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 Man Booker Prize for his novel "True History of the Kelly Gang", written from Kelly's perspective. The Ned Kelly Awards are Australia's premier prizes for crime fiction and true crime writing. Kelly is the subject of songs by musicians as diverse as Johnny Cash and Midnight Oil. In the time since his execution, Kelly has been mythologised into a "Robin Hood" character, a political icon and a figure of Irish Catholic and working-class resistance to the establishment and British colonial ties. In the Jerilderie Letter, Kelly demands that wealthy squatters share their land with, and redistribute their wealth to, the