The Kelly Gang - Australia's Infamous Gang of Bushrangers

A jigsaw of clues finally solves the Ned Kelly puzzle

2011-09-03T17:44:00.001+10:00

Lee Franklin with a picture of his grandfather who grabbed a key clue, a skull, dug up in the grounds of the Old Melbourne Gaol site.

HISTORY endures powerfully in blood, in bone, and in the secrets families keep, as the riddle of Ned Kelly's remains - finally laid to rest this week - testifies.

The keepers of three crucial morsels of the 130-year-old mystery were three disparate Melbourne men, connected by the stories of their ancestors.

The information they were able to provide to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine was critical to this stone-cold case being cracked by a multidisciplinary team of forensic specialists, legal experts and historians.

Kelly descendant Lee Olver's blood sample provided proof positive that the bones dug up at Pentridge were those of his notorious forebear, outlaw Ned Kelly. DIGITALLY ALTERED IMAGE.

The keeper of the blood, and within it the DNA, is Leigh Olver, a quietly spoken high school art teacher from Melbourne's inner west. Flicking through the photographs of the women from whom he is descended, the wizened face of his great- great-grandmother as an old lady is familiar from the pages of history books. She is Ellen Kelly, matriarch of the Kelly clan - Ned's mother.

The story of his infamous ancestor, one that has intrigued Olver all his life, feels very close.

As a little girl his grandmother, Elsie Knight (later Elsie Pedifer) lived for a time with old Granny Kelly. Olver and his family would try to prise her memories from her, though for a long time she was reluctant to give them up.

She told Olver that when she was growing up, she was counselled by family lore to not speak of the Kelly connection - it was not something to boast of. Not so much shameful, but controversial - ''no good would come of it'' was the refrain.

''I see Ned as an important figure for the time,'' Olver says. ''I think the Kelly story did change the way we saw ourselves, and his multilayered character transcends time.''

Olver struggles with the polarising villain/hero representation of Kelly. Enduring grief at his crimes still resonates through time. He felt it profoundly when he went to Stringybark Creek to unveil a plaque for the police killed there. ''I really just wanted to say 'let's just let it rest, let it go in the past'.''

Olver is proud of his heritage, in all its hues. ''It's almost like this larger-than-life connection to me. It's special to have that connection to him. I do have a love for the family, for the strugglers.''

Out on the other side of Melbourne, in a brick veneer in Ringwood, Lee Franklin also keeps photographs of his heritage proudly displayed, together with heirlooms and documents that tell the extraordinary boom-and-bust story of his grandfather, Harry Lee, who made and lost two fortunes.

The first was as a celebrated builder whose work included the War Memorial Hall at Melbourne Grammar. He had almost completed a warehouse for Myer when the Depression hit and he was wiped out. He later started a chicken farm in Cheltenham, but was ruined when disease swept through the cages.

Harry Lee was the contractor who was commissioned to work on the Old Melbourne Gaol site in 1929, demolishing a section to make way for part of what is today RMIT.

The story passed down to Franklin is that Harry was deeply concerned at the prospect of digging up bodies in the prison yard, Ned Kelly among them, but was assured that there would be little left to find.

Nonetheless an expectant crowd gathered on the site when he moved his diggers in. When coffins and bones were unearthed, boys swarmed on the site and sped off with souvenirs.

Harry quickly grabbed the skull turned up where a marker indicated Kelly's grave, taking it home for safekeeping.

Lee Franklin's mother and aunt, small girls at the time, recalled being shown the skull sitting on their father's bedside table. Within a day or two, someone came from the government to collect it.

Franklin's account helped investigators fill a critical gap in the provenance of the skull, which many years later materialised in a display case, purporting to be Ned Kelly's.

Another piece in the puzzle fell into place when Chris Ott, a photographer from the inner city, handed over to investigators a tiny wooden box containing a single tooth.

