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Were Jesse James and Ned Kelly more than just social bandits?
Word count: 5,245
Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man. He robbed the Glendale train He stole from the rich and gave to the poor Hed a hand and a heart and a brain.1 Ned Kelly was a gentleman: many hardships did he endure. He battled to deprive the rich then gave it to the poor. But this mode of distribution was not acceptable to all, Though backed by certain gunmen known as Gilbert and Ben Hall.2

Already during their lifetimes, Jesse James and Ned Kelly had acquired in the popular imagination the attributes of the mythical Robin Hood. The medieval English outlaw has always been seen as the epitome of all bandits celebrated in popular culture and folklore, a defender of the poor and the weak against oppressive agents of the ruling elite, as well as becoming the cultural script which determined the attitudes and actions of later outlaws whose survival and success depended on support from the people.3 James and Kelly, as opposed to other outlaws around the globe contemporary to them, have both superseded the level of mere local or folkloric heroes. Ever since their deaths in the early 1880s, they have consistently been portrayed under different lights in a multitude of books, magazines, plays, poems and films.4 There is even a childrens tale with the Australian bushranger as its main character, Thomas Kencallys Ned Kelly and the City of Bees (1995). For Tranter and Donoghue, Jesse James has become a symbol of the globalisation of American culture.5 James was known to more Americans in the late nineteenth-century than their President

1 2

The Ballad of Jesse James, M. Larking, The Singing Cowboy (1931) Ned Kelly Was a Gentleman in J. Sweeney, Original Australian Verse (1945) 3 Seal (1996), p.17 4 Huggan (2002), p.132 5 Tranter & Donoghue (2007), p.2

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was,6 and comes only second after Robin Hood in the list of most famous outlaws worldwide. For Seal, Kelly has become the culmination of the Anglophone outlaw hero tradition, linking Anglo-Celtic traditions of protest and struggle with elements of the American outlaw tradition (bank robberies, railroad holdups), and eventually being elevated to the status of Australian national hero, as confirmed in 1980 with the issue of postage stamps to commemorate the centenary of his death.7 Jesse James and Ned Kelly had in common not only the way their figures have been remembered and celebrated in history, but also a significant amount of features in their lives. Their outlawries were of a type very specific to the nineteenth-century, in which people were still settling in the frontiers of the US and Australia, creating new communities of small individualist agricultural proprietors and farmers.8 The American bushwhacker and the Australian bushranger alike made physical their flight from the law by retiring into remote regions on the edges of civilization. Jesses and Neds bush skills were symptoms of their love for the territories in which they grew up and later operated; territories that came to be known as the James and the Kelly countries respectively. Both outlaws lost their fathers at an early age. John Red Kelly, an Irish transportee, died in December 1866 when Ned was around 11. The Baptist Reverend Robert James died soon after leaving Missouri in 1851 to try and make his fortune in the Californian gold rush. Jesse was barely four at the time. A gold rush also took place in North-eastern Victoria in the 1850s, shaping the socio-economic conditions which would eventually lead to Neds outlawry.9 Both were raised by and became very close to their mothers, Ellen Kelly and Zerelda Samuels. In fact, the oppression from the authorities which the two women suffered was significant in prompting the banditry of their sons. Ellen and Zerelda remarried after their husbands deaths, and that they
6 7

Stiles (2002), p.3 Seal, pp.147-8 8 Ward (1958), p.10 9 McQuilton (1979)

