Christ as Bushranger: Ned Kelly as a Secular Christ

Ned Kelly is one of Australia’s most enduring cultural icons, and yet the religious dimensions of his life have barely begun to be explored. In this chapter, the way in which Kelly has been appropriated as a Christlike figure in Australian culture will be explored alongside the religious instincts in Kelly’s own life. The Christian faith was part of the social imaginary of the world Kelly inhabited. What little education he had was given by the church and its book, and at key turning points in his life, Kelly gave serious consideration to the presence of God and followed religious instincts which impinged upon his conduct and his conscience in what could be seen as determinative ways. While certainly no saint, Kelly, like Christ, identified with the poor, warned that response to his words would determine the fate of his hearers, suffered in his body the marks of a ruling power, was sentenced to death by the state, and rose again in fiction, film, and fantasy as the saviour of the downtrodden and a proletarian hero.