NED KELLY RIDES AGAIN

Southland Times, Issue 23948, 14 October 1939, Page 10

NED KELLY RIDES AGAIN

BAIL UP. By Hilary Lofting. The New Century Press, Sydney. Price 2/6. The story of Ned Kelly and the Kelly gang has been told many times and has always had a, grim fascination, especially for Australians and New Zealanders. It is a story which can be retold many times and still grip the attention. Just before his death Hilary Lofting completed “Bail Up,” the truth, as he saw it, about the exploits of Ned Kelly, and about the man himself. There may be some who quarrel with the author’s picture of the bushranger, but none will deny that the story is a distinguished addition to the host of tales about the Kelly gang. Hilary Lofting saw Ned Kelly not as a brutal ruffian, but as a young man with a thrist for adventure allied with a vague but nevertheless compelling sense of injustice. When he found that the “big bosses” had everything and were quite prepared to ride roughshod over such people as the Kellys to get more, Ned Kelly felt justified in giving free reign to his love of excitement. From cattle and horse stealing it was for him an easy step to bushranging. Then a callous policeman’s ■ treatment of his mother and sisters brought him, easily enough, to murder. His career as an outlaw then reached its peak.

There was something of grandeur in the exploits of Ned and Dan Kelly, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne when they omitted bloodshed from their onslaughts on society: to “stick up” whole townships, forcing the inhabitants to join in wild drinking debauches, must have given the outlaws some grim amusement and a certain justification for swaggering. But there were no redeeming features about their final battle with the police, when women and children were among the victims of a savage gun fight round the Glenrowan hotel. Ned Kelly makes a grand enough exit, but it is difficult to accept the author’s implied suggestion that he was a social reformer who somehow got hold of a gun instead of a soapbox.

MYSTERY IN KENT THE HOUSE OF THE HUNDRED HEADS. By Robert Moss. Robert Hale, London, through Whitcombe and Tombs. Price 7/6. James Spindell-Scott gives up botany and amateur detection to become a professional detective and join in the search for a kidnapped American financier. His confidant is his very efficient secretary, Janet Voyce, and his principal enemy a mysterious Dr Glaish whose identity is disclosed not even to the leading members of the kidnapping gang. The “House of the Hundred Heads” is an ancient mansion in Kent in which some violent action occurs before the American is recovered. The hundred heads are not human; they are figures above the doors of electrically-guarded vaults into which the financier and SpindellScott are thrown. The plot of this story has plenty of action and intrigue.