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dominated their later husbands seems to be accepted by all commentators. They had strong characters, which in a way also accounts for the tenacity of their sons. The stories of Jesse James and Ned Kelly have more in common than it is possible to recount here. In many respects, their lives developed in ways similar to other famous outlaws. This has encouraged scholars to study the particular phenomenon of high profile celebrated bandits. These studies seek to better understand why they were celebrated in their day and why they remain as worldwide renowned cultural icons. Scholars have also analysed the different factors which prompted banditry and made it possible at the time. Nowadays, any serious work focusing on either Jesse James or Ned Kelly or indeed any popular outlaw inevitably has to deal with Eric Hobsbawms theory of social banditry. For Hobsbawm, what differentiated social bandits from standard bandits was that the former were peasant outlaws considered common criminals by the authorities but who remained in peasant societies and were regarded by their people as heroes and champions of justice and as thus were admired and assisted. This special relationship with the peoples of their territory is what made their banditry social.10 Hobsbawm applies his theory mainly to peasant outlaws in southern Europe, although he points out that what unites under the same category all these cases of outlawry and others like those of Jesse James and Ned Kelly are the similar patterns that are evident in the careers of them all. This similarity of cases is not a product of a cultural diffusion of the idea of social banditry epitomised by Robin Hood, but rather a reflection of similar situations arising in different peasant societies and which lead to outbursts of outlawry.11 For Hobsbawm, social banditry is a rural phenomenon that takes place when the economic balance in traditionalist and pre-capitalist societies is upset by armed conflicts or financial crises.12 Hence, the social banditry

10 11

Hobsbawm (2000), pp19-20 Hobsbawm (1959), pp.16-7 12 Ibid., p.23

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of Jesse James could be seen as a clear post-Civil War phenomenon prompted by the discrimination suffered by ex-Confederates during Reconstruction, while Kellys case could be explained in terms of the economic hardships endured by North-eastern Victorian selectors after the failure of the free selection acts of the 1860s.13 Despite the clear rebellious element of social banditry against the establishment, Hobsbawm concludes that this was a primitive and pre-political form of protest, which sought to recover the local social balance that had been upset but stopped short from a major revolution. Social bandits were activists, not ideologists.14 Contrary to this, Jones argues that in fact Kelly and his sympathisers intended to proclaim a republic in North-eastern Victoria, and that had Ned Kelly not prevented his numerous armed supporters from assisting the gang at Glenrowan, a completely different outcome might have followed.15 As will be shown more in detail below, Stiles holds that Jesse Jamess outlawry can only be explained as part of a wider antiReconstruction Confederate effort in the post-Civil War years.16 However, to Hobsbawms credit, Jones admits that Kellys plans for a republic were simplistic if anything, while the social element in the doings of the James gang diminished as ex-Confederates gained more power within the Democratic Party. Moreover, after Northfield, the Jameses became corrupted and started to lose legitimacy for their crimes. Social bandits stopped being social when they broke the special link which united them with their people against oppressive agents and differentiated them from common criminals. Doing so was a threat to their endurance, since they depended on this relationship to enjoy support and shelter from popular quarters.17 Jesse James was reported to have deprived

13 14

Seal, p.5 Hobsbawm (2000), pp.28-30 15 Jones (2008), pp.275-310 16 Stiles, pp.384-94 17 Hobsbawm (1959), p.17

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individuals of their possessions during his last train holdup in Blue Cut in September 1881.18 He would die less than six months afterwards at the hands of Robert Ford who, with his brother Charlie had been staying in Jesses home in St Joseph, Missouri, while they were planning another bank robbery. Jesses ideals about the social function of his banditry had clearly declined from 1876 (Northfield) and one wonders if he would have completely lost his reputation as a modern Robin Hood had his career not been interrupted by Ford. Regardless of whether they actually believed in the sociality of their banditry although they would not call it that popular outlaws throughout history have had to take special care to make their actions resemble those of a Robin Hood. James and Kelly were not an exception and they were aware of it. With Jesses Cameron Letters and Neds Jerilderie one, as well as their interventions in the press, both bandits sought to justify their actions as necessary to defend their social groups from the continuous oppression they suffered. They did so with deeds as well, attacking only banks and corporations, which were seen as agents of the enemies of their people (unionists and squatters). Hobsbawm has described several elements that compose the process by which outlaws became social bandits.19 Firstly, they started their careers not by crime but as victims of injustice. Soon after the Civil War concluded, Jesse James tried to surrender himself to the victors to earn the amnesty that had been promised to all former Confederates. Nonetheless, he was attacked by unionist soldiers as he tried to give himself in. He killed some of them in the clash and was forced to run away.20 His popularity severely increased after the Pikerton detectives set-off an incendiary bomb in the Samuel farm, taking the life of Jesses eight-year old step-brother and Zereldas right arm.21 Kelly always claimed his outlawry was forced upon him by constable Fitzpatrick, who had forced his way into the familys homestead, drunk, molested one of Neds
18 19

