Ostracised (play)

Ostracised, or Every Man's Hand Against Them is a 1881 Australian play about Ned Kelly by E.C. Martin. It was the first straight dramatisation of the Kelly story from an Australian writer although there had been one in London. The play was banned in Sydney.

Martin was a journalist and occasional playwright (What May Happen to a Man in Victoria). He claimed to have "not written it to pander to the morbid tastes of the public, but rather-to show that vice ever meets its reward."

According to academic Richard Fotheringham "Martin seems to have developed the idea that Dan Kelly was the true psycho path of the piece and that Ned Kelly... had been dragged unwillingly into the disaster." The play appears to have been interspersed with songs.

In the lead up to the play debuting there were rumours the play would be banned "on the grounds of its alleged demoralising tendency, and the reflections cast by it upon the character of the police force ; but as the play proceeded, it became evident that theie rumours were unfounded."