Who Said the Kelly Letters? The Question of Authorship and the Nature of Wild Language in the Cameron and Jerilderie Letters.
The two public letters composed by Ned Kelly in his time of outlawry provide a window of understanding onto Kelly's ‘true’ nature. Understanding of both the letters themselves and the man who produced them has been obscured in the past, for the most part due to our own need to sanitise an icon: the romantic picture of a decent, honest man, forced to take up arms against those who oppressed him and his class, the downtrodden selectors of north‐east Victoria. As a consequence, a distance has been put between our accepted image of the iron‐clad avenger and the content of the letters themselves. Yet the real Kelly was far more intriguing than this two dimensional mythic archetype. There is a richness, a suavity, a gutteral and ribald energy in the letters themselves that defy previous popular images of Kelly.