As its title suggests, 'Kelly Ground' is partly an evocation of the tragic history of the Australian folk hero, Ned Kelly. Lumsdaine had originally envisaged an opera (to a libretto by Peter Porter) but they abandoned a literal treatment of the subject, and Lumsdaine's piano work does not narrate Kelly's story directly. A staunch opposer of capital punishment, Lumsdaine sees Kelly's execution by hanging as a terrible symbol of human rights abuse and injustice. Though initially somewhat reticent about this matter in relation to 'Kelly Ground', the composer has more recently indicated that the work also relates execution of the Rosenbergs, who were killed in the United States in the fifties for spying activities at the height of the cold war, amidst a storm of international protest and widespread revulsion. The 4-minute duration of each section of Lumsdaine's work is itself a direct reference to the time taken to execute the Rosenbergs. Thus behind one of Lumsdaine's strictest serially-derived pieces lies a typically deep humanitarian concern, which informs all his work.