Ned Kelly, one of Australia’s notorious bush rangers, was finally interred in blessed ground, more than 130 years after his death.
The Canberra Times
(January 19, 2013) reported on Ned Kelly’s burial. On Friday, January 18, Kelly’s
bones were placed in a coffin and given a Requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Church
in Wangaratta, in the Australian state of Victoria. The burial will take place
on Sunday in the Greta cemetery where he’ll be buried in an unmarked grave beside his mother Ellen’s
unmarked grave, and near two members of the Kelly Gang: Dan Kelly and Steve Hart.
During the gun fight
with police near Glenrowan in which Ned Kelly donned a suit of armour – a metal
mask and chest plate - Kelly was shot and convicted of murdering a policeman.
After he was executed by hanging in November 1880 at the age of 25, his
headless body was buried in a pit on prison grounds at the Old Melbourne Goal.
Kelly is believed to
have around 450 descendants today. Relatives attended his mass, wearing green
sashes. It is believed that Ned Kelly, awarded a green sash in his youth for
saving a boy from drowning, wore the green sash underneath his armour on the
day of the siege at Glenrowan. It is still debatable today whether Kelly was
famous or infamous, a rebel against The Establishment or merely the murderer of
constabulary, a man of legends or nothing more than a thief.
His descendants sought a
cemetery burial when Kelly’s bones were found in the Old Melbourne Goal in 2008 and
identified by DNA. At the funeral, mourners included relatives (who bore no
bitterness, reported the Canberra Times) of Michael Scanlon, one of the
policemen shot by Kelly at Stringybark Creek; and descendants of Aaron
Sherritt, the former friend of the Kelly Gang who was shot by them for being an
informer; and a descendant of Ned’s sister Grace.
An extract from my
latest novel, Liberia’s Deadest Ends,
gives an account of Ned Kelly’s life and death:
When borders were crossed, one country’s freedom fighter was another’s
terrorist. Within borders, it was counterintuitive that outlaws and renegades
should become national heroes, but they usually were and their exploits were
often justified and lauded throughout the land. In Australia, the notorious
thief Ned Kelly, albeit with a modicum of controversy, rose to national status.
In defiance of authority and the law, Ned Kelly—son of Red Kelly who had been
released into the state of Victoria after doing penance in Tasmania for trying
to shoot his landlord—took to horse thieving and bank robbery. Ned’s criminal
life began at the age of fourteen when he stole a few shillings from a Chinese
man, then took up a firearm and continued his thieving ways.
Kelly’s
“real” turmoil, some biographers say, was due to the arrest of his mother,
Ellen Kelly, for shooting Constable Fitzpatrick in the wrist when he assaulted
Ned’s older sister Kate. Ellen tended to the constable’s wound and fed him. He
promptly arrested her and lied in court about the event, denying the rape
allegations. Mother Ellen, or Ma Ellen—as tough as her namesake, the Liberian
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—was convicted and sentenced for three years for
attempted murder, despite breastfeeding an infant. While Ellen Kelly was
imprisoned, the Kelly gang—Ned Kelly, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve
Hart—increased their banditry until their “last stand” in a shootout with
police when they took sixty people hostage in a hotel in Glenrowan in the
southern state of Victoria. Police killed the gang members and shot Ned in the
arm, thumb, and both legs. He was arrested and, refusing to apologize in court,
was promptly convicted of shooting a policeman. Before his hanging, his mother
is purported to have said, “Mind you die like a Kelly, Ned!” His last words as
he was hanged on November 11, 1880, in Melbourne Jail, were “Such is life.”
Over time, he became a hero despite efforts to ban documentaries and films
about his life. Ned Kelly was a hero for his courage and bravery, defending his
mother’s and sister’s honor, and for his defiance of the constabulary and the
British Empire that ruled Australia. … Tyrants or heroes, their rise and fall
were at the will of their nations’ courts. Taylor, if declared guilty, would
never be hanged because the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone did not
permit the imposition of the death penalty.
[Liberia’s
Deadest Ends by
Martina Nicolls]
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