Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: Ned Kelly

  • Famous Family Trees

    Famous Family Trees

    This beautifully presented children’s hardback book is a fascinating look at history through the family tree. Shakespeare, Cleopatra, and Genghis Khan are three of the people on the front cover whose time in history will be explored. Their stories are directed by their predecessors. The time period covers people who lived from 100 BC to AD 2013, and ranges across many different cultures. It is also remarkable that some such as Gandhi influenced Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.

    A brief summary is given of the person whose family tree is pictured. An outline of Julius Caesar’s achievements and death show what a master he was.  Interesting facts are presented. With Julius Caesar, his surname became a title of royalty that translated to Czar in Russia, and Kaiser in Germany. He was very renowned for his water crossings. One of his armies built the first ever bridge over the River Rhine.

    Wolfgang Mozart is given the same double page spread in this book. A short summary of his life is given, followed by facts about him. The illustrations show him as a small child playing in front of a royal audience. We are told that he began writing and performing music at five years of age. Interestingly, Mozart’s family were farmers in Bavaria. His father, who was a skilled musician, left the farm and became a musician, while his grandfather on his mother’s side, was also a musician.

    Ned Kelly’s story is briefly told with interesting facts to the fore. The area in Victoria where he was raised was settled by many Irish convicts and free settlers. His family were well known to police, but after Ned’s death, they moved towards respectability, and were incognito until 130 years later, when Ned was reburied next to his mother.

    Many famous people feature in this interesting book. It is intended to whet the appetite for more information about characters of interest, and it succeeds in this. The layout is conducive for children to browse through the book, survey the illustrations and discover a hero or villain. A whole page is given over to the drawing of the family tree itself, with a few facts, and the life story of each character on the other page, is brief and succinct.

  • Ned Kelly The Iron Outlaw

    Ned Kelly The Iron Outlaw

    Ned Kelly is a name that has lived on long into Australian History as a man who, bushranger though he undoubtable was, was also a man who was targeted, misjudged and most definitely the victim of corruption and greed.

    He lived only until he was 25 years old, his final trial was an absolute miscarriage of Justice, which was later proven and interestingly became the basis for what is today known as a Royal Commission. The findings of this first Royal Commission on the Police Force of Victoria, in relation to the capture and death of Ned Kelly, was highly critical of the Victorian police force and also helped towards the modernisation of the Victorian Police as they entered the 20th century.

    Truth is often times stranger than fiction and in the sad case of Ned Kelly and the Kelly family, sometimes the fiction far outweighed the fact , inadvertently adding to the troubles experienced not only by Ned, but also his Mother and sisters.

    Coming from a proud but poor Irish migrant family, the Kelly’s hit on both good and bad times on the land, struggling to make a living in the early days of the settlement in Victoria. Victimized as many were, Ned took the law into his own hands taking on the corruption that was prevalent at the time, the greedy land barons, many of whom had begun as squatters on the lands they held, and a government full of men of dubious morality and background.

    His career as an outlaw was colourful, flamboyant and in essence supported by the people, as they saw Ned and his brothers as fighters for the underdog and the rights of the poorer people. In the 18 months of his reign as Victoria’s most wanted outlaw, Ned and the Kelly Gang carried out many daring raids, wrote essays explaining what and why they did what they did, failed to fire a shot although they robbed two banks.

    His final and most daring plan to establish the Republic of Victoria and derail a special police train being sent into the area of Glenrowan, went terribly, fatally, wrong with Joe Byrne, Dan Kelly and Steve Hart losing their lives and Ned being arrested and tried, sentenced to hang.

    Such was public outrage a petition was taken up and signed by more than 32,000 people and presented to the Governor, but to no avail. Ned Kelly was hanged on Thursday 11 November 1880.

    His legacy and his legend still live on. For anyone who is a Kelly fan or fanatic or simply wants to know more about this humble man who took on the  might of a corrupt system, eventually paying with his life, this book by Historian Brad Webb is a must have . It is what could be considered as the ‘essential guide’ to Ned Kelly, but also contains rarely seen images and is full of interesting little ‘fact pages’ which offers a slightly different perspective to the more sanitized version of events.