Stiles, p.368 Hobsbawm (200), p.47 20 Dibble (1931), p.230 21 Stiles, pp.278-80

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sisters and them falsely accused the mother of taking part in Neds attack on the policeman. This was also the culmination of a period in which the Kelly brothers had been subjected to continuous police harassment and been blamed for a variety of crimes.22 Injustices endured by the social bandits moved them to become righters of wrongs, to free their communities from injustices they also suffered. As Robin Hood allegedly did, Hobsbawms social bandits never killed except in selfdefence or just revenge. Ned Kelly always argued that he only shot constables Lonigan and Kennedy at Stringybark Creek after they refused to bail up to the gang and drew their pistols to fight back.23 It was widely accepted, nonetheless, that Jesse James was more prone to kill as soon as he was resisted during the robberies. Robert A. Pikerton said that Jesse [had] no more compunction about cold-blood murder than he [had] about eating his breakfast.24 At least eleven civilians were killed by the James-Younger gang in their twelve bank robberies, seven railroad holdups and four stagecoach robberies. The popular backlash that led to the gangs disaster at Northfield was prompted by Jesses execution of Joseph Lee Heywood, the banks cashier. A most important characteristic of a Robin Hood-like social bandit was that he would only steal from the rich to give to the poor. The fragments from ballads above testify that public opinion generally believed this was the case with Ned Kelly and Jesse James. It certainly was so with Kelly, who only took money from the government and the squatters in his two bank robberies, and who is reported to have burnt the papers stored at Euroas bank which contained details of mortgages held against small famers. He also made Steve Hart return a watch he had taken from an individual at the Jerilderie robbery.25 For most of his career, Jesse James and his gang also dedicated themselves to the robbery of unionist money held in banks or that of corporations, which were perceived as more impersonal. Nonetheless, it has already been
22 23

Jones, pp.95-133 Ibid, pp.155-173 24 Settle (1966), p.105 25 Seal, pp.155,164

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mentioned how Jesse became progressively more relaxed in this respect towards the end of his life. Many an academic has assessed the extent to which Jesse James and Ned Kelly can be considered social bandits. John McQuilton, for instance, in his study of The Kelly Oubreak (1979), concluded that Kellys case resulted from a conjunction of specific social, economic and natural factors in North-eastern Victoria in the late nineteenth-century. He argues that his thesis does not oppose Hobsbawms, but rather reinforces it, although it modifies its premises by adding a new geographical dimension that needs to be accounted for. McQuilton believes that the fundamental landscape changes that North-eastern Victoria was subjected to in the period, eventually created the social conditions that allowed and supported the emergence of social banditry in the region. Different land-use systems were developed, challenged and discarded in a mans lifespan. Squatters started to occupy lands in the region in the 1840s. During the gold rush of the 1850s new communities of diggers appeared and in the 1860s selectors were given land to develop the agrarian system needed to sustain the increasing population in the region. All these changes created a rural community in North-eastern Victoria that was characterised by a sharp division between squatters and selectors and their respective land-use systems. Richer English squatters enjoyed the support of the authorities and were able to abuse the selection system in their favour. Poor Irish selectors, on the other hand, were disfavoured by the failure of the agrarian transformation, since the specific conditions of the land made it not good for monocultural use. In this incipient context of rural poverty, selectors sons were forced to change their priorities. They lost interest in the land and many became seasonal labourers. Many others found the way of making a living from the lifting and borrowing of squatters stock. This practice, which was seen as criminal by the squatters but not by the selectors, became endemic by the
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1870s, and generated an atmosphere of discrepancy between official and popular definitions of legality which highly favoured the emergence of outlawry and explains why most of Kellys sympathisers came from selector communities.26 On top of all this, the Victoria Police had been modelled to resemble the Royal Irish Constabulary. It became a paramilitary force that was alienated from the communities and formed of men perceived as the squatters men. Popular discontent against the police had started in the 1850s with their dubious policing of the gold fields. By the 1870s the police were widely seen as an oppressive force by selectors and thus when Kelly attacked Fitzpatrick, it was easily assumed by most that the constable had probably exceeded his duties.27 McQuiltons thesis show how in the case of Ned Kelly the explanations for his social banditry can be found in a wider dimension than the mere upsetting of traditional rural communities. Nonetheless, McQuilton maintains that his theory supports Hobsbawms despite its preconditions being modified: Kellys society was not rural but capitalist through and through. Moreover, selector communities could not be considered traditionalists since they were relatively young. Most selectors had been born in Australia and thus could not have reproduced in their communities the traditions that characterised European rural communities in which social banditry emerged in the same period. White criticises the application of social banditry to Jesse James by arguing also that Jesse could not be a champion of peasants following the European tradition, since there were no peasants in America. Nor was he the defender of a traditional society of self-sufficient homesteaders since his was a modern oriented society, based on the capitalist exploitation of the land.28 Nevertheless, Stiles maintains (and the same could be said of part of McQuiltons thesis) that Whites approach is limited because while it junks the outward trappings of Hobsbawms

