I Am Ned Kelly — John Molony

“Almost every Australian knows the name ‘Ned Kelly’. Few know more than the basic facts…”

In this selection off our Top Shelf, historian John Molony explores the circumstances surrounding the life and death of Ned Kelly. It’s part work of scholarship and serious biography and part speculative fiction. Take a look at this excerpt from the dust-cover:

“On the eve of his hanging, his mother, a prisoner in the same Melbourne Gaol, said to him, ‘Mind you die like a Kelly, son’; he had certainly lived like one. This is the story of Ned Kelly, of his people, who were destined to poverty, degradation and rejection, and of the land that made a legend of him.”

Our copy is a first edition in very good condition, for $25. It surely is an important milestone in Ned Kelly scholarship, but this is no dry historical tome. The early chapters outline Ned Kelly’s childhood without slipping into a laundry list of woes. The book doesn’t seek so much to explain Ned Kelly’s actions as to catalogue them in a very erudite fashion. An enjoyable book for any lover of Australiana or real life crime!

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