The Ned Kelly Myth in Film and Literature

I'm using the following as a sample of my academic/formal writing.  If you're reading this just to follow my adventures in Europe... this may not interest you.

The bushrangers of the colonial era play a large role in informing aspects of Australian identity, history and mythology.  The legend of Ned Kelly has risen above all the other bushrangers, being retold in non-fiction and fiction novels, on film and even through painting.  The popularity of the Kelly story may be due to Kelly’s “tough, bold anti-authoritarian stance” which is seen as “an essential part of [Australian] national character, with its roots in [Australia’s] convict history” (Juddery 2008, p. 26).  There are a number of key events from the life of Ned Kelly that are regularly retold - the Fitzpatrick incident and the bank robbery at Euroa for example.  However, slight changes in the representation of these events and the overall way these events are constructed has an overwhelming impact on the way Ned Kelly’s character is represented on the page or screen.  A number of slight changes can construct Kelly across a broad spectrum ranging from a universal hero to a product of Australian cultural attitudes.

Although Ned Kelly has appeared on screen many times since the original The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) - popularly believed to be the world’s first feature film - the majority of these have faded into obscurity due to age, were minor television productions, or were parodies.  Two serious Ned Kelly films still remain relevant and available today - Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly (1970) with Mick Jagger in the title role, and Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly (2003) starring Heath Ledger.  Both of these films seek to place Kelly in the realm of universal myth, but slight differences in their approaches affect the extent to which this universality is achieved.  Brief reference to a pair of novels - Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine (1991) and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is also relevant in this comparison.  Jordan’s Ned Kelly film was loosely adapted from Our Sunshine, and True History of the Kelly Gang offers an interesting comparison as a text aimed at grounding rather than mythologizing the Ned Kelly story.

The time at which particular scenes in the Ned Kelly story took place within each film impacts the extent to which the audience is position to view Kelly as legendary.  Both films begin their story proper at approximately the same point in the Kelly history, when Kelly was released from prison after serving three months for accepting a stolen horse, which he claimed he did not realise was stolen.  Jordan’s version opens with the scene of Kelly’s unfair arrest and treatment by the police, while Richardson begins with a brief prologue - subtitled ‘The End’ - in which Kelly is hanged.  It then jumps straight to ‘The Beginning’ as Kelly walks home.  The details of Kelly’s imprisonment are revealed in a folkloric song played over this montage sequence, but the details are easy to miss.  From the very start, then, Jordan reveals the injustice and pettiness of the Victorian police force, while Richardson focuses attention on the foreshadowing of Kelly’s inevitable end.  There are five events that encompass the Ned Kelly legend as represented in both of these films.  They are: the Fitzpatrick incident; the Stringybark Creek killings; the bank robbery at Euroa; the bank robbery at Jerilderie; and the murder of Aaron Sherritt leading to the Glenrowan shootout.  Although both films are approximately the same length, these events take place at different times during the course of the story.

	Ned Kelly (1970)	Ned Kelly (2003)
Fitzpatrick Incident	40:05 - 43:05	21:07 - 27:11
Stringybark Creek	45:54 - 51:46	33:14 - 39:38
Euroa Robbery	54:59 - 59:56	42:53 - 47:50
Jerilderie Robbery	1:02:21 - 1:05:11	49:25 - 53:18
Aaron Sherritt’s Murder	1:17:12 - 1:18:02	1:11:00 - 1:13:03
Glenrowan	1:19:17 - 1:39:56	1:15:21 - 1:38:28
Film Ends	1:41:27	1:41:00

For the purposes of this comparison, the Fitzpatrick Incident is defined as occurring from the moment Fitzpatrick arrives at the Kelly homestead to when he leaves, Stringybark takes place from the point the Kelly’s ambush Lonigan and McIntyre to the death of Sgt. Kennedy, and Glenrowan takes place from the moment Kelly holds up the station until he is shot down.  The other sequences are self-contained and have clear starting and ending points.

The Fitzpatrick Incident is somewhat of a turning point in the Ned Kelly history, as it is the moment at which he became an outlaw.  This scene occurs one fifth of the way through the 2003 film, while taking place two fifths of the way through the 1970 version.  By having this sequence earlier, the 2003 version is emphasizing the events after this point, which represents the Ned Kelly outlaw legend.  In True History of the Kelly Gang, this event does not take place until page 256 of 400 pages, well over halfway.  This gives the opportunity to provide contextualization leading up to Kelly becoming an outlaw, which plays a major role in giving the story a sense of cultural specificity.  Karen Pearlman’s discussion of ownership in relation to mythmaking (2010) suggests a reason for this.  The events described above are the well-tread, well-known parts of the Ned Kelly myth - it is these moments of action that are owned by the Australian people and the world at large.  These events also represent the grand moments of the Kelly history, focusing on grand conflicts as opposed to smaller, personal conflict.  In the end, however, the 1970 Ned Kelly film works to construct a legendary, universal depiction of Ned Kelly by incorporating the sense of grand conflict even into those opening forty minutes.

