Australian legends

Jack Riley, the original man from Snowy River, was born in 1841 in County Mayo, Ireland, arriving alone in Sydney in 1854 on an indentured passage at 13. Ned Kelly, on the other hand, was the son of an Irish convict, Red Kelly, who was transported to Tasmania. Red Kelly and Ellen Quin settled in Beveridge, north of Melbourne, where Ned was born in 1854. Red died in 1866 when Ned was 12, compelling Ned to leave school and provide for Ellen and his siblings. So, both Jack and Ned’s circumstances dramatically changed as they entered adolescence, turning them into men overnight. Whilst Jack Riley and Ned Kelly’s familial experiences of the law are contrasting, they both grew up in the marginalised Irish Catholic world of sectarian nineteenth-century rural Australia. They were both fully aware of the class distinctions in Australia, especially concerning land ownership and related privileges. Their perspectives on the later Gold Rush and Bushranger periods would have been similar. Both had ...