Jingo was Born in the Slum

In 2018 Matthew Thorne was invited by Australian Director Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, Macbeth) to create a photographic project during the making of his feature film ‘True History Of The Kelly Gang’. This photo book is the result of that project: A collection of photos, poems and essays on the iconic Australian Ned Kelly story. A work that documents the most recent telling of the iconic colonial Australian legend of Ned Kelly.

These images are of living ghosts, land beyond land, and that corrupting fear of never quite belonging that eats uniquely at the colonialist’s heart. The Kelly story is never real, and it is never fiction. It lives in the hollow in-between world. It is both present and past, myth and truth. And in this way (perhaps) it is as close as white colonial Australia has come to touching the innate mystic nature of the land.