Ned Kelly’s motivation in each of the texts is a key factor in situating the character within universal legend or cultural specificity.  Grand motivations suggest heroic or legendary endeavor, while personal motives, especially those related to the particular social conditions of the setting, are often reflective of a more subdued and realistic interpretation.  Both films present Kelly’s motivations as the result of large-scale oppression by law, class and government institutions.  In the 1970 film, early scenes set up a class conflict between the wealthy squatters and the poor Irish settlers.  In one scene Ned argues against the injustice of the police impounding a settler’s cattle.  He later refuses to work for Mr Whitley, one of the squatters, ridiculing him publically and accusing Whitley of not offering “honest work.”  He then happily impounds Whitley’s prize bull when an opportunity presents itself, thumbing his nose to the establishment and wealth.  From the very beginning, then, Mick Jagger as Ned Kelly represents revolutionary ideals, and his later outlawry becomes more an extension of these ideals than a response to Fitzpatrick’s shooting or the deaths at Stringybark Creek.  Everything Ned does feeds into this revolution.  His writing of the Jerilderie letter is a response to his realization that “words are very loud” and will raise his revolution more effectively than violence.  The murder of Aaron Sherritt is treated as an opportunity to initiate the Glenrowan plan - the guns and armour are prepared before the gang even learn of Aaron’s betrayal, and the scene itself is almost clinical, playing out over only fifty seconds and offering only the briefest glance of Joe Byrne attacking.

Compare this with the motivations of Heath Ledger’s Ned Kelly.  He expresses a desire (through voiceover) to “walk the straight and narrow” and works hard for his family.  His outlawry is a direct response to the oppressive machinations of the Victorian Police.  In a spontaneous moment, realizing his gang is despised by many, he is suddenly inspired to write the Jerilderie letter.  The gang only start preparing their armour and weapons for Glenrowan after Aaron has been killed (though in the original script the armour preparation scene occurred between their discovery of Aaron’s betrayal and his murder) - emphasizing the killing’s emotional motivations over the rational ones.  This more emotional representation of Ned is more sympathetic than the rational, scheming Mick Jagger, but both offer universal, legendary motives.  Although they are certainly different motives, they each correspond to different criteria from Graham Seal’s universal structure of the outlaw hero legend (1996).  Ledger’s Kelly, by responding to machinations of institutional pressures, has motives that correspond to being forced into outlawry and oppressed (Seal, 1996, p. 11).  By contrast, Jagger’s Kelly has a motive that meets the criteria of being oppressed and being a friend of the poor.  While different, both sets of motivation correspond to universal aspects of the outlaw hero, and therefore neither represents culturally specific motives.

Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang offers a Ned Kelly whose motives are far less grand than the two films and are a product of a specific social and cultural background.  Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that Ned’s central motive is to protect his mother.  The book goes as far as to suggest an Oedipal relationship, as Ned mistakes his lover Mary Hearn for his mother and the community ridicules him for his love.  While this is still a universally-recognisable motivation, with its roots in psychoanalytic theory and family bonds, it is a much more personal motive, and the manifestation of the motivation is therefore specific to the Australian colonial era.  As opposed to surviving a shootout, running from police, or robbing a bank, this version of Ned Kelly works the land of Eleven Mile Creek, fends off suitors such as the bushranger Harry Power and becomes caught up in cattle duffing.  These activities contribute far more to a feeling of place and time than the actions Ned takes in either film, where the robbing of a bank could occur anywhere and any time a bank exists.

