Relatives of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly have reacted with anger to plans to put a collection of his bones on public display.

The headless skeleton of Kelly, who was hanged for murder in the Old Melbourne Jail in 1880, was found jammed into an axe box buried under the city's now-disused Pentridge Prison.

DNA checks with a distant living relative have confirmed the bones are those of the notorious highwayman.

'It's almost a complete skeleton apart from the missing skull,' said a spokesman for the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, where scientists have been working on the DNA match.


Headless: The remains of Australia's most infamous criminal, Ned Kelly


Bullet hole: The Tibia bone from Kelly's right leg shows an old wound

A positive comparison was made with a DNA sample taken from Melbourne schoolteacher Leigh Olver , the great grandson of Kelly's sister Ellen.

But when Anthony Griffiths, the great grandson of Kelly's sister Grace, heard that the Victorian Government was planning to put the bones on display, he was appalled.

'To do that would be recreating something out of medieval times,' he said. 'This plan is macabre and disgusting.'

However, Mr Stephen Corner, a spokesman for the institute, said people should at least see photos of the bones.

'These are historical remains of historical significance and we think it is reasonable in this particular instance,' he said.


Leigh Olver, Ned Kelly's great grand nephew, with the remains


Forensic odontologists analysing the dental remains of Ned Kelly

Father Peter Norden, a former Pentridge Prison chaplain who performed a funeral service for Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Australia in 1967, told the Australian Broadcasting Commission that it should be up to Kelly's descendants to decide what to do with the bones.

'In the past, the family has suggested that Kelly's bones be buried beside his father, Red, who is believed to be buried in central northern Victoria,' said Father Norden.


Folk hero Ned Kelly

'For too long his remains remained in the Old Melbourne Gaol. The skull was on display in a kind of ghastly exposition of lack of respect.

'Australia has moved way beyond the barbaric times when we thought we could uphold the value of human life by taking the life of another.'

Kelly's skull, which had been displayed next to the bushranger's death mask, was removed from the jail in December 1978 and its whereabouts remain a mystery.

Father Norden said that in his opinion Kelly was not given a fair trial after he had been charged with the murder of three policemen who were hunting for him and his gang and he should never have been executed.

'There were serious grounds about the fact he shot in self defence at the time because there was a clear conspiracy by Victorian police not to arrest him but to execute him.'

He described Kelly as a symbol of the social conflict and unrest that existed in the late 19th century between Irish Australians and the English establishment.

The Victorian Government said today it would hold widespread discussions before a final decision is made whether the bones should be put on public display.

THE LEGEND OF NED KELLY
Ned Kelly as the Australian-born son of an Irishman, John 'Red' Kelly, who was sent to Tasmania for stealing two pigs.

His father died when he was 11-years-old, meaning he had to leave school and work on his grandfather's cattle farm to support his family.

As a teenager, Kelly was already having run-ins with the law and was repeatedly accused of stealing livestock. He was first arrested, aged 14, for assaulting a Chinese man.

He was also arrested for receiving stolen property and assault offences, and served three years hard labour while still in his teens. The family felt they were unfairly targeted by police.

Kelly later shot a policeman who came to visit in the wrist because he was trying to get friendly with his sister, Kate.

The officer vowed to pay the family back and made a false report which led to Kelly's mother being jailed for three years.

Kelly and his brother went into hiding, fearing more repercussions. Three officers were then killed in a struggle after trailing them and they became outlaws.

Over two years, the gang laid low in the bushlands of north-eastern Victoria - emerging to rob banks and the rich. During this time, they became folk heros and symbols of Irish Australian resistance.

They were eventually cornered at the Glenrowan Hotel where, after a nine-hour siege, Kelly emerged in a full suit of armour but he was captured after being shot in the legs and charged with murder.

He was later hanged but his name became one of legend because of tales about his daring and he is an iconic Australian figure.

Edward "Ned" Kelly (June 1854/June 1855 – 11 November 1880)[1] was an Irish Australian bushranger, considered by some merely a cold-blooded killer, while by others a folk hero and symbol of Irish Australian resistance against oppression by the British ruling class for his defiance of the colonial authorities.[2]
Kelly was born in Victoria to an Irish convict father, and as a young man he clashed with the Victoria Police. Following an incident at his home in 1878, police parties searched for him in the bush. After he killed three policemen, the colony proclaimed Kelly and his gang wanted outlaws.
A final violent confrontation with police took place at Glenrowan on 28 June 1880. Kelly, dressed in home-made plate metal armour and helmet, was captured and sent to jail. He was hanged for murder at Old Melbourne Gaol in November 1880. His daring and notoriety made him an iconic figure in Australian history, folklore, literature, art and film.

