“Welcome ladies and gentlemen…….please stand to attention to witness an unnatural phenomena where live before your eyes and ears a flat picture becomes a living picture…….The Boho series of photographs is by the modern magic artist Jacqui Stockdale who likes telling stories about Australia’s colonial past where ordinary men became heroes and villains at the same time. Where Ned Kelly’s comrades were spotted in dresses and the Catholics and Protestants fought over the same cross.”

Jacqui Stockdale, who grew up in Benalla, has been playing bushranger, retracing Ned Kelly's steps to garner the images she painted as landscape backdrops for her new series The Boho. The artist then brought in friends to theatrically pose in the manner of 19th-century studio photographs. In doing so, Stockdale creates a pungent mix of Australian folklore, masquerade and shifting identities that, though historical in subject matter, speaks to contemporary concerns. While singer Paul Kelly strikes a pose modelled on his infamous, but unrelated, namesake, other models cast light on the Aboriginal history often left in the shadows of the Kelly Gang myth.