Ned’s motivation spawning from socio-cultural context is reflective of a broader condition related to his place within the world of the text.  In the 1970 film, as is suggested by his revolutionary motives and actions protecting the poor, he is represented as a leader within the community, protecting the poor, loved by the settlers and loathed by the squatters and police.  Similarly, the 2003 film represents Ned’s character as being somehow separate from, or even above, that of the community he grew up in.  Although he is not a revolutionary leader, he is a well-respected man in the community, as indicated by Wild Wright’s desire to get back into his favour after causing his imprisonment, asking the words, “Are we square?” and showing great relief when Ned replies in the affirmative.  The Ned Kelly of True History of the Kelly Gang is not special.  He is constructed as a product of the society he grew up in, and is treated with no more or less respect than any other member of the community.  He is taken advantage of by Harry Power, ostracized when his family believe him to have betrayed Power, and even occasionally falls out of favour with his mother.  He is not a special person - he is simply the product of his cultural upbringing, and his move to outlawry is a result of events outside his control.  Lacking a specific antagonist, Ned instead faces the social problems of colonial Australia.  The two films, on the other hand, ensure that the audience has a specific antagonist they know to be working behind the scenes to catch the Kelly gang.  In the 1970 film it is Sgt. Nicholson, a somewhat bumbling officer who often expresses guilt at the way things turn out, saying that he “has no wish to oppress anyone” when instructing his men on how to seek the Kellys.  However, the character only exists for the benefit of the audience, as there is never a direct confrontation between Ned and Nicholson, and there is never any evidence Ned is even aware of Nicholson’s existence.  From the moment Superintendent Hare is introduced in the 2003 film - brought in by the colonial government as a response to the Euroa robbery - he plays a very active role in the hunt for the Kellys, and it is made clear through voiceover that Ned himself sees Hare as his principal enemy.  Hare cruelly imprisons all Ned’s associates on no charge, burns the bushland and poisons the rivers to chase out the Kelly gang.  Ned lists Hare’s presence at Glenrowan as one of the parts of his overall plan, and is given an opportunity to shoot Hare face-to-face once Hare arrives.  When Ned is finally captured, he shares a moment with Hare, and Hare asks to have the famous sash, awarded after Ned saved a drowning child, showing Hare’s respect for the man.  This exchange cements Ned as being a grand figure, as even his most brutal enemies pay their respects to him.  By having an active antagonist, Jordan constructs a more heroic portrayal of Ned Kelly than either Richardson’s passive antagonist or Carey’s complete lack of a single antagonist.

Although these broad tendencies across the course of each film provide many interesting points of contention, a deeper analysis of the manner in which the Stringybark Creek killings play out in each film reveals how each film constructs their differing representations of Ned Kelly.  The 2003 film takes much greater pains to make Kelly a sympathetic figure and justify his use of violence against the police officers.  When scouting the creek, Ledger’s Kelly notices the police have stretchers with them, apparently revealing that “the bastards aren’t taking prisoners.”  There is no such revelation in the 1970 film.  Further, Joe Byrne’s claim that “they’ve got us hemmed in on wither side, whether they know it or not” suggests the gang have no choice but to confront the police if they are to survive - a suggestion absent from the 1970 version.  Both films then follow a similar trajectory as the gang surrounds Lonigan and McIntyre and hold them up.  McIntyre surrenders and Lonigan takes out his gun.  In both films Lonigan fires.  In the 1970 film, Ned immediately fires back, while in the 2003 version there is a half second pause - enough time for the bullet to be seen impacting a tree close to Ned’s head - before Ned shoots Lonigan through the eye.  Lonigan is treated fairly well by Ned in both films - in the 2003 version Lonigan drinks tea with the gang as they sit waiting for Kennedy and Scanlon - he even offers to “leave the force first thing tomorrow” suggesting his recognition that he is on the wrong side in this conflict.  Assumedly as a device to maintain tension through the scene, the 1970 film does not have this tea-drinking interlude.  Ned only has time to promise McIntyre not to cuff or hurt him as long as he co-operates before the arrival of Scanlon and Kennedy.  Again, in both films the police are the first to fire, and Ned immediately shoot Scanlon dead.  At this point Kennedy flees and Ned follows.  In the 1970 film, Kennedy takes cover behind a log, initiating a brief shootout in which he is shot and killed.  The 2003 film has Ned following Kennedy as he fires desperately over his shoulder.  Ned shoots him once, injuring him, and promises not to shoot him if he surrenders.  Kennedy spins once more, fires and misses, Ned raises his gun, taking a little under a second from when Kennedy’s shot was fired, and shoots Kennedy down.  The key difference between the two during this chase is that it is only in the 2003 film that Ned offers Kennedy the opportunity to surrender.  With Kennedy then still alive on the ground, Jagger’s Kelly looks to the rest of the gang and asks why “the silly bugger” didn’t surrender.  Ledger’s Kelly asks the same question directly to the dying Kennedy, then, horrified at what he has done, leaps down and tries to save him, constantly apologizing.  The audience is positioned to feel that Kennedy’s death is actually a personal tragedy for Kelly, as Kelly’s apologies reveal that he blames himself for the incident, when all the evidence of the sequence suggests otherwise.  Jagger’s more rational character asks the question rhetorically, externalizing the blame and therefore neither asking for nor receiving audience sympathy.  Jordan’s film goes to much greater lengths to justify the violence perpetrated by the gang and reveal Ned’s regret and guilt for its occurrence.  Richardson’s version, while definitely justifying Ned’s role in the violence, does so in a much less definite manner, encouraging the audience to distance themselves from Jagger’s Kelly.  This impression is assisted by the folk song playing over the top:

“They say that Ned Kelly ain’t never done wrong

but tell that to Lonigan’s widow.”