It was, according to family legend and the oath of his grandfather, Michael Alexander Talbot - a carpenter and former mayor of South Melbourne - Ned Kelly's tooth. As a schoolboy, Ott had taken it to show and tell.

Talbot, as a young man, had been a labourer for Harry Lee, and had been on the prison site the day of the dig in 1929. An old photograph shows young Talbot holding aloft a skull - the picture was very likely taken by Lee before retrieving the skull and taking it home.

Talbot preserved the tooth with a full written account of its discovery. But after Talbot's death, the family relinquished it to institute investigators.

In the forensics laboratory the tooth was found to fit perfectly into the skull long believed to be that of Ned Kelly.

While this did not identify the skull as Ned's, it did provide investigators with proof that the so-called Baxter skull - the one displayed at Old Melbourne Gaol, and then acquired and secreted for 30 years by farmer Tom Baxter - was indeed the same one disinterred from the prison site that day in 1929.

Three clues, three men, three families with remarkable stories. Some rather more public than others.

www.BrisbaneTimes.com.au

DNA test may solve Ipswich link to Kelly Gang

2011-09-02T07:32:00.001+10:00

Cr Paul Tully standing at the site in the Ipswich cemetery where Dan Kelly, Ned's brother, is thought to be buried.

THE TRUTH about whether bushranger Dan Kelly, brother of Ned, is truly buried in the Ipswich Cemetery is now one step closer to being revealed.

Ipswich councillor and historian Paul Tully has raised the prospect of an exhumation of the remains of James Ryan, who claimed to be the bushranger Dan Kelly until his death in 1948.

Cr Tully's call has come in the wake of news that remains exhumed from Pentridge Prison in Melbourne are those of Ned Kelly, who was hanged in 1880.

Doctors and scientists at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine confirmed the find.

The standard history is that Dan Kelly died in the fire at Glenrowan Inn along with fellow bushranger Steve Hart on June 28, 1880.

But that was turned in its head when a man walked into the offices of The Truth newspaper in 1933 claiming to be Dan Kelly.

He maintained the story until his death – that he had escaped the fire and made his way to Ipswich – and convinced many locals of his story in the Fernvale area, where he lived.

Tully, who has been hot on the trail of the possible Queensland connection to the Kelly Gang for more than 20 years, said yesterday's DNA confirmation of the identity of Ned made the exhumation of the Ryan remains at the Ipswich Cemetery an issue worth exploring.

"This now gives us the definite opportunity of comparing the DNA," Cr Tully said.

"The state government needs to give approval.

"There was a claim that Steve Hart was buried in Toowoomba and there was an exhumation of a grave up there years ago – so it wouldn't be the first time a supposed bushranger's grave was reopened."

Tully said the bodies that were retrieved from the Glenrowan fire were burnt beyond recognition and never officially identified.

The man claiming to be Dan Kelly always said that he and Hart had been taken in by a German couple before heading north.

In light of other information, Cr Tully said the final resting place of Dan Kelly could well be in the pauper's section of the Ipswich Cemetery "where the Ipswich Council has erected a memorial to this man who died penniless and without any family or friends".

www.QT.com.au

DNA confirms Kelly Gang link

2011-09-01T11:21:00.000+10:00

Forensic experts have confirmed that human remains found at the old Pentridge Prison site in Melbourne are those of notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly.

After an exhaustive 20-month investigation, scientists and doctors today revealed that an almost complete skeleton found buried in a wooden axe box were those of the famous outlaw, who was executed in 1880.

A DNA sample taken from Melbourne school teacher Leigh Olver, who is Ned’s sister Ellen’s great-grandson, confirmed the remains were those of Kelly.

The presence of the remains at Pentridge Prison had been long rumoured but never confirmed, until now.

Kelly’s remains were mixed among those of 33 others that were exhumed from Pentridge in 2009. His skull was stolen from a glass display case at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978 - the mystery surrounding its whereabouts sparking the investigation that led to the discovery.

Attorney-General Robert Clark said it was a remarkable achievement by forensic teams in Australia and around the world.

