NED KELLY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 508, 18 March 1949, Page 13

NED KELLY

AUSTRALIAN SON, By Max Brown. Georgian House, Melbourne, 12/6. ED KELLY’S reputation has lost nothing by the fact that he was regarded in some quarters as the hero of a class struggle. He himself was born and cradled in the atmosphere of rebellion against authority. His father had been transported from Ireland to Van Diemen’s Land for some crime of political colour, not clearly specified. Ned grew up in the midst of a conflict in which squatters tried, somewhat unscrupulously, to maintain their great estates intact against the encroachments of land-hungry selectors. Being poor he sympathised with the have-nots; belonging to an oppressed race he conceived a natural hatred for everything and everyone symbolic of authority — more especially the police whose methods seem to have been at least tactless, and -who lived at enmity with that section of the population which owed its presence in Australia to the harsh penal laws of the mother country. In all probability his adolescent mind perceived little or no distinction between acts of crime and acts of rebellion. Having already spent three months in gaol at an age when most boys are still at school, the criminal of 14 had only been free a short time when he was sentenced again to a term» of three years for horse stealing. After this he worked steadily as an honest man till’ a grievance against the local squatters induced him to begin horse stealing again. Circumstances in which he might have lived as a lawabiding citizen are hard to imagine, but all chance of such a possibility disappeared when his mother was imprisoned for resisting the police who came to arrest his young brother. Thenceforward his life was given over to waging war against society, with the immediate release of his mother as the only condition on which he was prepared to make peace. Mr. Brown makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. He is, of course, welcome to an opinion derived from careful study of the whole question, but on occasions his admiration for Ned Kelly

boils over in passages so highflown as to be ludicrous. For instance-‘"Yet the brand which they (the Kelly gang) took from the fire and threw into the police tent was to ignite the spirit of thousands of oppressed of their nation and shed a widening glimmer into new centuries." The author has compiled his narrative of the Kelly gang’s exploits mainly from letters which Ned -wrote periodically to the authorities engaged in hunting him down, and from contemporary newspaper reports. Australian Son is a genuine thriller but from a literary standpoint it suffers the disadvantage of being part history and, one gathers, part (continued on next page)

| BOOK REVIEWS. (Contd)

(continued from previous page) fiction. Many of the pages devoted to dialogue read rather obviously as though they were reconstructions from newsPaper reports. The illustrations are aptly chosen; remarkable among them is a reproduction of Ned Kelly’s death masque which might, from its benign aspect, be that of a curate of the Church

O1 England:

R. M.

Burdon

BACK FROM CHAOS ATOMIC CHALLENGE. The BBC Talks in permanent form. Winchester Publications. WO years ago, during ‘an "Atomic Week," the BBC arranged for these talks. Now they have been gathered from the British Listener, a Greek chorus of young peoples’ opinions has been added and illustrations adorn the text. No one could wish for a more impressive array of informed opinioh. Cockroft, Oliphant, and Dale provide the scientic explanations; Cheshire, who saw the second bomb explode, and Bronowski, who examined the damage, give eye-witnesses’ accounts, Falls and Thomson discuss the "new" warfare, Blackett and Thomson talk of control, Sir John Anderson sums up, and we have a final commentary by Henry Wallace. Against this* weighty background the "provocative" views of the younger generation sound a little juvenile: The youngsters are mixed bag of British, American, Russian, German, Polish, Chinese, Indian, and Danish. They are mostly in their twenties and students predominate. Other than the Briton, none can claim to be representative of his country’s thought. All are long exiled and intend to remain in Britain. The publishers have made an excellent job of their work. The pictures of atomic bomb explosions are so well chosen and of such fearful beauty that the chilling effect reinforces powerfully the text. He who is not moved by them could not be moved by anything short of the Last Trump-of which, indeed, these may be a fore-shadowing.

This collection is for Everyman. It is non-technical yet very informative, although some of the information is now a little dated. It suffers from the disadvantage that any collection of talks cannot avoid. It is formless and there is no interplay of minds. There is an oversimplification inseparable from the spoken word where there can be no teferring back. The views of an American and a Russian scientist would also have given’ the series completeness! One of the illustrations shows the "permanent shadow" cast by the exploding bomb oma gasometer at Hiroshima. That shadow has lengthened since then.

it now covers us all.

J.D.

McD.