Book review - Glenrowan: The Siege That Shaped A Nation

NED Kelly can never die. This most famous of Australian bushrangers continues to offer a deep well of material for fact, fiction and cinema.

NED Kelly can never die. This most famous of Australian bushrangers continues to offer a deep well of material for fact, fiction and cinema.

He remains both saint and sinner, a spirited defender of his family and a killer of men; an intriguing character.

Kelly was hanged in November 1880, some months after the siege in the Victorian hamlet of Glenrowan where he was captured and his mates killed.

This followed a series of clashes, some bloodier than others, across northeast Victoria.

There have been wagonloads of treatises on Kelly and his gang, some a tad turgid. But Ian Shaw provides a fresh, detailed and dramatic account of the siege and all its players.

Shaw's careful consideration of Glenrowan allows him to recount history in concise, most readable language.

He fleshes out the drama with little tripping over psychological or political polemic although Shaw may conclude, as does a later royal commission, that not all the authorities were as true and just as reported.

After outlaw Joe Byrne shot dead informer Aaron Sherrit, Shaw says, police facts were either mismatched or imagined.

"It was the beginning of a cover-up of police incompetence from one angle, and of sheer cowardice from another. But in many ways it was symptomatic of what was becoming characteristic of the events unfolding at Glenrowan confusion."

Glenrowan: The Siege That Shaped A Nation
Ian W. Shaw
Pan Macmillan, $34.99