A companion guide to the Ned Kelly display at State Library Victoria. Features physical and digital items in our collections and links to external sites.
Mouthful of Dust is a cinematic web experience featuring artefacts belonging to Victoria’s most notorious bushranger, Ned Kelly. 3D scans of the armour, rifle, boot, death mask and Jerilderie letter allow users to examine the items in near-forensic detail. Viewers can travel inside the suit of armour and look out through Ned’s helmet; or see Ned’s engravings on the rifle butt, including a dedication to his father Red Kelly. Leading Victorian writers from a range of literary genres have produced new short works inspired by the 3D scans, adding fresh perspectives and interpretations of Ned Kelly’s story. The new writings accompany the 3D scans, which viewers can interact with or enjoy as stunning short films.
Almost five thousand photographs of the items were used to generate the 3D representations through a process called photogrammetry, which analyses the similarities between photographs taken from different perspectives. Mouthful of Dust opens access to the Kelly Collection beyond the walls of the Library and provides an experience of the artefacts that would be otherwise impossible.
Usually known as the 'Jerilderie letter', this document was written by Joe Byrne at the dictation of Ned Kelly. It chronicles the careers of Ned Kelly and his gang from 1870 onwards, including a description of the shooting of three police officers at Stringybark Creek, Victoria in October 1878. In the letter, Kelly cites cases of alleged police corruption and expresses pro-Irish and anti-English sentiments. It is accompanied by a note, undated, on the letterhead of 'Wareena', Wangaratta, stating that 'This is the document given to me by Ned Kelly when the Bank at Jerilderie was stuck up in Feby. 1879'. The note was written by Edwin Richard Living who was a teller at the Bank of N.S.W. at the time of the robbery.
The letter is a part of the Library's Manuscripts Collection. Its digitised version can be viewed and downloaded for free online, as below. For links to online and published versions of the transcript of the letter, visit the Jerilderie letter page in this guide.
For your listening pleasure, we present a new audio recording of the Jerilderie letter. Visit our Jerilderie letter page for more information.
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Project led by Audience Engagement and Creative Studio, managed by Change and Projects, in collaboration with Collection Care, and Collection Curation and Engagement teams
Project by Digitising and Document Delivery
Project by Audience Engagement and Collection Curation and Engagement
