Hi Guest

take a look at this website, an educational summary for schoolchildren:

http://www.convictcreations.com/history/nedkelly.htm

Among other things it comments:

Despite Ned being found guilty, sixty thousand Victorians signed a petition demanding Ned's life be spared. Tensions in the community remained at fever pitch and sympathisers threatened the kind of revolt that Ned may have been planning.

To defuse the powder keg, an inquest was held into the actions of the police. Nearly every officer involved in the Kelly case was subsequently dismissed from the force or reduced in rank. As for Constable Fitzpatrick, the trooper who started the whole thing, he was dismissed as "not being fit to be in the police force; that he associated with the lowest persons in Lancefield; that he could not be trusted out of sight; and that he never did his duty".

Just like the Eureka Diggers three decades earlier, it seems Ned lost the battle but won the war. His actions led to police corruption coming under scrutiny which ultimately freed his fellow selectors from oppression. Of course at the time, it was unlikely that he was able to appreciate the immense change his actions were to have upon Australian society. Prior to mounting the scaffold, his final words were the somewhat cynical "Such is life".

Ned's comments on the trial were:
"It's no use blaming anyone now.... It is not that I fear death. I fear it as little as to drink a cup of tea. On the evidence that has been given, no juryman could have given any other verdict. That is my opinion. But, as I say, if I'd examined the witnesses, I'd had shown matters in a different light... For my own part, I don't care one straw about my life, nor the result of the trial; and I know very well from the stories I've been told, of how I am spoken of- that the public at large execrate my name... But I don't mind, for I am the last that carries public favour or dreads the public frown. Let the hand of the law strike me down if it will; but I ask my story be heard and considered."
(Ned Kelly 1880)
........

to challenge and expose corruption in the police force in those years was a great achievement. NSW police over the years have suffered occasional similar purges after findings of corruption. (as seen in the 1997 Wood Royal Commission into the NSW Police in which Wood found that "on a prima facie basis, widespread corruption, criminal conduct ... and perjury existed within the NSW police force".
Major General Sir John Monash, former commander of the AIF in World War 1, was witness to the The Jerilderie Bank of New South Wales Robbery. : He was a Jerilderie storekeeper's son on the last day of Christmas holidays from Scotch College, Melbourne. The storekeeper was Mr Louis Monash, his son John Monash, in the next century to become one of Australia's greatest statesman and most distinguished general. Looking back through fifty remarkable years, Sir John Monash told a journalist that as a small boy of thirteen he sat on his father's verandah while the outlaws collected their prisoners: Sir John says that he has never been so overawed in his life as when the redoubtable bushranger spoke a few words to him, and for many a month he was the envied hero of the school as 'the boy who talked to Ned Kelly'.