Ned Kelly: bush ranger who was Australia's most famous son
Ned Kelly, the bush ranger who would go on to become one of Australia's most famous sons, was born in June 1855 in the Victorian town of Beveridge, around 25 miles north of Melbourne.

Image 1 of 2
Ned Kelly was executed in 1880, aged 25, after evading police troopers for two years
By Bonnie Malkin, Sydney7:59AM BST 01 Sep 2011
He was the eldest of eight children born to John "Red" Kelly, an Irishman who had been sent to Australia from Ireland for stealing two pigs, and Ellen Quinn.
Kelly's father died when he was 11-years-old, leaving the family destitute and forcing Kelly to leave school to work on his grandfather's cattle farm.
Life was hard, and Kelly was often in trouble. On several occasions he was accused of stealing cattle, and he was first arrested at the tender age of 14 for assaulting a Chinese man.
During his teens, Ned Kelly had some minor run-ins with the law for receiving stolen property and assault offences – one of which saw him sentenced to three years hard labour.
When he got out, the Kelly family increasingly saw themselves as being persecuted by the police.

Shortly later, Kelly shot a policeman in the wrist for becoming too friendly with his sister Kate. Fearing the police would not believe his side of the story, Ned and his brother Dan, along with friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart – the members of The Kelly gang – went into hiding.
While on the run, the four ambushed a group of police on their trail in Stringybark Creek, killing three, and from that point on became wanted outlaws.
For the next two years the gang roamed the countryside, holding up banks and making a name for themselves as local folk heros and symbols of Irish Australian resistance against oppression by the British ruling class.
But their period on the run ended in 1880 when, after a plan to derail a police train went wrong, the gang was cornered at the Glenrowan Hotel.
After a nine-hour siege Ned Kelly, wearing a suit of armour made from heavy steel that had been purchased with the profits from the bank robberies, was captured after being repeatedly shot. The other three gang members died in the shoot-out.
Kelly was taken to Melbourne and sentenced to death for murder. He died on Nov 11 1880 with the famous last words – "such is life".
The exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang have been the subject of numerous films and television series, including a portrayal by Rolling Stone Mick Jagger in a 1970 movie of the same name.
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Good and Interesting story.

Ned Kelly: How Mick Jagger Almost Ruined the Australian Icon

Ned Kelly, the legendary Irish-Australian bank robber and antihero icon, whose bones were recently recovered, was largely unknown to audiences beyond Down Under until 1970 when rock star Mick Jagger played him in an eponymous movie.
[IMG]http://i.ebayimg.com/t/OST-NED-KELLY-SHEL-SILVERSTEIN-MICK-JAGGER-1970-UA-NM-/00/$(KGrHqZ,!l!E1F6jsUnVBNbwU0gjPw~~_35.JPG[/IMG]

Mick Jagger as Ned Kelly


The film, despite boasting gorgeous cinematography of Australia’s glorious bush country, is widely regarded as a disappointment. One of the biggest problems was the casting of the Rolling Stone front man in the lead role (a decision that sparked fury in Kelly’s living descendants).

Not only was Jagger not Australian, but also he wasn't even of Irish descent; and he was much shorter and slighter than the big, burly, muscular Kelly.

Irish Australians were especially aghast at Jagger’s fake and unconvincing brogue.

The film also featured a soundtrack of folk-country songs augmented with a rock-and-roll beat which jarringly contradicted the film’s late 19th century ambience.



In its review of the film, The New York Times wrote: “Unfortunately, [director Tony] Richardson's direction and script… do not delve too deeply into character [of Ned Kelly]. Nor are the principals' motivations projected with relevance to untutored American viewers… With intrusive, explanatory songs by Shel Silverstein sung by Waylon Jennings, [the film] emerges as somewhat pretentious folk-ballad fare that often explains little more than its action.”

The filming of the Kelly saga was reportedly plagued by injuries to cast and crew, fires on set, and (perhaps as a omen), the attempted suicide by Marianne Faithful, Jagger’s then-girlfriend who was supposed to get a part in the movie.

The film was so poorly conceived that even its director and lead star dismissed it, and failed to show up at the opening in London.

Nonetheless, Jagger was reportedly hurt by the criticism of his performance, and he effectively ended his career as an actor.

Ned Kelly's descendants were apparently not Rolling Stones fans - no surprise - the Irish still hate the English.
Ned Kelly was a criminal and a cop-killer and got his just deserts. He was no hero. Mick Jagger was not much of an actor either.

