Douglas Morrissey Thesis, Chapter 5, Part One [Brian Stevenson]

Note that this is the fourth installment in an ongoing series of chapter reviews of Doug Morrissey's 1987 thesis "Selectors, Squatters and Stock Thieves: A Social History of Kelly Country." The first part can be found at


http://elevenmilecreek.blogspot.com/2010/11/douglas-morrisseys-unpublished-thesis.html

This chapter of the wonderful Morrissey thesis is a long one, nearly fifty pages, so I will digest it in installments. I simply could not do it justice in one blog post.

Chapter 5 looks at the social order and authority in the Kelly country during the period of interest to us.

Of course, those in charge during this period were overwhelmingly British. Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians and English and Welsh Protestants predominated in every way possible - in numbers, in influence and in authority. One angry 'representative' of a very small number of Irish Catholics would later make much of this in his so-called Jerilderie letter, but the overwhelming impression that Morrissey has is of harmony and homogeneity, based on the 'Britishness' of the residents of the district. English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish (of the Orange and the Green variety) all 'jealously guarded their respective identities, but had little difficulty in perceiving themselves as British.'

Curious as it may seem, many of the Irish in the district had no trouble reconciling the troubled past of their island with loyalty to the British Crown. As Morrissey puts it:

'Colonial Irishmen remembered Ireland's past vividly, and on purely tribal occasions ... denounced England's domination of their homeland. But they also saw themselves as loyal British subjects living in an enlightened age of human reform, and age which they believed would see the end of England's domination of Ireland and the eventual granting of Home Rule.'

Such denunciations, even though they were non-seditious, came from the most surprising of sources. Squatters James Whitty and Andrew Byrne (both mentioned by name in the Jerilderie letter, although Byrne - no relation to you-know-who - had his name rendered as 'Burns') had no trouble denouncing 'English landlords' before the meetings of the Irish National Land League, and dutifully pledging allegiance to the Crown on other occasions. It was simply what people have done many times before and since - not been satisfied with things as they were, but being respectful of the traditional institutions and realising that social change, no matter how desirable, was best implemented gradually and peacefully. And gradual the change it was, with Home Rule for Ireland eventually coming into being in 1921, a slow process but still within the lifetimes of many people who knew Ned Kelly.

British social homogeneity manifested itself in the most surprising forms in the Kelly Country during this period. Glasses were lifted to toast the Royal Family at the St Patrick's ball organised by the local Hibernian Society. Roman Catholics and Protestants helped each other with collecting funds for church buildings and schools. The Catholic Whitty children went to a school established by the Greta Primitive Methodist community. Jane Byrne and Kate Whitty - pleasant ladies, I am sure, but presumably not of the stuff of which the distaff side of fiery Irish nationalists were made - formed the Moyhu branch of the Victorian Native Ladies Land League, which quietly but firmly supported the Irish cause. The Whittys and the Byrnes, and numerous other families, squatter and selector, simply preferred to overlay their publicly declared loyalty to Ireland with due deference to the prevailing authority. As Morrissey puts it: 'Support for the Irish National Land League and Irish Home Rule were acceptable channels of protest, allowing colonial Irishmen to exercise their patriotism without losing their status as loyal British subjects.'

Where does the oft-mentioned but never really solidly evidenced Republic of Northeastern Victoria fit into all this? Nowhere, really. Morrissey tactfully puts the contention of those writers who accept the notion of a republic as 'being open to serious doubt.' Well aware of the perennial and inherent difficulty of proving a negative - ie that there were never any plans for a republic - Morrissey suggests that the aborted train wreck at Glenrowan was meant to be a prelude to a series of co-ordinated bank raids instead. Whatever the case, the 'strangely passive' group of sympathisers did not feel motivated enough, either by nationalism or financial gain, to assist the beleaguered Gang and instead stood by while it was destroyed. It's also worth noting that there was an absence of politically and/or racially motivated crime in the area which would be some sort of a vague bolster to the notion of a hypothesised republic.

I'll let Morrissey have the last word on the plans for a republic, which, if they ever had any existence at all, were:

'part of a local undercurrent which has left no trace ... The Kelly Outbreak and particularly its dramatic closing moments at Glenrowan, are not a sound basis upon which to assess thge loyalty and behaviour of the region's Irish settlers. The majority of Irish settlers, many of whom may have felt some sympathy for the outlaws, were not directly involved in Ned Kelly's rebellion. The Glenrowan episode represents a crisis in the Kelly Outbreak whch, if a republican conspiracy was being planned, indicates the extreme alienation of the Kelly Gang and its immediate sympathisers from their Irish Catholic neighbours in the region.'