September 8, 2001 Page 2
THE CASE FOR JAMES WHITTY
Who was
James Whitty? One view likely to be exposed on the big screen in the
near future is that James Whitty was the man who set Ned Kelly on a mad
career of crime. The historical reality is much more difficult to
uncover. Most of the "evidence" against Whitty circumstantial and the
"facts" are skeletal, as shown in
Attachment A,
An
extreme view is that James Whitty was a besotted farmer who got rich
with the help of his Tipperary-born wife, by getting the best of a
bargain with The Devil. That is how eminent Australian author, Peter
Carey, characterises James Whitty is his latest novel, the so-called
‘True History of the Kelly Gang.' At least Carey has the grace to add a
note describing the encounter as "fanciful". But his portrayal of Whitty
is just as jaundiced throughout the book. That is an outcome of Carey's
dependence on TV scriptwriter and local historian, Ian Jones, to whom
Carey says he turned "when I was lost or bewildered or simply forgetful
of the facts".
According to Jones, Ned Kelly went bad because James Whitty and others
spread lies about him. Ned did not steal Whitty's bull, nor Whitty's
calves, although later he did steal a lot of horses, including Whitty's,
just to give them all something to talk about. Jones believes all this
because Ned says so and Jones' faith in Ned is as great as the "almost
boundless" faith he says Ned had in his fellow-man. So, over a decade or
so, Jones has constructed a caricature of Whitty that may be just as
fanciful as the Carey version.
Jones
asserts that Whitty was "a dour and implacable glazier who led the King
Valley squatters against the battling cocky fanners", and, Ned Kelly's
"old enemy... leading light of the King Valley squatters". When making
those observations in his 1992 book, The Friendship That destroyed Ned
Kelly, Jones provides no authenticating source beyond Kelly's Cameron
and Jerilderie letters. More recently, Jones has argued a different
case, telling a Nightline audience on 9 April 2001 that "stupid" actions
by the police "catapulted the Kelly outbreak into a rebellion, because
at that point Ned had to act on behalf of a whole class of people in the
north-east." But in his 1995 master work, Ned Kelly, A Short Life, Jones
tries to sustain a different line— that untrue accusations by James
Whitty and his associates set Kelly on the path that led inexorably to
Stringybark Creek, Glenrowan and the gallows. The line wavers as Jones
the historian battles with Jones the TV producer and script writer.
The
first difficulty is that Ned Kelly's perverse viewpoint as expressed in
the Cameron and Jerilderie letters remains Jones primary source. The
greater difficulty is that Jones accepts at face value the three claims
Ned Kelly makes. First, Ned say, he turns to large-scale stock theft
because he is tired of false accusations made by Whitty and others and
decides to give them something to talk about. Unlike Jones, an earlier
writer Frank Clune wisely dismisses Ned's claim as "self-deception".
Second, Ned says, that Whitty, along with the Byrne family, had taken
all the best land in the King Valley and, not content with that were
greedily impounding stock that happened to stray from the paddocks of
"poor" owners. Third, Ned says, Constable Thomas Farrell, brother to
James Whitty's son-in-law, John Farrell, stole a horse from Ned's
father-in-law, George King, and kept it in one of Whitty's or Farrell's
paddocks until he left the police force.
Jones
adds a little substance to this raw material by drawing circumstantial
evidence, mainly from Entries in the Police Gazette and advertisements
or other articles, mainly from the Wangaratta Despatch and the Ovens and
Murray Advertiser. Otherwise, Jones view of Ned's relationship with
James Whitty is justified by some undisclosed research summarised in a
monograph by Jones partner, Bronwyn Binns, and two letters from a
descendant of James Whitty's brother, Patrick" The detail available from
contemporary press articles inspired Jones to flesh out the
"confrontation" between Kelly and Whitty at Moyhu races on 28 February
1877. His dramatisation is at least the equal of Carey's more recent
effort and of Max Brown's 1947 version "".Ned is there to deny having
stolen Whitty's bull. Jones has Ned striding past a banjo-strumming
Negro minstrel and a lady spinning her Wheel of Fortune, his
"alexandrite" eyes flashing as "the figure of stern authority", James
Whitty-
September 8, 2001 Page 3
faces the "equally authoritative" Ned Kelly. There is a threat of
thunder and a "most curious" storm coming that sets the stage for "an
explosive confrontation". The melodrama turns to farce when Whitty says
his missing bull has been found and readily concedes that he never
thought Ned took it-- only that his son-in-law Farrell had said Ned took
it. In the absence of any contrary evidence, Jones speculates that Ned
was left with the choice of looking for Farrell or instead enjoying the
rest of the race program.
(viii) Nonetheless it is that incident,
compounded by a further accusation a couple of weeks later about some
stolen calves, that Ned says pushed him towards horse stealing on a
scale beyond any past accusation.
Such
dramatisations may well be within the current bounds of scholarship but
some of Jones' fictional embellishments are more dubious. At the time of
the Moyhu race-course confrontation, for example, Jones describes Whitty
as "now 62, a Dickensian figure of stern authority with his starched
collar, rawboned face and grey side-whiskers. Seemingly all good stuff
—except that the only factual basis for the description would appear to
be Jones "interpretation" of the photograph of James Whitty that is
displayed in the Burke Museum, Beechworth, as part of a montage of
district pioneers.
Since
the photographs for the montage were collected some years after James
Whitty's death, it is not possible to say when the photograph was taken
or whether he looked more or less "Dickensian" than his contemporaries.
