Kelly’s malevolent ghost still haunts Australia

Ned Kelly, Sidney Nolan, 1946

‘A Sidney Nolan painting of Ned Kelly has sold for a record-breaking $5.4 million to an unknown bidder.’ (ABC, 26 March 2010)

It should have been burned.

In fact, fine art though it maybe, the whole series should be burned – or at least locked away from sight for fifty years.

The mainstream Aussie bloke has been going backwards ever since Nolan created his paradoxically emasculating paradigm. The iconoclastic image has itself become an icon and, like Kelly’s iron helmet, is a dead weight around the neck of the Australian male. Far from the hackneyed rebellious ‘larrikin’ image, Australia has one of the most numbingly conformist male cultures on the planet.

Kelly represents the Australian male alone in a barren cultural desert of his own making. Bereft of company and locked into a simplistic cell-like box with a cerebral content so thin the light shines through it. Blinkered by his iron mask he can see only directly forward or backward with no possibility of lateral vision or movement.

This icon – and the crass uber-blokey sentiment it symbolises – is responsible in no small part for the tragic separation by the Australian male from his magnificent European heritage.

Instead of men who embrace a rich and endlessly varied culture, we have lumbering adolescent stereotypes too scared to do anything slightly different, be appreciative of intellectual achievement, or admire millennia of artistic endeavour – because some of their Kelly-like gang of ‘mates’ might suspect they are gay.

We can only hope for a new Australian image of equal power to rid us of this wretched debilitating icon; a new iconoclasm to shatter the cultural fundamentalism of culturally impotent Australian masculinity.

Now that would be worth $5.4 million.