Ned Kelly

"I give fair warning to all those who has reason to fear me to sell out and give ten pounds out of every hundred towards the widow and orphan fund and do not attempt to reside in Victoria but as short a time as possible after reading this notice, neglect this and abide by the consequences, which shall be worse than the rust in the wheat of 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."

"Any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the police in any way whatever or employing any person whom they know to be a detective, or cad or those who would be so depraved as to take blood money, will be outlawed and declared unfit to be allowed human burial. Their property either consumed or confiscated and them and theirs and all belonging to them exterminated of the face of the earth, the enemy I cannot catch myself. I shall give a payable reward."

"You are committing a manifest injustice in imprisoning so many innocent people, just because they are supposed to be friendly to us. There is not the least foundation for the charge of aiding and abetting us against any of them, and you may know this is correct, or we would not be obtaining our food as usual, since they have been arrested."

"It will pay Government to give those people who are suffering innocence, justice and liberty. if not I will be compelled to show some colonial stratagem which will open the eyes of not only the Victoria Police and inhabitants but also the whole British army and no doubt they will acknowledge their hounds were barking at the wrong stump."

"I was a school kid at Jerilderie when Ned Kelly and his gang took possession of the township ... Like all the other youngsters in the place, I was keen to get a glimpse of the famous outlaw. ... I saw him come out of [the hotel] and squat on the verandahs edge to have a smoke. He beckoned me over, asked me my name and so forth―and then he gave me a short lecture. I can assure you, a Sunday school superintendent couldnt have given me sounder advice as to human conduct. ... He gave me a shilling, I ought to have kept it."

"The resurgence of the Ned Kelly legend ... stresses the enigma of why one of the most decent, law-abiding peoples in the world should make a national hero of one of the most cold-blooded, egotistical, and utterly self-centred criminals who ever decorated the end of a rope in an Australian jail. His frankness in turpitude, his utter vengefulness, his cruelty, his cold-blooded lack of regret at the wiping out of the lives of decent men can only repel even an unfastidious mind. Yet his spirit has been extolled as the spirit of Australia, his animal lawlessness has been held up as a renewal of the spirit of Eureka."

"I have been wronged and my mother and four or five men lagged innocent and is my brothers and sisters and my mother not to be pitied also, who have no alternative but to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed, big bellied, magpie legged, narrow hipped, splaw-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords, known as officers of justice or Victorian police who some calls honest gentlemen."

"I told [Kelly] that [Sergeant Kennedy and Constable Scanlon] were both countrymen and co-religionists of his own. ... This statement ... was not strictly true, for Kelly was Australian born, but his father came from Tipperary and his mother from Armagh, and I thought he might be possessed of some of that patriotic-religious feeling which is such a bond of sympathy amongst the Irish people. My opinion is that he possessed none of this feeling. On the question of religion I believe he was apathetic, and like a great many young bushmen he prided himself more on his Australian birth than he did upon his extraction from any particular race. A favourite expression of his was: "I will let them see what one native [native-born Australian] can do."

"Neds story falls on that universal fault line that makes someone a rebel or a freedom fighter to one group and an outlaw or a terrorist to another. He is regularly attacked as a thief and murderer. Much less regularly is it recalled that a government inquiry the year after the Kelly outbreak demoted or suspended most of the police involved. But what makes Ned a legend is not that everyone sees him the same—its that everyone sees him. Like a bushfire on the horizon casting its red glow into the night."

"Everyone looks on me like a black snake."

"My mother, with an infant baby, and brother-in-law and another neighbour, were taken for aiding and abetting and attempting to murder [Fitzpatrick], a charge for which they are as purely innocent as the child unborn."

"The public could not do any more than take firearms and assisting the police as they have done, but by the light that shines pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be cool to what pleasure I will give some of them and any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the Police ..."