26 27

Morrisey (1878), p.294 McQuilton (1987), pp.45-51 28 White (1981), pp.393-4

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social banditry, it retains the inner assumptions it is based on, namely the argument that social bandits were primitive rebels, politically unsophisticated.29 Hobsbawm believes modern outlaws such as James and Kelly can still be considered peasant bandits, at least in theory, because railroad holdups and bank robberies were adaptations of peasant banditry to capitalism. Although James and Kelly emerged in capitalist societies, they were still peasant bandits because they still adapted to Marxs idea of peasantry, consisting namely on self-sufficiency. Peasants do not constitute a class because they are a set of individuals, economically independent, who relate to each other through primitive economic relations. This economic primitiveness makes them also politically unsophisticated and backward. They cannot represent themselves and here is where the social bandit comes. Nonetheless, because the bandit is a peasant himself, the nature of his rebellion against the authorities will be primitive as well.30 Stiless criticism of Hobsbawm and White consists in stressing how both academics have failed to understand the real nature of the support Jesse James received. He does not criticise the idea of social banditry in itself although he points out that it risks paying too much attention to economic factors while neglecting others which might be relevant as well; which in a way is what McQuilton does when proposing the geographical dimension to understand Ned Kelly. Stiles only disagrees with Hobsbawm in that in the case of Jesse James, those who supported him were far from politically unsophisticated and they saw the bandit not as a champion against an economic oppressor, but rather as a Confederate hero of the anti-Reconstruction movement or, as Stiles implies in the title of his book, as the last rebel of the Civil War. Jesse James emerged in a social context that was rural but highly politicised. Farmers formed sophisticated political organizations such as the Grange and the Peoples Party. 31 James

29 30

Stiles, pp.383-4 Ibid 31 Ibid, p.384

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and his contemporaries followed the vivid political discussions that took place in the printed media between Republicans and Democrats, and newspapers consistently identified the political nature of Jesses banditry. Referring to the James-Younger gang, the Kansas City Times said in 1881 that they continued the war after the war ended; and the Kansas City Journal of Commerce that there is not a man of average intelligence in this county who does not know that these outlaws have been harboured and befriended, and are so today, by men who harboured and befriended them during the war, and by nobody else, and for no other reason.32 Contrary to what an ideal Hobsbawmian social bandit would do, Jesse did not seek to reunite a divided community. He championed the pride and power of a social group that had been created by the Civil War itself, not against corporations but against fellow Missourians who supported the Union and had a northward-looking vision.33 He was a Confederate hero whose banditry formed part of the Confederate front of struggle to regain respect in politics, achieve the social standing thwarted by the 1865 Constitution and realign Missouris sense of itself as a Southern state.34 Jesse James was a champion of the Confederate Lost Cause who aimed to overturn the Radical post-war Reconstruction programme. His image as a popular Confederate outlaw was not imposed on him by the mob (as would be the case with a social bandit, according to Hobsbawm), but he actively sought to promote it with his letters to the newspapers and with the assistance of John Edwardss editorials. His banditry was not, as White sustains, an exotic appendage of the agrarian revolt of post-Civil War America,35 but rather an appendage of the Southern-Separatist, whitesupremacist revolt of the former Confederacy.36 Jesses banditry was political and so was only

