We all need a hero.
Re Menzies House post yesterday under: “Barbecue time—test your Aussieness.” It was about an innovative burger launched in Sydney called, “Kangemu” a mixture of kangaroo and emu. Lively comment, however, turned to matters of flags, Cronulla riots, police, and Ned Kelly. Nothing really about our Coat of Arms emblem served up on a bun.
Coincidentally, on the same day, distant kin of Ned Kelly gathered to bury what are thought by the family to be Ned’s remains, or some of them at least. This was picked up by Australian and international media. Most of it less than complimentary of Kelly, as a British police profiler decided after analysing Ned’s “Jerilderie Letter” dictated by him to Joe Byrne in 1879. The profiler determined Kelly as “psychotic and Dangerous.”
Perhaps the profiler was swayed after reading that Ned’s dislike for a neighbour was such that he sent the bloke’s wife a set of Bull’s testicles to highlight her husband’s lack of “manhood”.
The Jerilderie letter is lengthy. It does reveal much about rural life in the mid eighteen hundreds and how various hatreds, especially how one of law and order flourished. Read the letter and offer your analysis as comment. No comments about “kangemu” burgers please! GC.Ed.
It begins, including errors:
Dear Sir,
I wish to acquaint you with some of the occurrences of the present past and future. In or about the spring of 1870 the ground was very soft a hawker named Mr Gould got his waggon bogged between Greta and my mother's house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places so Mr. Gould had abandon his waggon for fear of loosing his horses in the spewy ground.
Entire letter: http://www.ironoutlaw.com/html/jerilderie_01.html
