Ned Kelly, directed by Gregor Jordan, is a biopic about a legendary Australian hero who was born in 1855 and died by hanging in 1880. The film spans the years from his first arrest in 1871 and to final capture in 1880, with flashbacks to his boyhood days. Brief references in the film to the political context require clarification for non-Australians. Many in Australia are proud today that they forebears were convicts, and indeed Ned's father was in trouble with the law, having served a sentence in Tasmania for the theft of two pigs in Ireland. When he was released from prison, he tried unsuccessfully to pan for gold in the outback, later became a small-scale dirt farmer, and died when firstborn Ned was 11. Dirt farmers, however, had to take out loans to start up; the weather was not favorable for growing vegetables each year, and the interest on the loans sometimes was as high as 30 percent. Since most English setters were not convicts, much of Australia's current class division of Australia is due to the fundamental distinction between those who arrived with advantages and those who did not. Some convicts were Irish, also encountering discrimination, which leads Ned (played by Heath Ledger) in one of his many softspoken voiceovers to comment that Irish have more dreams than gunpowder, whereas English have more gunpowder than dreams. When the film begins, Ned is riding a horse into an outback frontier town. He is stopped by police for being a horsethief, resists arrest, and then is sentenced to three years in prison. When he gets out, he hopes to be treated equally, working as a sheepshearer, woodcutter, boxer, and horsethief. One day, he comes to the defense to his sister Kate (played by Kerry Condon) when she is importuned for a dance by an English police officer (played by Kiri Paramore), who in turn responds by terrorizing the Kelly family until Ned pulls a gun on him. Kelly's mother (played by Kris McQuade) is even falsely accused, along with Ned, of assaulting the police officer. To avoid arrest, Ned forms the Kelly Gang, a Robin Hood foursome who steals horses, robs banks, shoots the bad guys, and evades capture by the police. In 1879, while holding the entire town of Jerilerie hostage, he sends a manifesto to the Premier of the State of Victoria, detailing a 5,000-word bill of particulars about the injustices of the government toward Irish Catholics in general and the Kelly family in particular; he not only demands independence for Ireland but also independence for the Northeast corner of the Australian State of Victoria. The result is that a bounty is issued for the capture of the Kelly Gang, dead or alive, as his rhetoric carries a potential for class or civil warfare. The authorities, led by Superintendent Francis Hare (played by Geoffrey Rush), decide upon a military operation involving about one hundred police, who travel by rail to Glenrowan and then open fire on the four as well as their unarmed supporters, resulting in a massacre of those in the town's inn on June 27, 1880. They capture Ned, but he becomes a folk hero who has been celebrated in books, films, paintings, plays, and even operas. The film is based on Our Sunshine (1991) by Robert Drewe. MH
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