If Ned Kelly were alive today...

...he'd be Mick Jagger. (That's a quote from the promo for the movie, back in 1970.) But he's long dead, and The Guardian has an article about digging him up:

"What else can England expect? Is there not big fat-necked Unicorns enough paid to torment and drive me to do thing which I don't wish to do, without the public assisting them?
It gets worse:
"by the light that shines pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened, their fat taken out, rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot, will be fool to what pleasure I will give… any person aiding… the Police."
The date was 1879 and the place was Jerilderie, New South Wales. The man delivering this 8,300-word threat to a captive audience of terrified townfolk has held Australia in his grip ever since.
Ned Kelly's heists were nothing if not grand. The Jerilderie Letter, intended to be published in a local paper, would have been the icing on the cake of a plan to hold a whole town captive before robbing its bank, had the paper's editor not run off.
Was its author a cold-blooded killer ballsy enough to use body armour? A hero of Irish-Australian resistance to British colonialism? A fighter in a bitter struggle for land rights? If his ever more brazen attacks against the police and the banks had succeeded, would he have created a Republic of North East Victoria? The truth is probably paler than the legend, but hardly a year goes by without some addition to it.
Now, 131 years after his hanging, his skeleton has been identified, complete with the hole in the right shinbone from a gunshot wound. But not all of Ned Kelly has been found; his skull remains undiscovered. Such, as he told his hangman, is life.

Rico says it's still a good story, and both the original movie and the remake are worth seeing...