There is the suggestion that Ned is responsible, and that the killings were not justified.  This is enough to ensure that this representation of Ned Kelly does not adhere strictly to Seal’s criteria, as he claims the outlaw hero “must not indulge in unjustified violence” (1996, p. 11).  Within this single scene, then, the slight difference between the extent to which Ned Kelly is represented as belonging to universal myth in each film is revealed.

Ned Kelly’s role as a historical figure has become secondary to that of his role as a mythic one.  Although Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly goes to greater lengths to represent Ned Kelly as a universal myth, both versions do so far more than they attempt to reveal Ned Kelly as a product of his sociocultural context.  By maximizing the scale of Ned’s motivations and separating his character from that of the community he existed within, the films offer a vision of Ned as an outlaw hero similar to Robin Hood or Jess James.  They are both divorced from their Australian colonial context, creating films that add very little to the development of Australian on-screen cultural practice.

Reference List

Carey, P 2000, True History of the Kelly Gang, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland.

Drewe, R 1991, Our Sunshine, Penguin Books, Camberwell, Victoria.

Hartley, N 1970, Ned Kelly, video recording, MGM.

House, J & Woss, N 2003, Ned Kelly, video recording, Universal Pictures (Australasia) Pty Ltd.

Juddery, M 2008, ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’, History Today, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 24-30.

McDonagh, JM 2003, Ned Kelly: The Screenplay, Currency Press, Strawberry Hills, NSW.

Pearlman, K 2010, ‘Make our Myths’, LUMINA – Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business, vol. 2, p. 31.

Seale, G 1996, The Outlaw Legend: A Cultural Tradition in Britain, America and Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Bratislava and the Football Match of Doom

In an attempt to get some more of these out there, I’m going to go back slightly to Bratislava.  It was only a short stopover of two nights, barely one day, so I should easily be able to bang this one out in the five hour train trip to Munich – something I’m not certain is necessarily true of either Prague or Vienna.

Still, my time in Bratislava was fun and interesting.  And I can guarantee that the guys who made Eurotrip had never even been to Bratislava.

DAY HALF

My arrival in Bratislava was slightly later than I had originally planned as I remained in Vienna long enough to see Lily off to her flight (more of that in the Vienna blog, coming some time to a computer screen near you!)  This wasn’t really a problem since Bratislava is only an hour or so away from Vienna, and the trip was quickly over.

Bratislava has one of the smaller and more communist-feeling train stations I have been in the whole time I’ve been in Central Europe – it’s pretty much a giant concrete block with a space in the middle.

My hostel was not too far from the station, and I expected to pretty much have to follow a single street all the way there.  This worked out for me for a short while.  My instructions (that I had made based on Google Maps, as I always do) described a dead end that I would have to turn left at.  Well, the road ended in a staircase that led up to another road.  I assumed that this was the dead end, and that the left turn was actually a short way past the dead end, and I just hadn’t paid enough attention.

Well… it turned out that the staircase was a continuation of the road.  Yeah… in Europe streets don’t necessarily have to carry cars in order to be considered a street.

I went off left and soon reached an area that looked nothing like what I had been expecting based on Google.  It was a massive, multi-lane and multi-road intersection.  I was supposed to have come out on a little street – the street my hostel was supposedly on.

Confused, I walked a little way along the intersection.  Aaaaaand… there in front of me was the street I had been looking for.  So in Bratislava, even when you’re lost you’re not really.

The hostel was quite nice and included a spacious lounge area and single (!) beds.  Unfortunately it was not terribly full, though I have reason to believe that there were more people staying there than I necessarily saw.

When I arrived I met a British fellow.  Though perhaps ‘met’ isn’t the right way of putting it since he was asleep when I entered the room.  I set myself up in the room, started sorting through my bags and checking emails etc when the slumbering form awoke.

He’d just come from Budapest, which he’d been able to fly to cheaply from the UK.  He had just quit his job, a job related to British Parliament, though one he couldn’t give me much information about.  Apparently he hadn’t been allowed to have a life – no smartphone, no friends, no contact with relatives, no facebook account – and the job had showed him a side of British politics he hadn’t been able to handle seeing.  So he quit and ran away.  To Bratislava (well, eventually).

