Ned Kelly
60 quotes
Biography
"Everyone looks on me like a black snake."
"My mother, with an infant baby, and brother-in-law and another neighbour, were taken for aiding and abetting and attempting to murder [Fitzpatrick], a charge for which they are as purely innocent as the child unborn."
"If the public do not see justice done I will seek revenge for the name and character which has been given to me and my relations, while God gives me strength to pull a trigger."
"This cannot be called wilful murder, for I was compelled to shoot [the police] in my own defence, or lie down like a cur and die."
"Had I robbed, plundered, ravished and murdered everything I met my character could not be painted blacker than it as present, thank God my conscience is as clear as the snow in Peru."
"[Fitzpatrick] seems a strapping and genteel looking young man, and more fit to be a starcher to laundress than a trooper, but to a keen observer he has the wrong appearance to have anything like a clear conscience or a manly heart. The deceit is plain lit to be seen in the white cabbage-hearted looking face."
"I am really astonished to see Members of the Legislative Assembly led astray by such articles as the Police, for while an outlaw reigns their pocket swells, tis double pay and country girls."
"Circumstances have forced us to become what we are—outcasts and outlaws—and bad as we are, we are not so bad as we are supposed to be."
"You are committing a manifest injustice in imprisoning so many innocent people, just because they are supposed to be friendly to us. There is not the least foundation for the charge of aiding and abetting us against any of them, and you may know this is correct, or we would not be obtaining our food as usual, since they have been arrested."
"We will not leave [Victoria] until we have made the country ring with the name of Kelly and taken terrible revenge for the injustice and oppression we have been subjected to. Beware, for we are now desperate men."
"I wish to acquaint you with some of the occurrences of the present past and future."
"Mrs McCormack struck my horse in the flank with a bullock's skin it jumped forward and my fist came in collision with McCormack's nose and caused him to loose his equillibrium and fall postrate."
"I threw big cowardly Hall on his belly I straddled him and rooted both spurs onto his thighs he roared like a big calf attacked by dogs ... I used to trip him and let him take a mouth ful of dust now and again as he was as helpless as a big guano after leaving a dead bullock or a horse."
"The ignorant unicorns even threaten to shoot myself But as soon as I am dead they will be heels up in the muroo."
"It will pay Government to give those people who are suffering innocence, justice and liberty. if not I will be compelled to show some colonial stratagem which will open the eyes of not only the Victoria Police and inhabitants but also the whole British army and no doubt they will acknowledge their hounds were barking at the wrong stump."
"The Police got great credit and praise in the papers for arresting the mother of 12 children one an infant on her breast and those two quiet hard working innocent men who would not know the difference a revolver and a saucepan handle and kept them six months awaiting trial and then convicted them on the evidence of the meanest article that ever the sun shone on it."
"There never was such a thing as Justice in the English laws but any amount of injustice to be had."
"Fitzpatrick shall be the cause of greater slaughter to the Union Jack than St. Patrick was to the snakes and toads of Ireland."
"I would have scattered their blood and brains like rain I would manure the Eleven Mile with their bloated carcasses and yet remember there is not one drop of murderous blood in my Veins."
"I could not suffer them blowing me to pieces in my own native land and they knew Fitzpatrick wronged us and why not make it public and convict him but no they would rather riddle poor unfortunate creoles."
"If they packed our remains in, shattered into a mass of animated gore to Mansfield, they would have got great praise and credit as well as promotion but I am reconed a horrid brute because I had not been cowardly enough to lie down for them under such trying circumstances and insults to my people."
"I have been wronged and my mother and four or five men lagged innocent and is my brothers and sisters and my mother not to be pitied also, who have no alternative but to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed, big bellied, magpie legged, narrow hipped, splaw-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords, known as officers of justice or Victorian police who some calls honest gentlemen."
"A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him, in the first place he is a rogue in his heart but too cowardly to follow it up without having the force to disguise it. next he is traitor to his country ancestors and religion as they were all catholics before the Saxons and Cranmore yoke held sway since then they were perse cuted massacreed thrown into martrydom and tortured beyond the ideas of the present generation."
"The Queen must surely be proud of such heroic men as the Police and Irish soldiers as It takes eight or eleven of the biggest mud crushers in Melbourne to take one poor little half starved larrakin to a watch house. I have seen as many as eleven, big & ugly enough to lift Mount Macedon out of a crab hole more like the species of a baboon or Guerilla than a man."
"The public could not do any more than take firearms and assisting the police as they have done, but by the light that shines pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be cool to what pleasure I will give some of them and any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the Police ..."