DVD – Ned Kelly

Production Notes – by Darren Jones

The Story of Ned Kelly is a documentary we originally made for a Kelly exhibition in South Bank Melbourne. A strong point is the narration by Charles ( Bud ) Tingwell and appearance by leading Kelly historian Ian Jones. I was totally surprised when Bud agreed to do the read for just 1k. All we had left in the budget. Apparently he had just completed a stage show in Perth and had contacted his agent to see if anything was pending the day i rang. He did the whole read in one take. A real fair dincom professional and a true gentleman. Originally created under the banner of my first production company Picturepond Media, the film continues to enjoy an enthusiastic audience due to its strait forward and authentic portrail of the events that shaped this fascinating story. It really is the journey of a life time.

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$34.95 (inc.P&H)
Order delivery estimate 3 – 7 days

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$39.95 (inc.P&H)
Order delivery estimate 4 – 9 days

BOOK – The Friendship that destroyed Ned Kelly

Ian Jones

Lothian 1992

Preface

On the night of 26 June 1880 outlaw Joe Byrne, lieutenant of the Kelly Gang of bushrangers, shot his lifelong friend Aaron Sherritt, declaring to the dying man’s mother-in-law and pregnant bride, `The bastard will never put me away again.

Sherritt died an informer’s death, in a house bought by police money, wearing clothes given to him by a detective, with four constables dithering impotently in the next room. Even his funeral and his widow’s crepe were paid for by the police. Everything confirmed his guilt.

Aaron Sherritt is the classic traitor of Australian folklore. His name has a splendid ring of villainy to it and his best-known portrait shows an avaricious, almost cruel face, with sensual lips, cold eyes, and dark hair glossed back from a devilish widow’s peak.

But the `portrait’ is a contemporary press engraving which distorts Aaron’s features in conscious or unconscious homage to the traitor role in which he was already cast. In marked contrast, an original photograph records a striking, open face, with broad mouth ready to smile and bright, calm eyes. It is the face of a likeable rogue. In it you seek, without conviction, the man who betrayed his best friend for blood money.

Joe Byrne’s avenging role completed, he rode off to his own death only thirty-five hours later. He fell in battle with police, clad in plough-steel armour, as he raised a glass of whiskey in a last, defiant toast, `Many more years in the bush for the Kelly Gang!’

It was an end worthy of the outlaw legend he had helped to create and as preposterous as much else in the twenty-three year life of this opium-addicted bush poet who spoke Chinese, wooed barmaids, rode a magnificent grey mare, outwitted watching police to visit his widowed mother and was `the idol of the girls of the district’.

When some photographers won a bizarre photo session with Joe’s stiffened corpse hung on a cell door, they recorded a sadly handsome boy, the youth and gentleness of his face accentuated, rather than camouflaged, by a downy moustache and beard. Here is the poet, the lover, not the hard-riding outlaw, the killer.

In the end both the despised traitor and the swashbuckling outlaw seemed equally miscast

In essence, they were .Each was playing a role he had stumbled into.Yet each responded to the demands of his particular audience,so successfully that masque and reality interfused to become almost indistinguishable.

Ian Jones. from preface ‘The Friendship that destroyed Ned Kelly’ Lothian 1992