“To think a group of scientists could identify the body of a man who was executed more than 130 years ago, moved and buried in a haphazard fashion among 33 other prisoners, most of whom are not identified, is amazing,’’ he said.

The exhaustive forensic analysis was carried out by the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM), in collaboration with the forensic DNA laboratory EAAF in Argentina.

It included input from historians, pathologists, anthropologists, odontologists, radiologists, and ballistics and DNA experts.

Mr Clark said the analysis revealed Kelly’s remains were among those transferred from the Old Melbourne Gaol, where Kelly was hanged, to Pentridge Prison in 1929 and then exhumed again in 2009.

The investigation was launched in November 2009 when West Australian farmer Tom Baxter handed a skull to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine that he claimed was Kelly’s.

Mr Baxter said he had been in possession of the skull for years. Kelly’s skull was stolen from a glass display case at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978.

Earlier this month, the Victorian coroner rejected claims the skull handed to the state was that of Kelly, however Mr Baxter’s claims sparked an investigation that led to today’s announcement.

As well as trying to identify the skull, Professor Stephen Cordner and his team of forensic experts at the VIFM began trying to identify Ned Kelly’s remains from among the remains exhumed from Pentridge.

Through a series of CT scans, X-rays, pathology, odontology and anthropology tests plus extensive historical research and DNA analysis, the team was able to positively identify the remains.

The identification was completed when a DNA sample taken from Mr Olver was compared to a DNA sample taken from the remains.

In 2008, archaeologists located three mass burial plots at the old Pentridge Prison containing the remains of prisoners executed at the Melbourne Gaol and reburied at Pentridge in 1929.

Kelly was a celebrity even in 1929 when the bodies were dug up from the Melbourne Gaol and moved, and when the mass burial plots were discovered archaeologists said some souveniring of Kelly’s remains may have taken place.

Among his body parts thought at the time to have been souvenired was his head, which was removed immediately after his execution.

Some key body features, including a distinguishing wrist injury suffered at the Glenrowan siege, would have helped with identification of Kelly.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/

Consultations will begin shortly with Ned Kelly’s family to determine an appropriate resting place for the remains.

Investigations are continuing to identify the skull Mr Baxter had handed to the institute.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/ned-kellys-remains-found-20110901-1jmqi.html#ixzz1WetDhS11

Australian Mystery: Help needed in bizarre case of Ned Kelly's skull

2010-06-20T16:36:00.001+10:00

The coroner and Victorian Institute of Forensic
Medicine are still trying to determine whether
it is authentic.

ABC.net.au

There has been a public appeal to help solve the mystery surrounding the purported skull of Ned Kelly.

Kelly's skull was stolen from Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978 and last November, on the anniversary of Kelly's execution, farmer Tom Baxter handed in a skull which he claimed was the bushranger's.

The coroner and Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine are still trying to determine whether it is authentic.

The skull has now been CT-scanned and examined by pathologists and anthropologists but forensic specialists still need more information.

Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls is calling for people to hand over any Kelly photos, artefacts or even bones that could be used to solve the mystery.

"It's a tantalising puzzle that needs solving; I'm sure there is stuff out there in photo albums, in sheds, in backyards," he said.

"I'm sure that someone will know someone who knows someone who knows something. So all we are really asking for them to do is come forward.

"There's only so much that scientific expertise can do. Today, I'm calling on the public for help in this very important quest.

"Is this indeed Ned's head? Or is it just another dull skull?"

National Trust spokesman Martin Purslow says it no longer displays human remains, but is interested to know whether the skull that has been handed in is the one that was stolen.

"We've moved on ethically and we would not want Ned Kelly's skull on display here anymore," he said.

"We have Ned Kelly's death mask and we have many, many items related to Ned Kelly.

"But how Ned kelly's skull is treated, along with I suppose the remains of 135 people who were hanged at this site, is a matter that we would want to be part of the ethical debate on."

