The events at the heart of the Kelly story took place during the second half of the 1800s, a time of immense change in Australia.
The forcible and violent dispossession of First Nations people that began with the arrival of the First Fleet continued throughout the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries as pastoralists claimed land for grazing and agriculture. The terrible legacy of the official policy of Terra Nullius (empty land) on the original Australians continues to be felt today.
From the 1850s to the late 19th century, the gold rushes brought not just booming new towns with thriving businesses servicing mining operations, but also environmental disaster on a massive scale. Waterways were dredged for gold and vast tracts of land were clear felled and dug over, leaving behind muddy, lifeless moonscapes.
The felled forests were also used for new housing as well as thousands of kilometres of railway tracks connecting Melbourne and Sydney with new inland communities. In North East Victoria, many of these were decommissioned in the 20th century and recently reborn as scenic off-road cycle trails enjoyed year-round by thousands of visitors to the region.
Gold also created newly diverse societies with thousands of Chinese people heading for the goldfields. Resentment toward Chinese miners sometimes led to ugly racially-charged conflicts, the first glimpses of what was to be enshrined in law as the White Australia policy in 1901.
Convicts were still being transported to the colonies this time. Kelly’s own father was a convict sentenced to seven years in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) for theft before being granted his ‘ticket of leave’. His mother Ellen with her family and thousands of other new arrivals in the colony, was part of the vast diaspora of impoverished Irish emigrating to Australia and America after the Great Famine of the 1840s.
Law enforcement in the colony of Victoria was also undergoing change. As Victoria transitioned from a colonial settlement of New South Wales to a separate state, the police force changed alongside it. Regional police were isolated and leaders and headquarters were sometimes several days’ journey away.
The need to police a vast area was made more difficult by a shortage of recruits, leading to differences in policing standards depending on the individual skills of officers. Some stations were poorly resourced and some communities were very wary of police power. This dynamic contributed to many of the stories presented on this website.
It was also a time of vastly improved living standards for many new Australians including rates of literacy with the colony of Victoria becoming one of the first places in the world to introduce a universal education system that was ‘secular, compulsory and free’ in 1872.