Ned Kelly the Kelly Gang", the world's first dramatic feature-length film. Among those who have portrayed him on screen are Australian rules football player Bob Chitty ("The Glenrowan Affair", 1951), rock musician Mick Jagger ("Ned Kelly", 1970) and Heath Ledger ("Ned Kelly", 2003). In the visual arts, Sidney Nolan's 1946–47 Kelly series is considered "one of the greatest sequences of Australian painting of the twentieth century". His stylised depiction of Kelly's helmet has become an iconic Australian image; hundreds of performers dressed as "Nolanesque Kellys" starred in the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. In 2001, Peter Carey won the
The Story of the Kelly Gang long and includes the key scene of Kelly's last stand. In director Warwick Thornton's 2017 film "Sweet Country", a "travelling picture show" in 1920s Northern Territory shows "The Story of the Kelly Gang" to residents of an outback town, who cheer for the bushranger. The film's protagonist, an Aboriginal outlaw, is also named Kelly, but vilified and hunted by the same townspeople. According to "The Australian", Thornton, an Aboriginal, "has little time" for depictions of Ned Kelly as a larrikin folk hero and Irish victim of British colonisation. "When there was a raiding party," said Thonrton, "and a massacre happened,