Australia's greatest folk hero was Ned Kelly, who was a habitual criminal from a young age, but really made a name for himself in 1878 when he and his brother Dan has a run-in with police that left three officers dead. Kelly spend the next two years on the run, while his exploits impressed the populace and the reward for his capture grew higher and higher.
Kelly considered himself to have been mistreated by police, which many other Australians could relate to. During a bank robbery, he destroyed evidence of mortgages and other debts, which gained more fans. Kelly became a hero to the poor and downtrodden and was admired for striking back against wealthy landowners and corrupt authority figures. The story of Ned Kelly had a particularly dramatic climax when he and his gang endured eleven hours of police gunfire. Officers started to believe Kelly was un-killable, until they saw that the gang had fashioned homemade suits of heavy metal armor that made them resemble robots. That vision of Kelly made him an icon of resistance against authority. Read the story of Ned Kelly at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Chensiyuan)
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