Mr Baxter, from the remote Western Australian town of Derby, delivered the skull to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine after having it in his possession for years.

It is not clear how Mr Baxter acquired the skull, after it was stolen from a glass cabinet in the Old Melbourne Gaol.

Help is sought in six areas of research, to compare the scan with historical records and artefacts, including:

- Remains of bones and teeth reportedly taken as souvenirs by students from the Working Men's College (now RMIT) lunching near the Old Melbourne Gaol when graves were exhumed in 1929.

- A photograph of Alex Talbot, a former South Melbourne councillor, holding Ned Kelly's skull, which was mentioned in a newspaper report in 1997.

- Any information on grave exhume contractor Mr Lee of Lee and Dunn or his family, who was responsible for delivering Kelly's skull to the governor.

- Information about wax museum owner Maximilian Kreitmeyer who apparently made a death mask of Ned kelly shortly after his execution.

- Information about Sir Colin McKenzie, founder of the Australian Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, who was reportedly given Kelly's skull after exhumation.

- The missing bluestone block that marked Kelly's grave as E Kelly and the date of execution as 11.11.1880.

eBay Kelly Gang bookends for sale - Looks like a good buy!

2010-04-21T08:28:00.001+10:00

http://cgi.ebay.com/NED-KELLY-BOOK-ENDS-BUSHRANGER-OUTLAW-SWAGGIE-/130384103417?cmd=ViewItem&pt=AU_Books_Accessories_Gift_Books&hash=item1e5b7f87f9

Very Rare Kelly Gang Postcard on eBay

2010-04-19T16:26:00.000+10:00

Ned Kelly Forum

Ebay Sale - This is a VERY RARE ORIGINAL 1880s Ned Kelly The Kelly Gang Post Card taken off an original photo taken by an amatuer photoghrapher during their career when they were being hunted by more than a 100 police who couldnt even get sight of them.

I bought this some 20 yrs ago from an Adelaide antique dealer and there was only one other one known at the time I bought it.

This is guaranteed a genuine item not a repo or copy - a very rare piece of Ned Kelly memorabilia for the Ned Kelly collector,

I also am listing other Ned Kelly memorabilia so please check out my other auctions.

Problem was it had a divided back which were only introduced after 1900 and the card was sold for $588 !!!

Edinburgh International Festival: The book that launched Peter Carey's career

2010-04-18T19:09:00.001+10:00

News.Scotsman.com

Edinburgh International Festival: The book that launched Peter Carey's career as an author is coming to Edinburgh in a 'new and strange' form

'AM I AN opera buff?" says Peter Carey, laughing loudly and disparagingly at himself while repeating the question I've just asked. "No, I'm an idiot! I've seen maybe three operas in my life."

Soon he will have seen four, though, because his blackly comic 1981 novel, Bliss, about a man who believes he has died and gone to Hell has been transformed into an opera. It will have its European premiere at this year's Edinburgh International Festival following its debut performance in his homeland, at Sydney Opera House, earlier this month.

It is in Edinburgh that Carey, 66, hopes to catch celebrated Australian composer Brett Dean's take on that debut novel, which launched a career in which he has won the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang), and recently had admiring reviews for his latest, the picaresque Parrot & Olivier.

"I've made so many trips to Australia recently I just cannot have one more even for a world premiere," says Carey, speaking from the New York loft he shares with his third wife, the English publisher and editor Frances Coady. "It's exciting for this to be happening in Australia and then Edinburgh, but it's not about me. My work's done."

Bliss has already been adapted as a film, with a screenplay by Carey himself. It had style and charm, although he's always rather regretted his involvement in it. He says: "The actors were extraordinary and it looked really good but I think what it lost was its moral imperative. Never for a second did you imagine you were in Hell. When I did the film adaptation, I was ridiculously complacent and stupid."

However, as he remarks, it's much less common for novels to become operas. "Films certainly simplify things and I guess that operas probably have to simplify things even more, but, hey, what do I know?" he jokes.

