Art: Kelly Rides Again

He robbed those wealthy squatters,
Their flocks he did destroy,
The terror of Australia
Was the Wild Colonial Boy.

Thus sang thousands in the streets of Melbourne as they stood outside the city jail on Nov. 11, 1880. Inside, the ballad’s hero, Bushranger Ned Kelly, stood silently as the hangman slipped the noose over his head, said with a shrug, “Such is life,” and was dropped to his death. Ever since, the legend of Ned Kelly, the last of Australia’s hell-for-leather desperadoes, has lingered on as Australia’s private pride and public shame, celebrated in half a dozen movies and retold in scores of paperbacks and biographies. Now Ned Kelly is riding hard across the canvases of young Australian painters set on finding a theme that will stamp their works as authentic Aussie.

The best Kelly-on-canvas is from the brush of Sidney Nolan, 40, whose current show at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery is getting rave reviews and earning him recognition as Australia’s leading painter. Nolan first heard of Ned Kelly from his grandfather, a fourth-generation Australian and retired policeman. Years later, when Nolan began painting the wild landscapes of Victoria and New South Wales, the legends became the central images of his work.

Hood in a Hood. The tales were the kind that no small boy was likely to forget. For two glorious years in the 1870s young Ned Kelly, with a £2,000 price on his head, led a hard-riding gang, “bailed up” banks, “duffed” horses, stood off whole companies of police troopers. The gang, which included Ned’s brother Dan, bulletproofed themselves in massive vests beaten out of plowshares and canlike helmets. Staging holdups on a grand scale, the gang was generous with its loot, reserved its gunfire primarily for the police, and acquired the aura of latter-day Robin Hoods.

One of the best of Nolan’s paintings, Glenrowan Siege, is a free rendering of the Kelly brothers’ last stand. Trapped in the hotel in Glenrowan, a small town astride the main railroad north from Melbourne, the Kelly gang’s deadly rifle fire held off a company of troopers for 12½ hours until the authorities, who had sent for a twelve-pounder and detachment of garrison artillery, set the hotel on fire.

Bullets & Laughter. At the height of the fighting, Ned Kelly, wearing his 94-lb. suit of homemade armor, suddenly appeared in the rear of the police lines. A contemporary newspaper account describes the scene: “Nine police joined in the conflict and fired point-blank at Kelly. It was apparent that many of the shots hit him, yet he always recovered himself, and tapping his breast, laughed derisively at his opponents as he coolly returned the fire.” After half an hour of this strange battle, a police bullet found Kelly’s unprotected legs and felled him, the only member of the gang to emerge alive.

Nolan’s highlighting Australia’s wild and woolly past has caused many an official frown. Grumped one Australian government official: “It is a pity that Australia should be represented in a modern art museum by a criminal.” But Nolan, who keeps returning to the Kelly theme on his painting trips through southeast Asia and Europe, maintains, “Kelly was the one genuine Australian hero—even if Australians are ashamed to admit it.”