The Kelly Haters no 1 - Malcolm H Ellis [Brian Stevenson]

By the 1960s the legend of Ned Kelly as Australian hero had well and truly taken hold. It was decades since J J Keneally published The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and, in 1966, nearly twenty years since Max Brown’s first edition of his touchstone work, Australian Son had appeared. Frank Clune’s The Kelly Hunters, another work broadly pro-Kelly came out in 1954. All three were sympathetic, with the Keneally production in particular unapologetically pro-Kelly.

Enter Malcolm Henry Ellis, a historian and journalist, whose three page take on the Kelly legend in the weekly Australian newsmagazine, The Bulletin of 31 December 1966 remains as excoriating a tirade against Ned Kelly to appear in the twentieth century (not that there are many.) Ellis had already contributed biographies of the New South Wales Lachlan Macquarie, Francis Greenway the architect (he’s the man on the first ten dollar note, with Henry Lawson on the flip side for those who remember it) and sheep magnate John Macarthur.

While historians often come from the left side of the political spectrum, there was never any doubt as to where Malcolm Henry Ellis’s sympathies lay. Secretary for the Nationalist leader in Queensland in the years after the First World War, the socialist views of Queensland’s Labor government were anathema to him, so much so that he wrote a 572 page manuscript on the subject! The tome did not find a publisher, but was published in extremely distilled form as a sort of campaign manual for Labor’s opponents in the 1918 Queensland election. It doesn't seem to have helped much. The Labor party increased their majority and stayed in government for thirty-six of the next thirty-nine years!

Sad to relate, there’s also every indication that Ellis was not always a pleasant chap. When he was created a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) he wrote to his brother noting that while he was not especially ‘honour minded’ he was pleased that the CMG was ‘not awarded to blackfellows and Chinamen.’ He turned his hand to history, and in his fifties and sixties published the three biographies mentioned above, generally to positive reviews. But he quarreled with other key people, accusing one writer of plagiarizing his manuscript for her own book on Macquarie, and alienating people in the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Australasian Pioneers’ Club, and on the editorial board of the Australian dictionary of biography. (There’s a full account of this in aninteresting article available online by Andrew Moore, ‘The ‘’Historical Expert’: M H Ellis and the Historiography of the Cold War’, originally published in Australian historical studies no 114, 2000.)

Given Ellis’s conservatism and general support of the established order, he could not be expected to view the depredations of Ned Kelly with any favour, and he didn’t. The opening two paragraphs set the tone, with Ned described as:

‘…one of the most cold-blooded, egotistical and utterly self-centred criminals who ever decorated the end of a rope in an Australian jail. His frankness in turpitude, his utter vengefulness, his cruelty, his cold-blooded lack of regret at the wiping out of the lives of decent men can only repel even an unfastidious mind.’

('Turpitude' means baseness or depravity. Ellis used the word a couple of times in the article, so he must have liked it.)

Ned’s family is portrayed in a most unflattering way. The lad was of ‘a tribe which thought nothing of slugging a constable with a stirrup iron, or beating a half drunken adversary into pulp with a bent auger.’ (This, I believe, refers to the assault of Jimmy Quinn, Ned’s uncle, on the person of William Skelton, though I am willing to be corrected on this one.)

There follows a condemnatory list of Ned’s sins, presented in about as bad a light as Ellis could muster. Ellis saw Ned’s main characteristic as a stratagem: at Stringybark Creek, the stratagem was ‘to sneak up on a police camp while police were cooking, and wipe them out like dingoes, if possible.’ I think we all agree that what the Kellys did at Stringybark was pretty bad, but Ellis puts the worst possible spin on it and leaving out the details that Ned called for Lonigan and McIntyre to surrender, and spared McIntyre when he did. Other chroniclers have seen this call for surrender as a big plus in Ned’s favour. My own thought is that a five second warning is better than none at all, but doesn’t exactly qualify Ned and his cohorts for canonization.

Ellis is scathing about Ned’s decision to euthanase Kennedy, which ‘shows Kelly’s quality as a heartless, psychopathic killer, as merciless as a wild animal.’ True, there was nothing terribly heroic about the dispatching of Kennedy, but it is at least possible that this was done to spare him some suffering – with two corpses nearby, and McIntyre escaped, Ned Kelly had already committed capital crimes that were bound to come to light, so Kennedy’s survival or otherwise would have made little difference to him. But Ellis claims that help from whoever McIntyre told ‘would not have been long coming’: it is to be doubted that Kennedy would have lasted the days that the arrival of help would take.

Most chroniclers acknowledge that the thrilling deeds at Euroa and Jerilderie brought excitement, colour and gaiety into the drab lives of all that were concerned with them, except of course those who were employed in the police force or the banks. Even Ellis concedes that the raids were ‘theatrical display in the best tradition of Italian hill banditry.’ But he goes on, and probably with much certitude, to say:

How kind they were to the women and children, how polite to everybody! But had the father or brother or husband of one of those women and children put one finger out of place, he knew he would be mown down with utter ruthlessness.

Glenrowan, as everyone with an interest in the Kelly Gang knows, demonstrates so many negative facets of the saga, and Ellis correctly and quite justifiably terms them as such, using phrases like ‘useless ploughshare armour’, ‘insane revengeful bravado’ and, in the case of the hapless and terminally confused Aaron Sherritt, ‘coldly planned murder.’ For Ellis, ‘the vicious ruthlessness that laid behind the planning … was matched by the insane paranoiac evidence in the Kelly autobiography.’ Unsurprisingly, Ellis was not a fan of the Cameron and Jerilderie letters, terming them harangues about [Ned’s] wrongs, through which ran a whining note of self-pity, with the overlay of megalomania.

Such was the hatred that Malcolm Henry Ellis had for a man who died ten years before he was born that he even cited Ned’s gaol photographs as evidence of his degenerate qualities. Probably in implicit agreement with the majority of writers (this one included) that the Nettleton photographs of 10 November 1880 portray a pleasant faced individual who seems at peace with himself, Ellis admitted only that some of Ned’s photographs were speaking likenesses of the real man. They present cruelty and cunning only equaled by that of his degenerate brother Dan, who perished in the fires at Glenrowan.

Ellis concludes his three page diatribe on the Kellys with a rhetorical flourish that was totally predictable:

Everything about the Kellys that I can discover was base, vicious and undesirable. Ned was an arch-bully, menacing, vain, cruel, predatory, more like a wolverine than a dingo.

Regular readers of this blog will know, of course, that I am not a Ned fan. But like just about all of us, he had some good, even fine, qualities. Ned was not a nice person, but Ellis is way too hard on him. Nothing about the rescue of Richard Shelton, nothing about the hopeless but unbelievably and courageously suicidal charge back to the hotel to try to rescue Dan and Steve with thirty-four police in the way, nothing about Ned’s leadership qualities, nothing about his extraordinary athletic ability, be it with his rifle, his horse or his fists.

Ellis, of course, was a law-abiding citizen all his life, and respected by many for his industry and writing talents. But there were those who disliked him intensely, and some of those had good reason. If pressed, many of these would, no doubt, have preferred the company of Ned Kelly to his.

As a famous person once said, such is life.