However, he had been stuck in Bratislava for longer than he’d anticipated.  He’d fallen ill, having caught something in Budapest (apparently a crazy bug went around after I left) and had basically been asleep in the hostel for the last three or so days.  He was planning to go to Vienna the next day in order to see the Champions League match between Real Madrid and Manchester United (his team, since he was from Manchester) and wanted to recover before then.

I told him I’d just come from Vienna and that it was expensive. 

“You know, you can get a beer here for a euro.  In Vienna, you’re lucky if it’s cheaper than three.”

Nowadays I judge how expensive a place is based on the price of a pint of beer.

He considered this information for a moment.

“Well, I’m going to want a bit of beer for the game,” he said.  “Do you think they’ll be playing the match somewhere here?”

“Of course they will,” I replied.  “Think of all the expats living here.  They probably have a heap of Brit-style pubs playing the game tomorrow night.”

And then I found him a sports bar that would be playing the match the next night online.

“See?”

Faced with this new proposition, my British friend decided to remain in Bratislava one more night.  He went down to organize this.

Now, I had been umming and ahing over what I was going to do for dinner.  I’d only be in Bratislava two nights, and food, based on what I had seen on the boards of restaurants walking to the hostel, was pretty cheap.  I had a quick browse for a place where I could have some kind of traditional Slovak cuisine.  I found a place called the 1^st Slovak Pub.  And here came the problem – so far I had only met Mr Sick British Man, and he wasn’t in a state where he was ready to go out for dinner (he’d been surviving on 2-minute noodles for the last few days).  The only other option was to eat by myself.

To put this into perspective, I hadn’t really been into a restaurant by myself previously.  I’d often told myself I would do it, then chickened out at the last minute and gone to a takeaway joint, or perhaps a self-service place where it wasn’t unusual to be seated by oneself.  I was fairly certain, from descriptions I had read, the the 1^st Slovak Pub was the kind of place you went with a couple of people.  Still, I didn’t have much time and wanted to make sure I got to try the real deal.

I went out and walked toward the centre.  Bratislava seemed quite straightforward geographically – there was a main shopping street, where trams and such passed along, an old town just south of that and the ugly centre to the east.

On my Google Maps check, 1^st Slovak Pub had appeared to be on a small side street near to the tram line.  I had to cross that shopping street and wander through various alleys and streets in order to get there.

I left the hostel realizing I hadn’t actually written down any instructions, so I sort of walked in the direction I thought it was based on my glance at the map.  After a good twenty minutes of plodding randomly down little side streets, seeing the streets slowly fill with university students (it was pretty busy for early on a Monday night) I gave up and decided to just go for whatever garbage I could find that wasn’t either McDonalds or KFC.  I reached the shopping street, started heading down it, and walked right past the 1^st Slovak Pub.  I nonchalantly kept going, partly because I didn’t want people to see me suddenly do a double-take and turn around and partly because I still wasn’t certain I wasn’t just going to chicken out and eat something easy.

Halfway down the street I stopped to cross the road.  This was all part of my plan to turn back to the 1^st Slovak Pub: first, cross the street, curving as you do so in order to reach the other side pretty much perpendicular to the sidewalk.  Since the people on the other side of the sidewalk don’t know which direction you were walking (unless they are the kind of creepy dude who watches people on the other side of the road) you can easily turn around with no-one any the wiser.  Then, casually cross back over the street – people are less likely to notice you cross the street twice than to notice you turn around completely mid-stride.

By now I was approaching the pub and trying to decide whether I would, indeed, be entering or whether it would be better off to just walk on by and-  Oops, too late, I’ve gone inside.

The pub was set up a little like a museum.  Each room was supposed to represent a different era of Slovak history or something.  I can’t tell you much about that, unfortunately, since by the time I realized there were different themed rooms I’d already sat down at the first mildly inconspicuous table I could find.  Then I realized I’d managed to sit down right in direct view of the bar, where all the serving staff would be able to see and mock me.

A waitress came and gave me a menu.  I perused it – though I chose very quickly (there was a section called ‘Grandma’s Specialties’ that consisted of the kind of traditional food I was looking for) I made sure to read every last thing so that it would look like I was busy and enjoying myself and not some sad, lonely, pathetic loser.

I’d just reached the drinks page when the waitress returned and asked if I’d chosen.  I got a plate of pierogi and a beer.  The beer came very quickly, which I was relieved by since it meant I had something to do besides twiddle my thumbs.  I also started fiddling with my camera to make it clear I was totally occupied and didn’t need company.

