Remembering an Iron Outlaw : the cultural memory of Ned Kelly and the development of Australian identities

Abstract

Nineteenth-century outlaw Ned Kelly is probably Australia’s most famous historical figure. Ever since the start of his outlawry in 1878 his story has been repeated time and again, in every conceivable medium. Although the value of his memory has been hotly contested, he remains perhaps the national icon of Australia. This project explores the development of the cultural memory of Kelly over time, and the contributions it has made to constructions of national identity. Firstly, I show how the memory has functioned in both radical and conservative ways, sometimes both at once. It appears to exist in an eternally contradictory state. Secondly, this condition is linked to a series of complex and conflicting roles the Kelly memory has played in identity formation and negotiation. Ever since his outlawry, the identities invested in Kelly and those invested in the Australian nation have, in a two-way dynamic, fused into and strengthened each other, so that Kelly is in many ways a symbol for the national identity. Kelly has come to stand for an anti-establishment, working class subaltern Irish-inflected national identity. At the same time he has come to represent and enforce the whiteness, hyper-heterosexual masculinity, and violence of “Australianness”. Thirdly, the identity-functions Kelly’s memory has had are themselves brought about by specific sets of relationships that have composed the memory over time. Enduring cultural memories are never made by politicians, monuments, or individual media representations alone; they are formed and develop through tangles of relations that reach back and forth across time. I identify three sets of relationships in the case of Ned Kelly: medial, political, and temporal. Questions of media, temporality, and power have all been crucial to the emerging field of memory studies, and seem to be some of the main constituencies of all cultural memories, though their constellations are always different. The remembrance of Kelly provides a way in which to identify and analyse for the first time how they are all interwoven in what I term memory dispositifs, which are central in the assembling of cultural identities, with the many inclusions and exclusions that they entail.