Gay Bushrangers

Over at Reasons You Will Hate Me, Ms Fits has raised the perenial question of whether or not Ned Kelly (pictured left, the day before his execution) was a wooly woofter. Oddly enough, I wrote an article for the national fag-mag DNA on just such a topic a couple of years ago, as a tie-in with the lamentable 2003 film Ned Kelly. Here's a slightly abridged version of it for the salacious history-buffs among you:

AS NELLY AS NEDDY

As early as 1879 stories were circulating that at least one member of the Kelly Gang had a fondness for lady's clothing. In December the previous year the gang had held up Euroa's National Bank; before the raid Ned and the boys had burnt their old clothes, and disguised themselves as toffs. Among the ashes of their old clothes was found what was thought to be the remains of a lady's bonnet.

As Steve Hart (below, right) was the youngest, most slender member of the gang, police decided he must have been dressed as a woman, perhaps to reconoiter the bank, or - ah hah! - because he was a cross-dressing pervert.

According to Kelly expert Ian Jones, "the whole transvestism thing is codswallop...a complete misreading of the facts. The hat was a man's hat with a fly-veil on it."

By the 1960's the rumours had spread, and some were to claim that all four members of the Kelly Gang were cross-dressing transvestites.

Now, Ned Kelly was a strapping 1.8 metre tall man with a four inch reddish beard - hardly the sort of bloke who'd make a convincing drag queen. This didn't stop author Peter Carey adopting the rumours of cross-dressing for his 2000 best seller True History of the Kelly Gang, although he allocated the penchant for frocks to Ned's youngest brother Dan, and a third gang member , Steve Hart (and also Ned's dad, Red Kelly, who was not a member of the Gang).

The other key member of the Kelly Gang was the opium-smoking poet Joe Byrne, whose best friend - later to be shot and killed by the Gang just before the siege at Glenrowan, after he betrayed them to the police - was Aaron Sherritt.

Historian Manning-Clarke hinted of a relationship between the two - "a David and Jonathan friendship" (a Biblical reference to a friendship 'surpassing the love of women') - in Volume IV of his A History of Australia. Later, in 1980, John Moloney more bluntly claimed in his I Am Ned Kelly that the relationship between Joe and Aaron was a romantic one: "Aaron loved Joe with a love unbound and Joe had been taken from him," Moloney said, suggesting that the reason Aaron betrayed the Gang, and was consequently killed by them, was because Ned had stolen his lover away.

This theory gains weight in light of Aaron Sherritt's angry words to Joe Byrne's mother after she abused him for betraying the Gang: "I'll kill him [Joe] and before he's cold I'll fuck him."

Ian Jones sees no evidence of a homosexual relationship between Byrne and Sherritt. "You look at these two fellers and they are both very actively heterosexual," he says.

Any gay man who's had sex with a straight man can testify that being sexually active with women doesn't rule out same-sex activity. But let's assume that Ian Jones is right and Joe Byrne (left) was as straight as they come. What about the rest of the gang?

In 1966, in a Sydney Morning Herald article, linguist Sidney J Bakerwas quoted as saying about the Kelly Gang, "I have little doubt that they were a group of homosexuals."

His evidence? Ned's fondness for perfume; the gang's periodic donning of women's clothing (see above); a singular and well-documented example of man-on-man action instigated by a member of the gang (which we'll come to in a moment); and the deaths of the youngest Gang members, Dan Kelly and Steve Hart in one another's arms at the Siege of Glenrowan.

This article prompted considerable outrage, from such notables as author and artist Norman Lindsay. "All men of that era," Lindsay wrote the following year in The Bulletin, "irrespective of class, used perfume... In fact it was an almost male perogative."

This was indeed, an era when men carried cologne-scented handkerchiefs to ward off the stink of open drains. Sidney J. Baker's lack of understanding of men's fashion of the era, given that he was writing 80 years after the Gang's deaths, is understandable: his knowledge of their well-documented deaths, less so.

While the notion is romantic, I'm sad to say that Dan and Steve did not die in one another's arms. Eye-witness accounts, including Catholic priest Dean Michael Gibney, who tried to rescue the boys' bodies from the burning inn, clearly confirms that they died apart from one another.

However, one of Baker's facts is backed up by other sources. At the siege, Dan Kelly did ask another man to dance with him despite the fact that there were women present. This man was the same person who would betray the Gang to the police, leading to their deaths: the schoolteacher Tom Curnow.