Jones likes the word "Dickensian": a Murray Valley farmer who befriends
the Kelly outlaws and obtains first-hand evidence of Ned's "obsession"
with Whitty is Dickensian simply because his name is "Gideon Margery “(ix)
Even more misleading is Jones' account of the day James Whitty takes
possession of Myhree homestead, the "jewel" in the crown of his
expanding empire. Jones imagined him striding through empty rooms once
inhabited by real squatters, now revealed to be the Dockers and the
Clarks, pioneers who Jones seems to believe were spent forces but who in
fact remained influential landholders.. Of course Jones recognises that
Whitty's sense of satisfaction is diminished by the absence of his
"beloved" wife, Catherine, who died three years before. And as a measure
of Whitty's sense of loss, Jones offers the entirely unsubstantiated
comment that the "normally thrifty" grazier had donated a stained glass
window to her memory at Moyhu Catholic Church.
For a moment Whitty loses his image at the implacable oppressor of the
poor and becomes the miserly upstart laying claim to the house on the
hill, a kind of class traitor. "It had been a long, hard struggle for
the then illiterate Irish labourer who had arrived in the colony on an
assisted passage thirty-seven years before," says Jones.(x) But then,
"Whitty's achievements spoke of great energy and determination and he
brought the same spirit to his inevitable clashes with the battling
selectors who surrounded him. Ned in determining that he would give
Whitty and his friends 'something to talk about' must have realised that
he was taking on a dangerous enemy."
It
would be too tedious to go through a complex text in any further detail
but it should be clear from the examples above that to Suit his own
purposes Jones has fabricated a malign image of James Whitty. Needing to
sustain his thesis of a class struggle between "squatters" and
selectors, of a heroic rebellion by the oppressed against their
oppressors, scriptwriter Jones needs the personification of Whitty as
arch-enemy, as super-villain as anti-hero to match his hero, Ned. The
trouble is that some of the known facts about James Whitty refuse to fit
the role in which he is cast.
Jones
must have been dismayed when he obtained detail about the formation of
the Stock Protection League. Far from being "the leading light", Whitty
was no more than a member of the group that convened the inaugural
meeting and was elected as a committee member. Jones seeks to explain
this away by claiming that as 'Whitty, as usual, adopted a low
profile”(xi) just as elsewhere he claims Whitty was a "grey eminence",
In fact, as usual, James Whitty took his lead from Andrew Byrne who not
only convened the inaugural meeting of the Stock Protection League but
was elected president. Byrne, rather than Whitty could fairly claim to
be the leading light among members who included John Evans as
vice-president, William Dale as treasurer, RR. Tilt as paid secretary, a
committee comprising A. Tone, John Brincombe, E.Batchelor, T.Smith,
A.Clarke, J.Reid, A.Jeffiay (or more likely Jeffrey), Patrick Byrne and
membership comprising Henry Langtree, Rowland Vincent, W.Baird,
W.Dinning, F. G.Docker, J.RDocker, someone called French, John Reid,
John Webster, William Orr, W.Sinclair, J.Kaine and Benjamin Evans!`
(xii)
September 8, 2001 Page 4
Several
of these people would have far greater claims than James Whitty to be
seen as doyen of the north-east or even the King Valley squattocracy
That is evident from their stories in Worthy of Mention, Profiles of
people of the past from Wangaratta and district (from which Whitty
is a significant omission) (xiii) Andrew Byrne, for example, selected
320 acres at Moyhu in 1859, six years before James Whitty, eventually
expanding to more than 3,000 acres and employing 40 Chinese
share-farmers. As a Justice of the Peace who represented the western
riding on Oxley Shire Council, from 1874 and 1893, serving several terms
as president, Andrew Byrne is credited with founding the Moyhu
Co-operative Store and the Moyhu Cooperative Dairy Company.
He was alternately president and sometime secretary of the Moyhu Racing
club for some years and "every sports club and picnic in the district"
is said to have had his support(xiv) John Bristow Docker and his brother
Frederick George managed the Bontharambo run that their father, the Rev
Joseph Docker had settled there in the 1930s and obtained pre-emptive
rights in 1853.' Ironically, given the picture Jones paints of the
"powerful" Whitty clan, John Docker took over Myhree run after James
Whitty himself died there in 1929. ""John Evans, who was chosen
vice-president of the Stock Protection League on Andrew Byrne's casting
vote, was the son of the man who took over the "Whitefleld" run of
76,000 acres from William Clark in 1853.
Famous for being taken hostage by the bushranger "Mad Dog" Morgan, John
Evans was more than an ordinary grazier. He was an expert horseman who
bred and raced many horses, including some trained by his
brother-in-law, Mark Whitty (not James Whitty's son, more likely a
cousin or another brother). Yes, John Evans, an Anglican, married
Eleanor, James Whitty's niece in February 1870-- the kind of connection
by marriage, that Jones believes accounted for much of James Whitty's
power.
Any of
these pioneers along with the Faithfulls, the Clarks, the Chisholms, the
Mackays and many others could have served Jones as representatives of
the "squatter" class. Instead, because Ned Kelly named Whitty and
exaggerated the consequences of a brief exchange at either Moyhu or
Oxley races, Jones makes Whitty his stereotype of "oppression". The
Whitty of-Jones imagination is a caricature worthy of the masterful
Dickens from whom Jones draws acknowledged inspiration. A more sensible
view would be to see Whitty as a victim as well as a beneficiary of the
inequities arising from land distribution in early Victoria.
None of this matters if we want only larger-than-life myths and legends
or moral tales of haves and have-note of the righteous poor battling the
oppression of the undeserving rich. It matters only if we want the
truth. As historian Andrew McDermott said of Jones' view of Ned Kelly:
"If Ned Kelly had not lived we would not have one of the most precious
icons that we now have to worship....that is quite different from the
historical reality that took place". The same can be said of Jones' view
of James Whitty and more so of Peter Carey's fanciful creation..
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