I'm a bush ranger. The earliest words attributed to Ned Kelly in public record from 1869.

Bush Rangers were outlaws, and no Australian outlaw became more infamous in life or in death than Ned Kelly.

Kelly was one of the last true Bush Rangers in Australian history, marking an end to a wild and lawless era that mirrored the American Wild West.

Fellow Australian outlaw, Aaron Sherritt, once said about him, I look upon Ned Kelly as an

extraordinary man. There is no man in the world like him. He is superhuman. And he really was.

Love him or hate him. You couldn't deny that he was one tough son of a bitch, ready to die for his beliefs.

Ned grew up mostly in poverty in rural Victoria. His father was an Irish convict who had been shipped off to a penal colony in Australia's punishment, a man who'd later purchased a small farm, but it never yielded enough to keep his family fed, and he resorted to more theft to make up the

difference. There were also lawbreakers on his mother's side, a whole bunch of them, who committed

mainly crimes of theft as well. And Ned grew up believing that if Australia's government hadn't

stacked the deck against so many of its recent immigrants, if it hadn't created a system of land-owning

halves and have nots, that his family

wouldn't have had to resort to crime. He believed that the British colonial government's oppression

of working-class immigrants in Australia was no better than how his Irish ancestors had been

mistreated and oppressed by the British across the world. He would also grow up believing his family

was especially persecuted by the police.

Maybe for good reason. Maybe not. Either way, he developed a deep hatred for both the government

overall and law enforcement in particular. Then when he was a young teen, the infamous Bush Ranger

Harry Power would take Ned under his wing and show him the ropes of the outlaw life. And once Ned had got caught a few times and spent some time in jail,

he now really hated the government and the police.

And there was no going back from the outlaw life.

He was going to be a Bush Ranger until the day he died.

He would join a gang called DeGretta Mob before forming his own gang of Bush Rangers,

...