Cultural depictions of Ned Kelly a "significant respect for authority". Former criminal and celebrity Chopper Read produced numerous paintings of Ned Kelly, alluding directly to Sidney Nolan's imagery. One of Read's paintings features Kelly with a woman's breasts. He explained that "it relates to the fact that I think Kelly was a homosexual, ... I'm not really a fan of his. I'm tired of people calling me the modern-day Ned Kelly." However, Read compared himself with Kelly in some of his paintings. One such self-portrait titled "Tast Ful Old Criminal" ["sic"] was purchased amid controversy by the State Library of Victoria in 2003. "The Story
Ned Kelly squabbles with family members and her appearances in court over family disputes. The author Antony O'Brien has argued that Victoria's colonial police practices treated arrest as equivalent to proof of guilt. In 1869, aged fourteen, Kelly met Irish-born Harry Power (alias of Henry Johnson), a transported convict who turned to bushranging in North-Eastern Victoria after escaping Pentridge Prison outside Melbourne. The Kellys formed part of his network of sympathisers, and by May 1869, Ned had joined him as an 'apprentice' bushranger. At the end of the month, they attempted to steal horses from the Mansfield property of John Rowe, a