32 33

Quoted in Stiles, pp.289,349 Ibid, p.387 34 Ibid 35 White, p.395 36 Stiles, p.389

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relevant to Missouri politics while the struggle between the Unionist and Confederate wings of the Democratic Party lasted. The decline of the Jameses after Northfield coincided with the Confederates earning of a stable position within the Party, when the mediatic effect of the gang became less necessary. If the former Confederates won political respectability, it was partly thanks to the publicity of their cause given by Jesses exploits. Hence, this use of political violence moves Stiles to argue that the James-Youngers banditry resembled more the doings of a terrorist organisation like the Ku Klux Klan, although in a smaller scale. 37 This however is taking things too far, since terrorists strategy consists on terrorising the population to put pressure on the authorities, while Jesse James was an outlaw with a political programme which he fostered merely by remaining alive as a challenge to the establishment. Stiles uses many more arguments to deny that Jesse James was social bandit. Nonetheless, he fails to give enough importance to the fact that Jesse liked to portray himself as one in his criminal operations an interventions in the media.38 Already in his day he was talked of as a modern Robin Hood, and he never contradicted the assertion. Something similar happened in the case of Ned Kelly, although it seems that there is more academic agreement that his outlawry resembled that of a social bandit more than Jesse Jamess. Seal adopts a more conciliatory position regarding Hobsbawms social bandits. He argues that although in some specific cases this category has been challenged to reject the idea of an abstract force operating in history, the overall concept of social banditry has managed to survive as a useful framework to best conceptualise an understanding of the common activities and origins that characterised these historical types of outlaws.39 Seal still proposes outlaw heroes as an alternative concept with less potential ideological implications. He says that Hobsbawms studies may have failed to grasp the importance of folkloric and other cultural expressions that

37 38

Stiles, pp.388,393 Fellman (2005), pp.1485-6 39 Seal, p.3

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have always been attached to these outlaws. Indeed, the importance of these expressions was made evident even during the lives of the outlaws. For them, the lore became law as existing ideas of Robin Hoodism in society determined the way they conducted their banditries, attaching themselves to a cultural script that would guarantee they were perceived as heroes. 40 Ned Kelly and Jesse James lived in a period in which the development of industrial capitalism enabled the rise of mass culture, making of the two outlaw heroes examples of firstgeneration mass-media celebrities.41 Their fame has exponentially grown over the years making of them real cultural phenomena known around the globe. Their stories have become legends which are continuously reinterpreted and challenged in academic books and best-sellers, films and television programmes, popular songs, poems, etc.42 The fact that James and Kelly have been portrayed under a myriad of different lights in the most varied cultural forms since the late nineteenth-century explains why in their specific cases, categorising them as social bandits may be more or less accurate but certainly limiting for figures of such wide cultural appeal. Ned Kelly and Jesse James are not the names of two outlaws who were relevant in their localities during their lives but whose memory is now lost in the history books. As opposed to most bandits used by Hobsbawm to construct his thesis, James and Kelly are more than just social bandits. They are cultural phenomena whose significance is not tied solely to the original context from which they emerged.43 Their stories cannot be traced back to a single source and the quantity of material focused on them which has been published since the 1880s testifies for the durability of their legends. They have played a powerful role in popular culture, shaping the social memories of countries in which the Anglophone outlaw tradition was formed and those to

