Two Aussie Legends: Ned Kelly V. The Salad Roll

A guest post by Nova Weetman

Something for the weekend, Voracious readers: I’m handing over to my co-writer on Elsewhere Girls and Outlaw Girls, Nova Weetman, the author of many novels for children and teenagers as well as her latest book, a memoir called Love, Death & Other Scenes.

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Emily Gale, Nova Weetman, Outlaw Girls

In Australia everyone has their own road-trip essential, a local delicacy they will detour miles to find. For me it’s always been the salad roll. The best is made fresh, stuffed full of shredded iceberg lettuce, sliced tomato and cucumber, grated carrot, raw onion, a slice of tasty cheese, white pepper, and enough beetroot to stain your fingers for the rest of the day. 

For my latest children’s novel, Outlaw Girls, I toured regional Victoria with my friend and co-writer Emily Gale to research Ned Kelly’s teenage sister, Kate. We were writing the story of what Kate had done to protect the gang over the two years that they evaded police, and to be authentic we caught the train from Melbourne CBD to Benalla, a trip Kate was alleged to have made with her sister Maggie and cousin Tom to buy bullets from a gunsmith called J.W. Rosier.

Advertising: a carriage builder, a saddler, a gunmaker, and a stationers on Bourke Street, Melbourne

As we set off, Emily had a list of sites she wanted to see. She’d never been to Glenrowan and grew up in London, whereas as a kid I’d often stopped off in that town with my family on the way up the Hume, before the bypass was built and all the small towns lost the passing trade. I’d soaked up the Ned Kelly story dozens of times, and loved the memories of ordering my traditional salad roll from the bakery while my brother had a pie smothered in sauce. 

Once Emily and I arrived in Benalla, we picked up a hire car and drove to the bootmaker’s shop in Arundel Street, where Ned Kelly hid after he was charged with drunkenness. The shop was up for sale. We joked about buying it to open a bookshop / coffeeshop / cocktail bar, perhaps naming it ‘Sister Kate’ after the novel by Jean Bedford that made me want to write about Kate Kelly in the first place. Deciding that running a business was a bit out of our league, we left Benalla behind and headed to the tiny town of Greta to find the remains of the Eleven Mile Creek house where Kate, Ned and all the Kelly siblings had lived.

Sadly, the house is long gone, and all that remains are the chimney stacks of the hut, on private land set far back from the road. Emily was so determined to see it that she’d bought a camera with an impressive lens. While she spied it from the road, I sat in the car googling salad rolls near me, until she insisted that I wade through the long grass to see it for myself.

The chimney stack at Eleven Mile Creek; the house was built in 1877 and abandoned after Jim Kelly’s death in 1946.

Co-writing historical fiction means months of delicious deep-diving into research and then the joyful sharing of the unexpected finds along the way. It requires a certain sort of relationship, one built on honesty and frankness. Outlaw Girls is our second co-written book so we’ve already ironed out our different approaches to work. Sometimes I struggle to stay on track when we write together in the quiet of the Dome Room in the State Library; I talk too much, and whisper the words while I’m writing. Emily has taken to bringing headphones. Our trip to Glenrowan also showcased our different approaches: Emily had places to see and I had a nostalgic salad roll to find.

As we left the chimney remains and drove into the town of Glenrowan, she kept making us stop so she could take photos: the giant six-metre-high wooden sculpture of Ned, the distant Warby Ranges, late 1800s hair-curling tongs, boot hooks and spectacles, an egg box that belonged to a Kelly relative. If it was connected to Kate, then Emily had to photograph it. And I was getting hungry.

“Bail up and give me a salad roll!”

But actually, as much as I thought I knew Glenrowan, it had changed since my childhood. Ned was everywhere: museums, animatronics, hut recreations, a new historical centre on the site of Ned’s Last Stand, cafes and burger shops named after him, and even a period costume dress-up place where you could be a photographed extra in Kelly Country. If you didn’t know much about Ned before visiting Glenrowan, you could leave as an expert. (But, we’d argue, you still wouldn’t know enough about Ned’s sisters.)

And most importantly, I’d found my bakery! And they made salad rolls to order. Emily waited patiently while I ate. By the final bite, I was ready to go hunting for Kate.

She wasn’t easy to find in a town dominated by the men: Ned was everywhere, and naturally the tourists were there for him. Sure, Kate had a minor street named after her, running down past the giant Ned sculpture, but there weren’t many mentions of her in the museums or exhibitions. Her eldest sister Maggie was largely missing too, despite being cited in several biographies as the stalwart of this period and Ned’s most trusted sibling. The more we hunted for the women, the more determined we became that their stories were lacking from the narrative.

Kate and Maggie both played a role in the Kelly Gang’s success in hiding from police for so long. On horseback, the women rode supplies across the rugged Warby Ranges, stashing food parcels, ammunition and clothing in tree stumps. As relatives of the notorious gang, they suffered from excessive poverty, added police attention, their mother being jailed with their baby sister, public scrutiny, and judgement. They had much to add to the story, yet they were thoroughly faded figures in a land obsessed with Ned.

I suddenly realised what the sisters were. “They’re the salad rolls!” I said, high on iceberg lettuce. It made sense to me: the humble meat pie sells in its millions each year and has become the bakery item that defines Australia. There is even one named after Ned Kelly, with an egg on top.

For many of us, however, the fresh and vital salad roll is the dark horse we’d travel hundreds of miles for. Just like Emily and I had travelled to find Kate. “I love this theory,” said my co-writer. “But can we go now? There’s more to see. Oh, and by the way, you’ve got a bit of grated carrot on your chin.”

The Glenrowan Bakehouse. I highly recommend the salad roll.

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Nova Weetman is the author of many middle grade and young adult novels. But her latest book is Love, Death & Other Scenes, a memoir.