If This Was America, We'd Already Have A Ned Kelly Amusement Park




By Darryl Mason

Bon Scott's grave in the Freemantle cemetery gets thousands of visitors a year.

How many visitors do you think the grave, and a monument, of Ned Kelly would bring to country Victoria each year? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? What might the value of a dedicated memorial and museum to Ned Kelly be worth each year to Victorian tourism? $10 million? $30 million?

The idea of exhuming the bones of Ned Kelly, holding a very public funeral and entombing his remains beneath a monument that would draw tens of thousands of tourists no doubt repels some in Australia. Those who don't want to remember the chaos of the decades of bushrangers and police harrassment and brutality that led to Federation.

But most Australians, I suspect, would think it a fine and brilliant idea, and would enjoy the media fuss and furious debate about his criminality and probably a televised pseudo-retrial of Kelly as well.

Before the corporatisation of sports, and the reckless slaughter of World War I, the bushranging era, through the mid-to-late 1800s served up to a young nation a series of heroic, but flawed, outlaws who then defined the spirit of what it meant to be an Australian : protect your family and take absolutely no shit, from anybody.

Pentridge Prison Chaplain : Give Ned Kelly Back To His Family :

The remains of Ned Kelly and other prisoners found at the Pentridge Prison site should be returned to their families, a chaplain says.

The outlaw's remains should be returned to his family and he should be given a decent burial, former Pentridge Prison chaplain Father Peter Norden said.

Fr Norden said Kelly should be granted a final resting place with his deceased relatives...

Bushranger movies, and movies about Ned Kelly in particular, were extremely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Some of the first full-length feature films produced anywhere in the world were about Australian bushrangers fighting back against police brutality in a fascist police state. These films, of course, had to be banned :

• 1907 Victorian Chief Secretary bans screenings of The Story of the Kelly Gang
  in Benalla and Wangaratta.

• 1911 exhibition of The Story of the Kelly Gang film banned in Adelaide.

• 1912 New South Wales police department banned the production of bushranger films.

And here's that excellent shot of Ned Kelly's armour again :

(click to enlarge) - photo credit

Lyrics from Poor Ned, by Redgum :

Eighteen hundred and seventy eight
Was the year I remember so well
They put my father in an early grave
Slung my mother in gaol
Now I don't know what's right or wrong
But they hung Christ on nails
Six kids at home and two still on the breast
They wouldn't even give her bail

Ned Kelly's Remains Found In Prison Mass Grave


The Ned Kelly death mask, freshly cast off the corpse

The remains of Ned Kelly, one of the most legendary men, and most famous criminal, of Australia's short history, were dumped into a mass grave outside the prison where he was executed in 1880. His bones have recently been uncovered, though the skull is still missing. Wonder which family has been quietly passing that unique piece of Australiana from generation to generation?

The grave site of Australia's most notorious bushranger was discovered after historians and archeologists unearthed an old Department of Justice document yielding a vital clue.

Bone hunters during the week finally found an unknown mass grave where the remains of Kelly and other executed prisoners - removed from the Old Melbourne Gaol when it closed in 1929 - were interred at Pentridge.

"We have still some testing to do, but it's pretty clear we have found them," Heritage Victoria Senior Archeologist Jeremy Smith said yesterday.

Plans for the remains have not been finalised, but a publicly accessible cemetery and rose garden will be created at Pentridge.

Kelly was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on November 11, 1880, for crimes including murder.

Must be time to attempt to clone Ned Kelly by now. When the clones grow up, they can go on tour through our shopping centres and malls, perhaps a musical. Or just focus on TV. Ned Kelly Idol? Dancing With The Neds?

Australians loved, and still love, their bushrangers, even the cop killers.

Here's a clip of Heath Ledger in the sadly under-rated Ned Kelly movie, by Gregor Jordan. This is the last minutes of the movie :



A more traditional image of Kelly.