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Ned Kelly's appeal to international visitors
By Warwick Frost
Ned Kelly, as an Australian story, clearly has appeal to Australian tourists. However, does it also have appeal to international visitors? One perspective is that this glorification of an outlaw (like convicts and the sheep-stealer of Waltzing Matilda) is both embarrassing on the international stage and of little interest to tourists from overseas. As such, in 1956 there were plans to stage the play Ned Kelly as part of the cultural program of the Melbourne Olympics. Concerned that this presented an inappropriate image, the authorities banned its performance (Holland and Williamson 2003: 18). Nearly half a century later, the American travel writer Bill Bryson was highly critical of Australia's love of Ned Kelly and ridiculed the attraction Ned Kelly's Last Stand as `so bad it was worth more than we paid' (Bryson 2000: 173).
Despite such concerns, there were expectations that the film Ned Kelly would attract international tourists. Lois Appleby, the Chief Executive of Tourism Victoria, argued that there was, `a very exciting opportunity to capitalise on the potential international publicity of `Ned Kelly'' and part of its promotional strategy was to host overseas journalists on familiarisation tours (Tourism Victoria 2003). Qantas featured Ned Kelly as the cover story in its in-flight magazine, noting that, `the film looks set to propagate the Ned Kelly legend worldwide' (Boland 2003: 36). In addition, after being banned in 1956, Ned Kelly was one of the stars of the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.
Ned Kelly's international appeal, comes not from being a uniquely Australian story, but from being a universal story. The historian Eric Hobsbawm coined the term `social bandit' for outlaws who explicitly or implicitly represent the oppressed. Hobsbawm argued that social bandits occurred wherever rural societies were under pressure to change or produce an excessive surplus for an elite. Citing examples from the Americas, Asia and Europe, Hobsbawm also included Ned Kelly as a social bandit (Hobsbawm 2001). The folklorist Graham Seal saw outlaws as a cultural tradition in Britain, the USA, Australia and elsewhere and argued that outlaws were aware of this tradition and tried to follow its conventions (Seal 1996: 145). He particularly linked Kelly to Robin Hood, Billy the Kid and Jesse James (Seal 1996: 147). It is also important to understand that Kelly was contemporary with the great American outlaws; Kelly was executed in 1880, Billy the Kid was gunned down in 1881 and Jesse James in 1882.
In the lead up to the release of the film, Ned Kelly was compared to Robin Hood (Fawcett 2003: 21; see also Jones 1995: 338) and Jesse James (Goodman 2003; Ryan 2003). Director Gregor Jordan emphasised that this was more an Irish story than an Australian one (Jordan 2003) and revealed that the script portrayed Ned's life, `as similar to the story of Christ - persecuted through life, martyred in death' (quoted in Boland 2003: 36).
The universal appeal of the outlaw's story may be seen by comparing Ned Kelly with Braveheart. The latter film told the little-known story of the Scottish patriot William Wallace and was highly successful internationally. Intriguingly, Seal (1996: 2) placed Wallace as an outlaw alongside Kelly. Certainly, the two films present their heroes in similar ways. The characteristics may also be compared with Seal's ten consistent elements in the outlaw tradition, being, `friend of the poor, oppressed, forced into outlawry, brave, generous, courteous, does not indulge in unjustified violence, trickster [of his opponents], betrayed, lives on after death' (1996: 11). Braveheart has been used as an example of a historic story repackaged to fit American tastes regarding freedom fighting (Haydock 2002: 9). The recent Australian film may indeed be seen as a Braveheart-ed Ned Kelly.
Source: Monash University, http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/2573
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