40 41

Seal, p.17 Anderson (1986), p.44 42 Huggan, p.132 43 Anderson, p.45

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which it has been exported.44 Due to the capacity of their figures to engage with popular attitudes, from the cultural point of view their relevance has come to rely less on the historical accuracy of their legends and more on the ability of those legends to be adapted to a continuously varying set of ideological interests and consumer demands.45 Huggan accounts for the way in which Ned Kelly has become a paradigm in which the selective retelling of his story as a folk legend has met a nationalist ideological process, enabling the reworking of social memory to include Kelly into the fabric of Australias cultural myths.46 The portrayal of Kelly as one of Australias national heroes is supported in many cultural forms, many of whom proceed from or are encouraged by the political authorities. Other works such as Robert Drewes Our Sunshine (1991) challenge the idea of Kelly as a folk-hero. Drewe dismantles the bushrangers legend, stressing the brutality of the Kelly gang to criticise the predatory aspect that links the legend with those who continue to use it to compete for scraps of Kellys legacy in the name common or private interests.47 He also highlights the violent element in the legend, uncovering its reworking in culture as a displaced colonial trauma, as well as cutting through the surface of Kelly as a male bravado to reveal the deep-seated anxieties that lied within his persona.48 Studying the cultural phenomenon of Jesse James figure, Anderson argues that because of the way it has reached us, the academic study of Jesses story cannot be detached without difficulty from the cultural process within which his myth was formed.49 Quoting Kenneth Burke, Anderson maintains that all the different forms by which the story of Jesse James (and for that matter, Neds too) is transmitted are equally valuable cultural texts which are in mutual

44 45

Cf Huggan, p.132 Ibid, p.133 46 Ibid, p.132 47 Ibid, p.134 48 Ibid 49 Anderson, p.44

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dialogic interaction.50 Hence, no given text should be considered in isolation, as wholly corrupt or wholly authentic. Rather, it should be seen as an answer or rejoinder to assertions current in the situation in which it arose and which in itself constitutes a social practice in the ongoing ideological debate about the figure of the outlaw hero.51 Andersons intertextual hybrids52 are cultural texts which acknowledge without necessarily agreeing with them the contribution made by previous ones to sustain the new understanding of the outlaw hero they seek to transmit. Huggan believes Peter Careys The True Story of the Kelly Gang (2000) exemplifies this in that it is a self-reflective account of the Kelly Legend and of how it has been communicated. Moreover, the book also furthers its intertextuality by blurring the boundaries between oral and written, fictional and non-fictional cultural texts, giving equal importance to the input which each carries out in this new depiction of Ned Kelly.53 Anderson refers to the film The True Story of Jesse James (1957) as an example of intertextual hybridity. Nicholas Rays story also possesses a self-conscious and reflexive quality, and is an upfront attack on classical texts of Jesse James, mainly by his portrayal of the outlaw not as a social or popular bandit but as a bourgeois one.54 The parallel which Ray, director also of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), draws in his film, between Jesse as a post-war adolescent bandit and the delinquent youths of his time, shows the way external discourses are incorporated into the established stories of Jesse James and Ned Kelly.55 It also demonstrates the importance of cultural texts for their social and ideological function in contributing to ongoing cultural struggles over meaning.56

50 51

Anderson, p.44 Ibid, pp.44,46 52 Ibid, p.50 53 Huggan, pp.134-5 54 Anderson, pp.43,51-60 55 Ibid, p.49 56 Ibid, p.47

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These struggles over meaning have recently regained importance with the boosting of memory as central in contemporary discourses over personal and cultural identity. 57 Collective memory is now valued for its healing powers as cultural discourses have re-stimulated attempts to overcome personal and social traumas such as the Holocaust, Apartheid or the Northern Ireland Troubles. The figures of Kelly and James have also been imbued with this emerging memory industry, with the increasing commoditisation of memory as the function of a consumer-driven late-capitalist society in which historical consciousness has been eroded with nostalgia.58 The ever-growing conscious mystification of the two bandits denotes a current social longing for a time in which more rudimentary techniques of crime and punishment and preindustrial social and political conditions made it possible for a man to effectively challenge the authority of the state and somehow remain free. Our society yearns for heroes. In this context, diverse memorabilia and pseudo-historical reconstructions are supplied to meet the consumers demand for souvenirs and spectacles which grant the illusion of accessing experiences lived in the past but which are not possible anymore.59 Huggan points out that with the emergence of this new industry there is the danger of memory being manipulated for authoritarian purposes. At the same time, he believes memory is a powerful creative force which reinvents itself continually with new representations, superseding state-sanctioned attempts to regulate it and thus enabling the emergence of cultural memory as the collective activity occurring in the present by which the past is constantly modified.60 Nevertheless, if by their representation in different cultural texts, memories keep on changing our understanding of the past, is it possible to access the actual past through these texts? How faithful and can an idea be gained of who Jesse James and Ned Kelly really were?

