Ned Kelly

Ned Kelly is an Australian outlaw and revolutionary figure whose life, as Lin recounts it, ends in a doomed armed resistance to the authorities. His story matters both as part of the Australian national imagination and as a mirror Lin uses to explain how his own revolutionary identity became entangled with robbery and a desire for death.

Identity and Background

Lin describes Kelly as a young, tough, wild man who was not simply a hard-hearted criminal. His troubles began when he intervened to stop a drunken police officer from molesting his sister. The lawmen’s hostility, in Lin’s account, grew beyond that incident: they resented what Kelly represented, a rebellious spirit that challenged their authority.

Kelly’s story is presented to a listener who is unfamiliar with Australian history. Lin explains that the Australian bush means the countryside, locating Kelly’s struggle outside the cities and within a landscape where a gang could be pursued and surrounded. The account presents him not only as an individual fugitive but as a figure onto whom broader ideas of rebellion had gathered.

Capture and Final Stand

After Kelly and his companions were caught up in a shoot-out, the government declared war on them and sent a trainload of police to surround the gang at a hotel in the bush. The siege became a defining episode in Lin’s telling. Kelly’s best friend was killed; his younger brother and Steve Hart, both nineteen, chose death rather than capture.

Kelly wore armor made of steel, including a helmet and chest plate, and advanced on the police with both guns firing. His charge initially frightened them into retreat, but their officers drove them back into the fight. The police brought Kelly down, and a trial based, Lin says, on false witness statements sentenced him to death. The stand is thus remembered as both a display of defiance and a defeat enforced through the power of the state.

Death and Legacy

Kelly was hanged. Lin recounts that his head was removed after his death and used as a paperweight, a final indignity set against the defiance with which Kelly had faced his execution. Before he died, Kelly told the judge who had sentenced him that they would meet soon in a higher court; the judge died not long afterward. In Lin’s telling, that coincidence lends the ending an air of grim judgment without changing the worldly outcome: Kelly was executed.

Kelly’s reputation outlasted the failed rebellion. Lin says that artists, writers, musicians, and actors repeatedly returned to his story, which had become lodged in the Australian psyche. He compares Kelly’s cultural stature to that of Che Guevara and Emiliano Zapata, presenting him as a nationally resonant emblem of resistance rather than merely a historical outlaw.

Lin’s Identification with Kelly

Lin loved the Kelly story as a child and later recognized how deeply he had identified with it. He describes Kelly’s trajectory as that of a thief who became a revolutionary, reversing the direction of Lin’s own life: Lin had been a revolutionary who became a thief. The contrast gives their resemblance its force; Lin does not claim their histories were the same, but explains how he came to imagine them as overlapping.

During his heroin use, Lin says, his thinking became confused and he began to drown in a distorted fantasy of Kelly’s life and his own. When committing robberies, he expected the police to be waiting and imagined that they would shoot him. He wanted that ending, replaying the prospect of a fatal confrontation in his mind. Kelly’s story therefore functions in the conversation as more than a tale of outlaw heroism: it exposes how Lin had turned a remembered legend into a script for his own hoped-for death.