Dean and librettist Amanda Holden (not to be confused with the pouting Britain's Got Talent judge) recently arranged for an aria from the completed score to be sung for Carey in New York. He says: "To me, it was new, beautiful and luminous. I was stunned because it was so moving."

He'd been nervous because the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was filming the event. "So, I'm sitting in this studio next to the person who's made the work and there's a TV crew pointing a camera at me. I'm thinking, 'My God! What if I really hate it? Surely that's going to show on my face.' But it wasn't like that at all. It was thrilling, such a pleasure.

"Brett and Amanda have excavated the book and made something new and strange, and maybe even better, out of something I wrote, so I'm really, really excited about it, although it's a gamble for them. If it works and it looks like it will work and work spectacularly, then that's amazing, but if it doesn't work, it won't be my fault," he says, laughing again.

"I'll come out of it clean. They have permission to take all the risks I took so the best thing I can do is stay out of their way. If they fall, they fall just as I might have done when I wrote the book. But my feeling is this opera is going to be very, very good, in which case I should get no credit at all because it's not mine.

"I'm pleased, though, that they saw something in my work that made them want to create another work of art."

Carey has not read Bliss – a tour de force which was rewarded with two prestigious literary awards in Australia – since it was published. "I think I'll never read it again," he confesses. "I never go back to my books because I know as a writer I've changed a lot; I know I've got better. So I'd rather have an idea of Bliss than the reality. If I went back to it, I'd be self-critical. I'd maybe see what's wrong with it, even be embarrassed by it."

It's impossible to imagine why he should be, because Bliss is a gorgeously complex novel, a surreal, self-conscious work of metafiction that offers an intoxicating inquiry into life, death, sin, hypocrisy, midlife crisis and the fear of cancer. Written in sprightly, energetic prose with a spring in its step – words that aptly describe Carey himself – the book's "hero" is Harry Joy, a 39-year-old Australian advertising executive, who suffers a heart attack on his suburban lawn and lies dead for nine minutes. After being resuscitated and undergoing surgery, Harry believes he's died and gone to Hell and that actors are portraying his family and friends. His faithless wife is cavorting with his business partner, his teenage son is swapping drugs for sex with his Communist daughter, and the silk-shirted, white-suited Harry's career is morally bankrupt because he's making a fortune creating ads for carcinogenic products. Then his wife has him committed to a mental asylum.

Mad Men goes Down Under in the 1970s? Up to a point, but with fewer fabulous frocks, although the novel references the Madison Avenue world of legendary ad men and women, such as David Ogilvy and Mary Wells, for which Harry's wife hungers. Carey writes: "'In New York, there are towers of glass,' said Harry's father, 'it is the most terrible and beautiful city on Earth. All good, all evil exists there.' 'If you know where to look,' he said, 'you can find the Devil, that is where he lives. If you keep your eyes peeled you can see him drive down 42nd Street in a Cadillac.'" These words resonate throughout the novel and the opera, although when I quote them to Carey he says: "There you go! I want to rewrite that now."

A former advertising executive himself, Carey wrote Bliss before he'd been to New York, where he's lived for the past 20 years. In the late 1970s, he was living with his then girlfriend in an alternative community in North Queensland, returning to Sydney for five days a month to work in advertising. In this respect, Bliss is perhaps the most autobiographical of all 12 of his novels, because Harry meets and falls in love with Honey Barbara, who lives in just such a commune in the rainforest.

"It was a wonderful time in my life," Carey remembers. "We were living in paradise, despite policemen coming round to our shaky hippie hut and threatening to plant dope on me if I didn't tell them my name and address. I had to change the locations for Bliss. Everyone was terrified the police might raid the place. Imagine the police reading a novel! Pretty wild, huh?" Carey drew on the experience again in his 2008 novel, His Illegal Self.

Harry and Honey's love story is stronger, deeper and far more emotional in the opera, Carey believes. "But then maybe that's me judging myself for having done something poorly in the first place. If I have one abiding memory of Bliss, it is of the army surplus table I sat at while writing it. I can't remember the actual writing at all. With a colleague we'd started our own agency. We had little money so we furnished our offices with all this army stuff; I can still see that table."