In a later testimony at the inquest into the so-called Kelly Outbreak, Curnow says that young Dan (who was only 19 at the time he died) came out of the inn and asked him to dance with him. "I said I could not dance with the boots I had on," Curnow replied, whereupon Ned came out onto the veranda and said "Com on, never mind your boots." Curnow then danced with Dan Kelly.

If Dan Kelly (right) is our most likely suspect as the gay member of the Gang, on the basis that he specifically asked a man to dance with him despite the fact that Mrs Ann Jones, the innkeeper, and her daughter were present, we should also consider that Ned was probably no stranger to man-on-man action, having been jailed several times since he was a youth. Situational homsexuality, as any man who has spent time in jail or in the armed forces will testify, is by no means uncommon.

Shortly after Sidney Baker's allegations were made in the Sydney Morning Herald, historian Ian Jones remembers "talking to an old feller up in Kelly Country, Jack Plant I think... I said 'Look, what do you think about these stories about Ned being homosexual?' Poor old Jack thought about it for a moment and said, 'Listen, if Ned Kelly had been a poofter he would have been a bloody good one!'"

"Poor Sidney," Jones continues. "He had a bug about Ned Kelly. I would say that Sidney was homophobic, and that by applying these allegations to the Kelly Gang he thought he had placed them beyond the pale. He thought it would destroy their reputation. It was a stupid thing to do because it wasn't true. Even if it was true, it wouldn't have changed anything. Ned Kelly would have been what he was and would have done what he did."

While we may never know for certain whether or not members of the Kelly Gang comforted one another during those cold nights alone in the bush, there is one Australian bushranger that we can conclusively claim was what we would now call a homosexual.

Captain Moonlite, born Andrew Scott, turned to bushranging in 1869, but not successfully. He was caught and sentanced to 10 years in Melbourne's Pentridge Prison in 1872, where he met James Nesbit, who was aged 19 at the time of his release (compared to Scott's age of 37), and who was something of a career criminal. The two became close in jail, and lived together in Melbourne for several months following their release in 1879.

Thereafter the pair left Melbourne, embarking on a brief crime spree in the vicinity of Wagga Wagga, which led to them being besieged by the police. A gun battle took place, and James Nesbit was shot. According to some sources it happened while he was attempting to act as a decoy so that Moonlite could escape.

As Nesbit lay dying Captain Moonlite carried him back into the cover of a farmhouse, and "wept over him like a child...and kissed him passionately."

Throughout the following trial for the murder of a policeman killed in the siege, Moonlite wore a ring made of Nesbit's hair. His letters from Darlinghurst Gaol, written during the trial during the final weeks of his life, were never sent, and were later discovered by historian Garry Wotherspoon. They speak volumes of Moonlite's love for his dead companion.

"We were one in heart and soul, he died in my arms and I long to join him, where there shall be no more parting," Moonlite wrote in a letter to one friend. In another he said, "he died in my arms, his death has broken my heart." An in another letter, "when I think of my dearest Jim, I am nearly driven mad."
Captain Moonlite (right), aka Andrew Scott, was executed on January 20th 1880. His dying wish was to be buried beside his beloved James Nesbit, the man with whom he was "united by every tie which could bind human friendship, we were one in hopes, in heart and soul and this unity lasted until he died in my arms." This wish was not granted by the authorities of the day.

Joe Byrne, Steve Hart and Dan Kely died in the flaming ruins of the Glenrowan Inn on June 28th that same year of 1880. Ned Kelly was hung at the old Melbourne Gaol and died at four-and-a-half minutes past 10am on 11th of November, 1880.

Following his death, Ned's head was removed for study and medical students descended upon his still-warm corpse in a swarm, taking away every part of his body that they could as grisly souvenirs. The mutilated, headless body was buried in an unmarked grave in the grounds of the jail the following day.

Unlike the story of the Kelly Gang, there is a happy ending to the sad story of Captain Moonlite. Andrew Scott's coffin was exhumed from its grave at Sydney's Rookwood Cemetary in January, 1995. After having been transported in a horse-drawn cart to Gundagai Cemetery, the body of Captain Moonlite was reinterred, and now rests beside that of James Nesbit for all eternity.

***

Sources
The Sydney Morning Herald, August 4th 1966.
'The Question of Ned Kelly's Perfume,' Norman Lindsay, The Bulletin, March 18, 1967.
Ned Kelly: A Short Life, Ian Jones, Lothian Books 1995.
True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey, UQP 2000.
Camping by a Billabong, Robert French, Blackwattle Press 1993.
'Moonlight and... Romance: The Implications of the death-cell letters of Captain Moonlite and some of their implications,' Garry Wotherspoon, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 78, 1992.

This article first appeared in DNA #40 May 2003.