria turns the pages regularly to minimise exposure to light. The four pages on show here are the first to leave Australia. And perhaps mindful of the slight damage inflicted on the Book of Kells when it toured in the opposite direction a few years ago, the curators are taking no chances with the change of climate. They left the pages in their travel case overnight on Monday, to introduce them gently to Irish humidity, before putting them in their glass case yesterday, when they temporarily joined other artefacts in the ongoing "Ned at the Dead" exhibition.
The Joyce House is an apt venue, if only because the Jerilderie Letter is written in stream-of-consciousness style, largely free of punctuation. This was mainly due to a shortage of education on the part of Kelly, who left school at 11 after his father died, and of his friend Joe Byrne, who wrote the document at his leader's dictation. But in its many flamboyant passages, ranging as they do from fierce righteousness to equally fierce humour, there is an unmistakable voice. Peter Carey heard enough of it to develop a full-length fictionalised autobiography, the Booker-winning True History of the Kelly Gang.
Kelly certainly had a fine line in insult. At one point in the letter, he complains that his mother has had to endure "the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big, ugly, fat-necked wombat-headed, big-bellied, magpie-legged, narrow-hipped, splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords, which is better known as officers of justice or Victorian Police" (commas and hyphens are all mine). Elsewhere he describes a policeman as "the greatest horse-stealer with the exception of myself and George King [Kelly's step-father] that I know of".
It's only fair to point out that, as well as having a lively sense of humour, he was also a killer. Back in Australia, the jury is still not completely in on whether Kelly was a common thug or a tragic hero, backed into a corner by poverty until he lashed out. The verdict tends ever more towards the latter conclusion. But his politics are also open to debate. Some historians think he may have had a plan to declare an independent republic of north-east Victoria. Apart from railing against the oppression of Irish Catholics at home and abroad, however, the intentions expressed in the Jerilderie Letter are vague.
This makes Kelly all the more attractive to a wide range of left-leaning political movements in Australia, which have no doubt that if he were alive today he wouldn't be voting for the Liberals. Last August, peace activists in fancy dress had Ned Kelly "arresting" John Howard outside the Sydney Opera House on charges of selling out Australia. And even here, Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins invoked Kelly's name while failing to persuade the Dáil to condemn the visiting prime minister.
John Howard flew home to Australia last night. The Kelly letter stays until Saturday.