The pierogi came out – little crispy dumplings with sour cream and bacon.  I tried to work out how much the bill would come to.  It was somewhere in the vicinity of six euro.  This was just awkward, I decided, since I only had a ten euro note and tipping is customary in Slovakia.  Generally you’re supposed to say how much you wish to pay when you hand over the money, and the staff then gives you change based on that, keeping the tip directly.  I’d figured that the ‘correct’ tip was something like fifty cents, but it felt really weird having to say a specific amount.  I decided to have dessert and try to get it as close to ten as possible in order to be able to just give her the money and say “keep the change” or something.

They really only had one choice for dessert: strudel.  And it was surprise strudel, the kind where you don’t know what kind it will be until it arrives in front of you.  I got banana and chocolate in the end, and it actually tasted pretty good.

I was now close enough to ten euro that it didn’t really worry me (though I must say, I left a MASSIVE tip – but let’s be honest, a main, dessert and drink for ten euro isn’t too bad) so I asked for the bill and paid and left.

One of the differences I find between eating alone and eating with others is the exit.  With others you tend to hang about a bit, taking your time, talking and slowly heading for the door.  By yourself you grab your jacket and zoom out as quickly as you can.

Bratislava was easy to find my way around, so it didn’t take long to get back to the hostel.  Some more people had checked in since I’d gone out – a group of four South Americans (I’m constantly lumping South Americans together, it’s terrible – if I remembered what country they were from I would use that).  Anyway, they’d just come from Krakow, and I heard the usual spiel about how awesome it is (which turned out to be right) and went to bed.  The Brit could speak Spanish as he’d spent a year in South America, so they talked a while.

I just went to sleep.

DAY ONE

My only complete day in Bratislava, so I certainly didn’t want to waste it.  The South Americans left almost immediately, even before I got up (I didn’t get up that late).  The Brit was feeling better and said he felt like he needed to get out and see the city a bit before leaving – and he also, I suspect, wanted to get some fresh air so he’d be feeling right for going out to watch the football.  I had a couple of things to do that morning, so we agreed to meet up in the afternoon and go on the free walking tour at 2:30pm.

First, though, I had to go and get my ticket for Swan Lake in Prague.  There was a ticket issuing office somewhere in Bratislava, and it was my task to find it. 

On the way toward the ticketing office, I was approached by a woman about my age in a bit of a panic.  She was speaking Slovak at a rapid pace, and I was all like… “Um, what?”  She calmed down a bit and said, “It’s ok, I speak English.”

Her story was a bit tough to follow, but the gist of it was that she was a kindergarten teacher and had to get to her class, but she had locked herself out of either her apartment, having forgotten something important, or the school or something.  Anyway, the point was she needed a boost to a window she had left open so that she could get in and get to her kindergarten class.

I agreed to give her a hand.  The window was really rather high up, so I told her I would go on one knee and she should stand on my hand.  I would then lift her up.

She took her shoes off and we had a shot.  The first attempt failed rather abysmally – as soon as I tried to stand up she fell backwards off my knee.  I told her to lean against the wall and we managed to get her up to the window.  I pushed her feet the final few centimetres up over the windowsill.  She was swearing and saying “God God God God Jesus” constantly, but once she was up she took a breath and thanked me.

I passed her shoes up and went on my way.  It was only then that I realized that there was a possibility she’d simply been trying to break into someone’s house and I had just aided her in her crime.  To be honest, though, I don’t think that’s the case – it would have been pretty hard to fake her panic.  Still.

The walk took me, for really the first time, into Bratislava’s Old Town.  It was a very nice old town, filled with narrow streets, nice buildings and general quaintness.

As it wasn’t terribly large or complex, it didn’t take me all that long to find the ticket office.  It was actually a tourism information centre with one booth in the corner designated for Ticketportal, the organization I was dealing with.  I went to that corner and showed the lady my number.

She looked at it confused.  I explained it was for a show in Prague.  That didn’t seem to clear anything up for her.  Then I realized it was because her English wasn’t adept enough for the complexity of both what I needed to tell her and what she needed to tell me.

A lady came up to the desk and offered to help with the translation.  As it turned out, the numbers were different for Slovakian shows and Czech shows, so the lady wasn’t sure how to access my ticket.  When she heard it was for Prague, she went to the Czech site and got it working, so it wasn’t really an issue at all.  I slipped the ticket into my pocket wanting to make sure I remembered exactly where I put it so that I would not miss out.

I still had an awful lot of time to kill before the walking tour, so I decided to go for a walk to the river.  As it turned out, the river wasn’t all that far away, so I decided to walk along the river.  The riverside gradually got uglier and uglier (I didn’t even go that far) so, sick of that I headed in toward the castle.  Funnily enough, the castle was basically right next to my hostel but I ended up approaching it from the other side of the hill.

