Dezi Freeman outta Porepunkah 🚌 and old Ned Kelly 🤠 are a good 150 years apart, but bugger me if they don’t look like long-lost bush cousins. Pair of bloody larrikins, both told the law 🚔 to shove it, both reckon uniforms are for mugs, and both have scarpered into the same scrub 🌲 that’s been hiding bushrangers since the gold rush days ⛏️.
1. Outlaws with a beef 🔫
Ned kicked off floggin’ stock, then went full tilt as the most infamous bushranger we’ve ever had. Shot three coppers at Stringybark Creek 💥 and got slapped with the “outlaw” tag quicker than you can sink a middy 🍺.
Dezi? Calls himself a “sovereign citizen”, tried to “arrest” a judge⚖️, can’t say I’m sorry, them judges make their own laws called the “common law.” Desi calls the cops “terrorist mongrels” and now the yarn is he ambushed a couple before legging it bushwards.
2. Same old bush, same old hidey-holes
Kelly country – the Vic Alps 🏔️ and up the Murray – is where Dezi’s playing peek-a-boo with the boys in blue.
Coppers reckon he’s bush-smart; they’re pokin’ round caves, old mine shafts and cold-as-charity gullies. That country’ll swallow a bloke quicker than you can say “she’ll be right.”
3. The Hume’s still a mug’s magnet
Back in Kelly’s day, it was coaches and gold-rush punters 💰 that copped it along the Melbourne–Sydney track. Kelly, Power, Mad Dan Morgan all had a crack.
Now it’s the Hume Freeway, same guts, different toys. Horses swapped for Hiluxes, bush camps ⛺ and fire trails still making perfect bolt-holes for any stickybeak with a grudge.
4. Bush spirit, 21st-century style
Dezi’s bus yard outside Porepunkah is basically a Kelly hut with a solar panel ⚡ slapped on top.
And like Ned, he’s got a peanut gallery 🥜 who reckon he’s some kinda bush hero. Different blokes, different toys, same rough-as-guts country. Same bloody chip on the shoulder, same cat-and-mouse caper with the coppers. The names change, but the bush and the bull-dust legends never do.
