Wall to Wall Festival

This work explores the use of old photographs in the modern interpretations of large scale murals. Here the work plays on the way we view nostalgia and explores the sentiment communities attach to these memories, old stories and people. The images become distorted faded or misused over time. They have become our mythology.

The photograph this mural is based on is entitled Back door of the Back door of the Kelly homestead, Eleven Mile Creek, Glenrowan West, by Leo P. Ryan. It depicts Ned Kelly’s (Australia’s most famous outlaw bushranger) close relative as he stands at the back door of the famous Kelly gang hut in 1922 and located 30km east of Benalla today. This work was completed as part of the first edition of Wall to Wall facilitated by Juddy Roller.

Inscribed in ink by photographer on verso: The slab back door of the Kelly home is covered with carved initials. They include K.K., A.S., J.B., N.K., D.K., S.H., and all said to have been carved by Kate, Sherritt, Joe Byrne, Dan &​ Ned and Steve Hart themselves. The cuts certainly looked old when I saw them. The boy is Ned's nephew ( - Griffiths) and the similarity of his expression to the photos of Ned and his brother, and to that of Jim Kelly is remarkable. There was a definite likeness of expression in the Kelly family. There was related material in the Manuscript collection, MS 11132, including two letters from Leo P. Ryan to Max Brown dated May 1949 and October 1950. The original homestead, built by Ned Kelly, was a single gable of horizontal ironbark slab construction. In the early 1900s the Griffiths family replaced the bark roof with corrrugated iron and replaced the original slab chimney with brick. About 1950 two weatherboard gables were demolished, severely damaging the original front wall of the homestead. ¹