Anyway, I walked up the hill for a while, basically up some fairly dilapidated stairs, until I reached a residential zone on the top of the hill.  I had an inkling that there was some kind of statue somewhere on this hill that would provide wonderful views of the city from above, so I walked in the opposite direction of the castle, continuing up and up and up.

The road eventually stopped going up, which I took to mean I had reached the top of the hill, which I further deduced meant I had no idea where this statue and lookout were supposed to be.  This being the case, I headed back down the hill in order to get a squiz at the castle.

The castle was pretty lame all things considered – basically a great big white block with windows.  It did have a kind of medieval wall that went along the hill, but that wasn’t particularly impressive.  A walk around it took me to a weird statue and a bit of a view of the city.  It wasn’t quite the statue or view I had been searching for, but it was close enough and I got my panoramic over the city and checked out the decidedly weird statue.  It was some kind of woman with crazy weird hair and big feet, splayed out on a rock or something.  Not sure what it meant.

Anyway, off I headed back to meet up with my British mate for the walking tour.

What facts did I manage to pick up this time around?  Well, some of you may be interested in the bizarre custom Slovakian people have on a particular festival day in spring.  The idea is that the girls of the village or city dress up in their nicest dress.  They wait around at home for a bit before someone knocks at the door.

“Who is it?” she asks.

A boy answers her.  She opens the door and the boy throws a bucket of water over her, then proceeds to take her over his knee and smack her on the bottom.  As a thank-you, she gives him alcohol and money.  Apparently it used to be painted eggs, but the men all decided they wanted alcohol and money…  So you can see who gets the raw end of the deal here, I suspect.

We had a female guide, so we got to hear all about it from personal experience.  She said that if you live in a small village you just have to hope that you live at the end of the street where the boys are finishing since by the time they get there they’ll be too drunk to continue.

What else?  Well, Bratislava Castle is not a residency – it is a military fort.  It has stood up to the Ottomans, the Mongolians and Napoleon, but apparently it was destroyed when an Italian architect hired to redesign it held a party and accidentally lit it on fire.  So it couldn’t survive and Italian party.

Our guide kept having seedy people say weird things to her (in Slovak – she translated for us later).  One old lady said she looked like she needed to go to the toilet.  Later, a man hocking touristy junk on one of the bridges suggested she should do something rather dirty with him.  We were like… “Is this normal?”  Apparently it was the first time this sort of thing had happened to her.

There are a lot of statues around Bratislava, most of them rather humorous.  We only got the story behind one, a statue of Napoleon leaning on a bench with his hat pulled over his eyes.  Apparently it was revenge by the people of Bratislava on Napoleon for attacking their city.  Rather passive-aggressive.

The other interesting point is that, apparently, the Velvet Revolution (that is, the revolt that overthrew the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia) began in the university in Bratislava and is only erroneously attributed to having its origins in Prague.  Saying that, in Prague they say exactly the opposite, so take all this with a pinch of salt.  I suspect that by the time of the Velvet Revolution things were taking place all over Central Europe and it was just a natural endpoint for a number of regimes in the region.

The previous evening I had failed to have two very key staples of Slovak cuisine: garlic soup and halusky.  I had planned to go back to the 1^st Slovak Pub to try them, but a place called the Flagship Restaurant was recommended by the guide, so I chose to head there instead.

In fact it was run by the same organization, with a similar traditional pub feel and museum set-up.  To get to the Flagship Restaurant you had to walk down a short tunnel leading to a wooden door that took you onto a mock-up street.  Then you entered a bar, which I almost mistook for the restaurant but in fact you had to walk up a massive staircase in the back of the bar up to an old converted cinema.  The menu was slightly larger than the one at the other place, but its content was basically the same.  I knew what I was going to have, so ordered (and a beer of course).

The garlic soup was delicious.  It came served in a gigantic bread roll that you could then eat afterwards.  It was creamy and had actual chunks of garlic in it – you could taste the freshness.

Halusky are a kind of potato dumpling that isn’t dissimilar to gnocchi.  Really it’s just a smaller version, and it’s served with sheep’s cheese and bacon.  The bacon is really just a garnish made up of a few small fatty cubes, but it must be good quality because it adds a lot of flavor.

Basically I was stuffed after all that – I had eaten an entire breadroll (a huge one at that), all the soup contained within and a plate of starchy dough balls.  And a beer.