57 58

Huggan, p.137 Ibid 59 Ibid 60 Ibid

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Anderson explains that each articulation of Jesses story (and Neds I would say) is inhabited by the residue of previous versions, permeated with the interpretations of others.61 Interxtuality infuses each individual articulation with discourses inherent to the outlaws stories and with the historical sedimentation of discourses that have adhered to their figures. This is why the extent to which Jesse and Ned were social bandits is in a way not that relevant. What is important is to realise that they have become a lot more than that. As cultural phenomena, they have been represented in thousands of cultural texts over the decades. They have been portrayed in all forms and shapes: as heroes and murderers, as patriots and anarchists. The Jesse James played by Collin Farrell in American Outlaws (2001), for instance, is completely different to that performed by Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). These are also completely different films. The first one just uses the myth as an excuse for a Western shoot em up, outstanding for its bad acting and jawdropping factual inaccuracies, in which Jesse is no more than a cowboy lad always with a smile on his face. The latter, on the other hand, is a deeper work in which Andrew Dominik makes use of an amazing soundtrack and photography to carry out a psychological study of an embittered Jesse and his killer during the last months of the formers life. Although there also some minor inaccuracies in the film, The Assassination successfully presents Jesse as a legendary outlaw and then progressively strips him of the mythic halo around him to uncover a real man who was a criminal and who felt remorse for his crimes. The real Jesse James may well have been completely different to Andrew Dominiks one, and the same could be said of all the other Jesse Jameses and Ned Kellies that have been reproduced since the outlaws died. Nonetheless, no matter how erroneous cultural texts might be, instead of their outright dismissal, it is more functional to collect the ideas each text is trying to transmit and contrast them with those from others. In this way, a wider and more substantiated

61

Anderson, p.61

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picture of the outlaw heroes will be formed. This picture will inform us about the different ways the outlaws have been perceived by different communities over the decades since the 1880s as well as granting a more accurate and truthful image of who and what Jesse James and Ned Kelly really were.

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Outlaws HILTON, R.H. (1999), The Origins of Robin Hood, in S. Knight (ed.), Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism HOBSBAWM, E.(1959), Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries HOBSBAWM, E. (1969, 2000), Bandits SEAL, G. (1996), The Outlaw Legend: a cultural tradition in Britain, America and Australia TRANTER, B. & DONOGHUE, J. (2007), The Globalisation of Outlaws and Bushrangers, TASA and SAANZ Joint Conference 2007, 4-7 December 2007, Auckland, New Zealand

Ned Kelly EGGERT, P. (2007), The Bushrangers Voice: Peter Careys True Story of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Ned Kellys Jerilderie Letter (1879), College Literature, 34.3, Summer 2007, pp.120-39 HUGGAN, G. (2002), Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, May. JONES, I. (2008), Ned Kelly. A Short Life KELLY, N. (1879), The Jerilderie Letter, in N. Jose (ed.), The Literature of Australia: An Anthropology (2009), pp.224-8 MCQUILTON, J. (1979), The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry MCQUILTON, J. (1987), Police in Rural Victoria: A Regional Example, in M. Finnane (ed.), Policing Australia: Historical Perspectives MORRISSEY, D. (1978), Ned Kellys Sympathisers, Historical Studies, Vol. 18, Oct. 1978 WARD, R. (1958), The Australian Legend

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Jesse James ANDERSON, C. (1986), Jesse James, the Bourgeois Bandit: the Transformation of a Popular Hero, Cinema Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 43-64 BREIHAN, C.W. (1969), The Complete and Authentic Life of Jesse James CROY, H. (1967), Jesse James Was My Neighbour DIBBLE, R.F. (1931), Jesse James, The American Journal of Police Science, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp.220-40 FELLMAN, M. (2005), Review [Jesse James: the last Rebel of the Civil War], The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4, pp.1485-6 (No named author) Jessie [sic] James and Ned Kelly: A Local Connection, Before I Forget...: Journal of the Pountzpass and District Local History Society, No. 9 (Apr., 2003), pp. 76-81 STILES, T.J. (2002), Jesse James: the Last Rebel of the Civil War TRIPLETT, F. (1970), The Life, Times and Treacherous Death of Jesse James WHITE, R. (1981), Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits, The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp.387-408

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