Kelsay is a novelist and instructor of English composition. In this essay, Kelsay considers Ned Kelly's place in the Australian imagination.

In 1786, the English government was exhausted by an increase in crime that was the inevitable by-product of industrialization. Technical and mechanical innovation had resulted in urbanization, the mass movement of people from rural farming areas into cities. Some members of Parliament and other spokesmen for the government began to discuss the possibility of "transporting" convicted criminals to faraway penal colonies in England's newly acquired South Pacific lands—New South Wales, in present-day Australia, and Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania. Two years later, with a load of human cargo, eleven convict ships set sail for lands that were at that time almost entirely unknown by Englishmen. This practice continued unabated for the next eighty years, and by the 1860s and 1870s—the time in which...