I stumbled off home, unsure what time I was supposed to catch up with the Brit so that we could go watch the game.  I needn’t have worried – the game started at around 9pm, so I had plenty of time.  While I was hanging around waiting, who should come a-walking into my dorm but Corey and his girlfriend, the two Americans I had seen in both Rome and Zagreb.  They were meeting up with a friend of Corey’s who happened to go to Griffith University and who had for some reason come up listed as a mutual friend when I added Corey to Facebook.  It turned out I didn’t actually know her and Facebook was just being weird.

Anyway, she had left her scarf in Budapest (in Morrison’s, if you remember that place – if you don’t it’s the place we went on Monday night) and the other two had picked it up and brought it with them to Bratislava.

They’d had a good time in Budapest and had stayed in the same hostel I had (I recommended it to them).  Apparently the hostel had just started a fortnightly party in the baths when they arrived and it was amazing, so I’m now hoping to get back there some time since that’ll be a perfect opportunity to ACTUALLY GO TO THE BATHS WITHOUT HAVING TO ACTIVELY FIND OTHER PEOPLE.

There were two other guys, one Australia and the other Kiwi, who were there as well.  They’d decided to come with us, being fairly big football fans.

The Americans said they’d follow a little after us, as they still needed to eat.

On the way to the bar, the Kiwi told us about their previous night.  Apparently they were in a dorm with two girls from Ireland (I never met them, and you’re soon to understand why).  They were supposed to have left that morning, in fact, but had apparently spent the entire day in bed.  The reason for this was that they had gone out with the Aussie and Kiwi the night before and gotten smashed.  One of them had allegedly spent the entire night following the Kiwi from bed to bed in an attempt to sleep with him.  I can’t remember exactly how that story ended, but it was definitely not with them sleeping together (which I’m glad at, since otherwise I would have been chatting casually with not only an ass-hat but a rapist ass-hat).

When we arrived the sports bar was packed.  There was not a single space that wasn’t either taken or reserved.  There were even places at the bar that had been reserved!  That was crazy stuff.  We looked around in a halfhearted fashion – the others had already got beers before we even found a place to sit – and looked at each other.

“Well… I guess we just go see if we can find another place playing the game after we finish our beers.”

I didn’t want to give up that easily, so I went off into the back searching for a table.  I found what I thought was a bar where one could at least rest one’s glass and rushed back to the others to bring them there.  Turned out the bar was actually a blockade to stop customers getting to the fridge and it was a thoroughfare for the wait staff.  Oops.

We went upstairs and found a prime vantage point looking down onto the biggest screen.  We had to stand, but that was a small price to pay for what was, in all honesty, probably the best position in the house.  So I went to get a beer.

How did the game go?  Well… Man U lost.  It was looking pretty good for a while, but then a player got unfairly red carded (it was a yellow, but definitely no red) and they were suddenly one man down.  And against a team like Real Madrid, being one man down at the beginning of the second half spells doom.

We had a very irritating man behind us (a Real Madrid supporter) who would just call all the Man U players dirty constantly, and whenever they made a tackle he would complain about it.  He was the kind of guy who would refuse to recognize the fact that having a player sent off unfairly played a major role in ensuring their loss.

Our poor old Brit needed a drink after watching his team get defeated in such a way, so the others went out to continue the night.  I went to bed because I had an early bus to catch.

DAY TWO…ISH

I was out of the hostel by 8am, powerwalking to catch my 9am bus.  The bus stop was a bit outside of the area of the city I had been in previously, so with trusty map in hand I went on my merry way.

It was all going well until I got to a street that I was certain was the street with the bus stop on it.  I went almost all the way down this street without seeing hide nor hair of the bus stop, and it unfortunately didn’t help that the street had no sign to let me know what its name was.

Eventually I got worried I had missed the bus station and turned back to have a proper look.  In doing so, I caught sight of a street sign.  It was not the street I was looking for.  Whipping out my map I realized I needed to keep going just a little bit further…

(We just crossed into Germany, so I had my ticket checked by my very first German train conductor.  She was so lovely, and very surprised when she saw the number of trains I have caught so far.)

I only had ten minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave.

Fortunately, as it turned out, I was only five minutes away at that point.

Onto the bus I hopped, ready for a six hour drive that would get me to Krakow.  The entertainment for the ride was Transporter and Transporter 3.  I don’t know what language it was in – either Polish, Slovak or Estonian.  I watched it anyway.  There’s something strangely surreal about watching a totally mindless movie in another language – somehow you don’t have to concentrate.  What’s really sad, though, is that they were probably better movies because I couldn’t understand the dialogue.

Well, you know what happened in Krakow already, so I guess you could end up anywhere when this story is

TO BE CONTINUED