An amazingly prescient novel, Bliss tells how a colleague shows Harry a "cancer map" revealing the tragic cost of many of the lethal products for which his agency creates those dreams of desire. "No-one had even heard of cancer maps 30 years ago, so I think I got that right at least, because everybody now accepts it's true that you have occupational and geographical disease. At the time, people thought it was hippie-dippy bullshit," he notes, conceding that Bliss is a very dark book.

"I wanted to call it "Waiting for the Barbarians" (after Greek poet Cavafy's poem], but JM Coetzee came out with that title just before my book was published. Now that would be a good title for an opera, wouldn't it?"

The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906 - silent, b/w)

2010-04-18T18:54:00.000+10:00

Film.org.au

THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG (1906 - silent, b/w)

Director: Charles Tait

Writer: Charles Tait

Frank Mills as Ned Kelly

Elizabeth Tait as Kate Kelly

John Tait as the Schoolmaster

Only 9 minutes of footage remain of this originally 60-70 min film, the first of several cinematic renderings of Australia's best known bushranger anti-hero. Hugely successful, it toured Australia for several years.

Historically a landmark, both for its length and innovation in storytelling style, using never-before seen dynamic shots to create a very entertaining experience.

Painting of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly sells for $4.9 million

2010-04-18T18:35:00.003+10:00

Painting of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly sells for $4.9 million

Kelly Gang bomb shell: Shootout site in dispute in Glenrowan Australia

2010-04-18T17:25:00.000+10:00

Herald Sun

An original forensic photograph of the site
merged into a modern-day picture of what
Bill Denheld says is the same site.

A HISTORICAL research group claims to have found the true site of the ambush and murder of police by the Kelly gang 132 years ago.

The discovery will spark controversy, because more than $50,000 has been spent to create a tourist trail at another site claimed, by a rival research group, to be the scene of the infamous Stringybark Creek shootout.

Kelly researcher Bill Denheld said his group had identified the correct site with photo comparison tests which used the original police photographs taken only two days after the shootings.

"By comparing details of a steep slope in the background of one of the photos, the site can be identified at near the ruins of two huts which we found in 2002," Mr Denheld said.

The shootout on October 26, 1878, near Benalla, in which three policemen were killed, saw the Kelly gang become the most wanted outlaws in Australia.

"The tourism works at Stringybark Creek are the result of research that has not taken into account our recent discoveries," Mr Denheld said.

"We believe the true site is on the west bank of the creek near the huts, as reported in newspapers of October 1878. The site is exactly as it was then reported.

"No other sites display the photo comparison as near the site of two ruined huts where there is steep rising ground to the south, as shown in the background of the photos taken by Burman in 1878," Mr Denheld said.

Heritage Victoria's archaeologist Jeremy Smith said it was difficult to pin down the exact spot, but the entire area was now protected by heritage listing.

The Kelly Gang - Australia's Infamous Gang of Bushrangers

A jigsaw of clues finally solves the Ned Kelly puzzle

DNA test may solve Ipswich link to Kelly Gang

DNA confirms Kelly Gang link

Australian Mystery: Help needed in bizarre case of Ned Kelly's skull

eBay Kelly Gang bookends for sale - Looks like a good buy!

Very Rare Kelly Gang Postcard on eBay

Edinburgh International Festival: The book that launched Peter Carey's career

News.Scotsman.com

Edinburgh International Festival: The book that launched Peter Carey's career as an author is coming to Edinburgh in a 'new and strange' form

Premium Article !

Premium Article !

Registered Article !

The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906 - silent, b/w)

Film.org.au

THE STORY OF THE KELLY GANG (1906 - silent, b/w)

Painting of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly sells for $4.9 million

Kelly Gang bomb shell: Shootout site in dispute in Glenrowan Australia