Australian Legends and Australian Icons
Jack Riley, the original man from Snowy river.
Ned Kelly
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 run-ins with the law concerning the possession of stolen horses, and both served time.
Remarkably, both became eternal Australian legends and icons from opposite life choices in response to perceived injustice from the police, the courts and the squattocracy. Ned chose a life of increasingly violent confrontation. This confrontational modelling included: one, the murder of three police officers, partly in cold blood and partly in self-defence, and two, a revolutionary-inspired stand against the Victoria Police Force at Glenrowan in 1880. Ned was sentenced to death and was hung at the Old Melbourne Gaol at age 25. In sharp contrast, Jack retreated to Tom Groggin Station in the Snowy Mountains after his stint in jail in 1884, just a few short years after Ned died. Communing with the Victorian High Country, Jack found peace of mind and compassion for others, including the oppressed people of the First Nations. He died in 1914 at 73 having been the caretaker at Tom Groggin for 30 years, where his hospitality and guidance to travellers to the summit of Kosciusko were well known. One such traveller was Banjo Patterson, a close friend of the Mitchell family of Towong Station.
Both Jack and Ned had the gift of the gab and could hold an audience. Jack was Banjo Patterson’s muse at a campfire gathering of mates over a drop of whiskey in the summer of 1889/90. The yarn Jack spun Banjo was based on a ride to catch a horse many years earlier when he worked for the Prendergast family on the other side of the Snowy Mountains, near the Snowy River. Soon after, Banjo wrote the poem: The Man From Snowy River. Similarly, Ned was a great orator, evidenced by the Jerriderie letter he dictated to Joe Byrne. Both Jack and Ned displayed the ability to tell a story replete with grandiosity, more commonly known as Irish blarney.
Both Jack and Ned’s use of grandiosity, in the face of perceived persecution and marginalisation was so effective in captivating their respective audiences that their exploits have been endlessly retold in Australia to this day. Banjo presented Jack Riley as the triumphant underdog. Ned Kelly presented himself as the determined, unstoppable underdog. What then are the important aspects of this giftedness for storytelling? How do we deconstruct it to reach its dynamism and understand its function in adjustment?
One does not so much shift a person’s attachment to a view by logical arguments strictly speaking but by diversion from the emotional and psychological attachment to their position on a matter of importance, like social standing, privilege and entitlement. Alternatively, a diversionary method triggering the imagination can create a picture in the audience’s mind of a completely different way of being or state of affairs, and this can shift a person’s perspective, at least momentarily. The picture exists in the viewer’s mind on its own merits if it is captivating.
This picture is not seen in comparison to one’s previously held view as better or worse, good or bad, right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, relevant or irrelevant. Dualistic, comparative judgemental thinking is not present in the moment of captivation, as it were. One is just mindful of the image and how that sits with oneself in the moment. One has been transported out of their normal perspective to another point of view or perspective seamlessly.
A critical aspect of how this mental transportation to a non-analytical dimension occurs is the adherence of the storyteller to the assumption that perceived facts or so-called truth are subordinate to the ride. In other words, the storyteller does not let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, and Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, both said we need to let go of our (psychological) attachment to our tightly-held views before we can adjust to reality, which is constantly crashing in on us. A logical analysis of alternative perspectives is insufficient to adjust to reality. In other words, valuing our inherited position on something needs to be dropped for us to be in a deconstructed space. This deconstructed space is a necessary condition for adjusting to reality, which is always crashing in on us.
In short, if we let go of our constructed inherited view of reality and consider a different point of view from a deconstructed mindset, then we are more transparent to reality which is crashing in on us anyway. This is so not because we judge the different point of view as better or worse than our previously valued inherited position, but because it helps us let go of our previously held position and be open to reality crashing in.
Once we are in the moment of deconstruction, we then need to make a choice to maintain open-mindedness and practise a leap of faith to allow reality to crash in creatively. I call this the blank space and see it as the necessary and sufficient condition for creative adjustment. Jack Riley experienced this creative adjustment when he took a leap of faith and famously and spontaneously crashed into his destiny as he leapt down the escapement in pursuit of the colt from Old Regret. Ned Kelly did the same when, in a perceived moment of risk and opportunity, he decided to hold up the three police officers at Stringybark Creek.
Jack Riley and Ned Kelly are Australian Legends because they somehow took us beyond our preconceptions and enabled us to let reality in. We, Australians, are discovering our emerging reality as the capacity to see each other as fundamentally equal. Jack and Ned’s transportation of our imaginations into the realm of the fantastic enables us to discover our reality, a reality free of class distinctions. An imminent example is how we have evolved into an egalitarian society. Recently, the son of a sole-parent-disability pensioner of underprivileged Irish Catholic heritage has become Prime Minister, namely Anthony Albanese.
