An Irishman's Diary

THE Book of Kells and the series of Ned Kelly paintings by Sidney Nolan may not have much in common. But there is this. Both are national treasures in their countries of origin.

You’ll remember the fuss 12 years ago when the illuminated manuscript made a rare journey out of Ireland – to Australia – and in the process suffered minor damage, apparently from vibration in flight. Well, the Ned Kelly pictures have just made an equally rare journey, in the opposite direction. And the couriers were taking no chances.

The 26 paintings would easily have fitted on one plane. But just in case, I’m told, they were split up and travelled on two separate Etihad flights. I believe it’s for broadly the same reasons that in the US, at times of national emergency, the president and vice president are kept apart.

Australian treasures as they may be, this is a homecoming for the paintings, and in more ways that one. Ned Kelly was famously the son of a Tipperary man, John “Red” Kelly, transported to Tasmania in 1842 for the theft of two pigs. But Nolan too had Tipperary roots – and Clare ones as well – albeit mediated through six generations in Australia.

That wasn’t all he had in common with his subject. During the late 1870s, a Nolan grandfather was involved in searches for the Kelly gang. And in the mid-1940s, when he conceived these pictures, the artist was himself on the run from authority – in his case the Australian army, which had enlisted him for potential front-line service in the second World War.

For these and other reasons, the first Kelly series (he returned to the subject years later, in more abstract form) became his defining works. Tracing the conflict between the dehumanised, black-armoured outlaw and the blue-uniformed police, but almost always against the backdrop of the Australian bush, the paintings have become as synonymous with that nation’s art as Kelly is to its general identity.

The prominence given to the landscape in the pictures is no accident. It underlines a point made by Robert Hughes in his great book, The Fatal Shore, about a 19th-century evolution in Australian convict ballads: from the older songs, where narrators lament their fate, but without questioning the system’s basic justice, to the newer ones like Bold Jack Donohoe and the Wild Colonial Boy, which were much more rebellious in sentiment.

Where the earlier lyrics “accept the System in the name of English values,” Hughes wrote, “the later ballads oppose it in the name of Irish values that became Australian”. And central to the shift was the identification of the romantic bush-ranger with the outback itself. “By taking to the bush,” suggested Hughes, “the convict left England and entered Australia.” Ned Kelly was the last and most romanticised of the bush-rangers, his gang’s destruction combining with the spread of the railroads to make the species extinct.

From being a mere – if prolific – horse-thief, he had risen within a few years to become a symbol of every poor Australian’s struggle for justice. As to whether he was more hero or villain, the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. More than 130 years after he was executed, the jury is still out.

It’s worth remembering that most of Kelly’s immediate enemies were as Irish as he was. Thus the catalyst for his family’s final, all-out confrontation with the law was a corrupt policeman called Fitzpatrick. The officers killed by the gang at Stringybark Creek were Scanlon, Kennedy, and Lonigan. And even one of tho civilians who died in the crossfire at Glenrowan was a Martin Cherry, from Limerick.

But of course, the stoicism of Kelly’s own demise sealed his legend. Inverting the biblical phrase, he had turned plough-shares into armour: the 80lb suits of war in which the gang made their final stand. And the armour worked, as far as it could. Kelly’s arms and legs were, however, uncovered. Between bullets and buck-shot, he was hit in 28 different places.

During the trial, in fact, he praised one of the police marksman as a “splendid shot”. He was less charitable about the judge – yet another Irishman named Redmond Barry. When Barry expressed the usual wish that God might have mercy on the condemned man’s soul, Kelly sounded a more pessimistic note but suggested that, wherever he was going, he expected to see the judge there too.

Strange to say, neither man was long for this world. Kelly was hanged on November 11th, 1880. And as Nolan points out in a note accompanying the trial painting, “Mr Justice Barry, a great man who did many good deeds, went home to bed and died a fortnight later, from, it is said, a septic carbuncle.”

There’s a certain irony in the venue for the Dublin exhibition: what was once the adjutant general’s quarters in an old British military hospital. These days, it serves as Imma’s “New Galleries”. But it may be apt that this is where the bold Ned has just been hanged all over again, and will remain so until the end of January.