ABSTRACT
In 1880, in Melbourne, Victoria, the judge Sir Redmond Barry sentenced the outlaw Ned Kelly to death. Kelly would become an Australian icon. Drawing on research on the treatment of the Kelly trial in law, folklore, works of dramatic fiction and cinema, this chapter considers the textual and visual representations of the judge and his judgment – the changing characterization – in the decades following Kelly’s execution in 1880. It seeks to explain how and why Barry has become the villain of the modern Kelly myth and to show that Barry’s early representations were more favourable.
