Ned Kelly - Aftermath and Lessons

Aftermath and Lessons

After Ned Kelly's death, the Victorian Royal Commission (1881–83) investigated the Victorian Police Force led to many changes to policing. The Commission took 18 months and its findings put many of the police involved in the Kelly hunt in a less-than-favourable light, yet it did not excuse or sanction the actions of the Kelly Gang. The Commission's work led to reprimands, demotions, or dismissal for a number of members of the Victorian police, including senior staff.

Writers such as Boxhall, The Story of Australian Bushrangers (1899) and Henry Giles Turner, History of the Colony of Victoria (1904) dismiss the Kelly Outbreak as simply a spate of criminality. Several police writers of the time such as Hare and Penzig (1988) wrote legitimising narratives about law and order and moral justification.

Others, commencing with Kenneally (1929), McQuilton (1979) and Jones (1995), perceived the Kelly Outbreak and the problems of Victoria's Land Selection Acts post-1860s as interlinked. McQuilton identified Kelly as the "social bandit" who was caught up in unresolved social contradictions—that is, the selector-squatter conflicts over land—and that Kelly gave the selectors the leadership they lacked. O'Brien (1999) identified a leaderless rural malaise in Northeastern Victoria as early as 1872–73, around land, policing and the Impounding Act.

Though the Kelly Gang was destroyed in 1880, for almost seven years a serious threat of a second outbreak existed because of major problems around land settlement and selection.

McQuilton suggested that two police officers involved in the pursuit of the Kelly Gang — John Sadleir, author of Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer, and Inspector W.B. Montford — averted the Second Outbreak by coming to understand that the unresolved social contradiction in Northeastern Victoria was about land, not crime, and by their good work in aiding small selectors.