Ned Kelly POD

Could Ned Kelly have become an even greater hero and nationalist figure for Aust hist had he not been killed alongside his gang at the Glenrowan Inn in June 1880 ? IIRC Ned and his gang, when they held up and took hostage the entire town, were intending to derail a trainload of armed police who'd been dispatched from Melbourne to hunt them down, but the cops were alerted by 1 schoolteacher, I believe, whom the gang had released based on his story that he had to urgently visit his pregnant wife. Kelly was also apparently intending to rally his supporters from around the local countryside as part of his intentions, intending, as some historians have alleged, to implement his plan to declare a Republic of North-eastern Victoria based on an earlier manifesto he'd drafted when he baled up the Bank of NSW in Jerrilderie in 1879. Hence, the infamous shootout at the Glenrowan Inn resulted.

WI the Kelly gang had managed to successfully derail the police train without the cops being informed ? Would they then have successfully been able to incite an insurrection against govt authority by rallying their supporters from neighbouring country towns, and stating their intention to implement Ned's Jerrilderie Manifesto ? How much of an impact would this rebellion have had on Aust hist ?
 
Melvin Loh said:
Could Ned Kelly have become an even greater hero and nationalist figure for Aust hist had he not been killed alongside his gang at the Glenrowan Inn in June 1880 ? IIRC Ned and his gang, when they held up and took hostage the entire town, were intending to derail a trainload of armed police who'd been dispatched from Melbourne to hunt them down, but the cops were alerted by 1 schoolteacher, I believe, whom the gang had released based on his story that he had to urgently visit his pregnant wife. Kelly was also apparently intending to rally his supporters from around the local countryside as part of his intentions, intending, as some historians have alleged, to implement his plan to declare a Republic of North-eastern Victoria based on an earlier manifesto he'd drafted when he baled up the Bank of NSW in Jerrilderie in 1879. Hence, the infamous shootout at the Glenrowan Inn resulted.

WI the Kelly gang had managed to successfully derail the police train without the cops being informed ? Would they then have successfully been able to incite an insurrection against govt authority by rallying their supporters from neighbouring country towns, and stating their intention to implement Ned's Jerrilderie Manifesto ? How much of an impact would this rebellion have had on Aust hist ?

Ned Kelly wasn't killed with his gang at Glenrowan. In October 1880 he was tried at Melbourne for murder, sentenced to death and hung in November - and rightly so. Overall he was just another murdering Bushranger who tried to give his activities some legitimacy by cloaking them with political double talk. And I say this as an Australian of Irish-Catholic descent.
 
Oh, yeah sorry Wombat, I'm aware of Ned Kelly being arrested at Glenrowan after his epic battle and 28 wounds with the cops, and his later trial and execution in Melbourne by the same judge who'd presided over his mother's trial.
 
Ned Kelly was accused of a crime he didn't commit and subsequently went bush. Shortly afterwards he was involved in a gunfight that saw three policemen killed. I find it easy to justify his fear that he wouldn't get a fair trial when he first ran off but as a result of the fight at stringybark creek he killed three men. Any attempt to create a revolution or whatever could only be joined by people who had shared Kelly's experience of discrimination and were able to overlook the death of those policemen, one of whom had an Irish Catholic name. Anyone from Melbourne who shared Kelly's ancestry and religion, wouldn't share his sense of grievance would identify with the law.
 
A. Bertram Chandler, an Australian sf writer, wrote Kelly Country, about a world where Kelly's revolution succeeds and he becomes President. I don't want to give anything away, but it's no utopia.
 
Last edited:
From what I've read, Ned Kelly was almost like a Jesse James, which would've been interesting. The best POD for a surviving Ned Kelly, IMO, has to be very early on. If even half of what he did during his teenage years could've been butterflied away, he might've turned out to become a better man than in OTL.

What do you think?
 
Top