When I close my eyes and picture an Aussie outback bushranger like Ned, I see just another grubby white dude, writes Eliza Reilly | THE VERDICT
The 1870s. Even though everyone looks super bored in photos, there were actually heaps of things going on. Like floggings, smallpox and making new friends, then killing those friends on the front lines of the Frontier Wars. Also, bushrangers! Australia was teeming with those bad boys of the bush, and frankly we’ve had a real cultural stiffy for them ever since. None more so than Ned Kelly.
A fitting 2022 Ned Kelly-esque equivalent would be that kid who tagged their name on a bus stop with a “cool S”. This isn’t inspiring, it’s the stuff of nightmares. Get outta here, you agents of perverse nostalgia. Take your fire guns and go hang out with your best mate the Babadook! After all this carrying-on, who in god’s name consumed all of this Kelly-inspired content and asked, “Pwetty pwease sir, may I have some more”? Because it wasn’t me.
However, much like in real life, what Ned Kelly actually said in death is slightly less impressive. The reality is, the content of his last words is uncertain; the only thing we do know for historical fact is depressingly on-brand for Ned. Turns out, on the day of his execution, the jail warden who was standing the closest to Ned at his hanging, wrote later in his secret diary that “Kelly opened his mouth and mumbled something that he couldn’t hear.” Talk about an anticlimax.