SAB Miller to Buy Fosters an Australian icon
WED, 22 JUN, 2011


The group that failed twice to take on the world and this year set itself up for a takeover by spinning off its wine business yesterday announced that one of the world's big brewers,
SABMiller's proposal that it take over Fosters for $4.90 a share, or $11.2 billion, was dismissed as too low by the Foster's board and sharemarket investors agreed, pushing Foster's shares more than 13 per cent higher to $5.15 on heavy turnover.
The London-listed SABMiller says it will continue to press its case for a friendly takeover, and in all likelihood will eventually increase its offer and add Foster's Lager, Victoria Bitter and other Foster's brands to a stable that includes Miller Draft, Urquell, Peroni and Grolsch.
A takeover will leave Australia's two big brewers in foreign hands after Kirin of Japan's move to full ownership of Lion Nathan in 2009. It is unlikely to be blocked by the Gillard government.
Foster's is an Australian icon, albeit an emotive one, and does not have the national strategic value that persuaded the government to prevent the Australian Securities Exchange from accepting a takeover bid from the Singapore Exchange in May.
The takeover proposal for the Melbourne-based brewer follows mergers that have created an elite group of international beer giants - SABMiller, the union of South African Breweries and Miller Brewing that is five times larger than Foster's; the even larger Anheuser-Busch InBev, a $US92 billion ($A87 billion) amalgam of America's Anheuser Busch (Budweiser) and Europe's InBev group (Stella Artois); and Heineken of the Netherlands.
For them and others with international ambition, including Japan's Asahi group, Foster's is a pawn in a larger global game, but things could have been different.
In the '80s John Elliott realised early that the brewing industry would go global, and put Foster's into the race with acquisitions in Britain and North America. But what was Elders IXL imploded under the weight of its debts in the early '90s, and the overseas brewing interests were sold off. Elliott got the trend right: it was his execution that was wrong.
From the mid-'90s, a rehabilitated Foster's expanded again, into wine. It was a refinement of Elliott's strategy, and a response to a steady decline in beer consumption and brand loyalty that has seen consumption per person here halve since the mid-'70s to levels last seen in the late 1940s.
But Foster's overpaid in its 2000 takeover of America's Beringer wine group and paid too much again in 2005 when it took over Southcorp, the Australian owner of Penfolds. It booked total losses of $2.4 billion on the misadventures, and in May last year signalled it would return to its brewing roots by hiving the wine business off.
A bid was being tacitly invited from that time, although SABMiller waited until the split happened last month, and it's now probably just a question of price.
More than 100 million Foster's shares changed hands yesterday, as traders who gamble on takeovers boarded. Their entry price suggests a 12 per cent increase in the bid to $5.50 a share gets SABMiller in the door.

Suspicious fire erupts at home linked to Australia’s most storied criminal, Ned Kelly
By Associated Press, Published: September 1

SYDNEY — Australian police say they are investigating a suspicious fire at a mansion once owned by the judge who sentenced Australia’s most notorious criminal, Ned Kelly, to death.

Friday’s announcement by police comes one day after officials said they had finally identified the headless remains of Kelly, who was hanged in 1880 after leading a gang of bank robbers in Australia’s southern Victoria state.
( State Library of Victoria / Associated Press ) - In this undated photo released by the State Library of Victoria, Australia’s most infamous criminal, Ned Kelly, holds a gun in Melbourne, Australia. The headless remains of Kelly have been identified, officials said Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011, ending a decades-long mystery surrounding the final resting place of a man now seen by many as a folk hero.
Victoria police said in a statement that Saturday’s blaze at the historic home in the state capital of Melbourne appears to have been deliberately lit. The house was being renovated, and police say they believe vandals squatting at the home set the fire and may have stolen copper wire from the house.

The mansion was once owned by judge Sir Redmond Barry, who ordered Kelly’s execution.

When he sentenced Kelly to death, Sir Redmond said the customary words: ‘‘May God have mercy on your soul’’, to which Kelly reportedly replied: "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go".

Just 12 days after the trial, Sir Redmond died from an abscess on his neck and lung congestion.

Bones of Australia’s Jesse James Are Identified, but His Skull Remains a Fugitive
By CHRISTINE KENNEALLY
Published: August 31, 2011

MELBOURNE, Australia — Even with the best scientific techniques, you can’t always get what you want. But if you try, as the Rolling Stones put it, sometimes you get what you need.
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Top, Old Melbourne Gaol, via Reuters; Victorian Forensic Medecine, via Reuters
An undated photograph of Ned Kelly, top, and his headless remains in Melbourne.
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Consider the case of Ned Kelly’s skull.

In Australia, Kelly needs no introduction; for Americans, it may help to think of him as Jesse James, Thomas Paine and John F. Kennedy rolled into one.

Born about 1854 to an Irish convict exiled to Australia, Kelly became a folk hero as a very young man. He took up arms against a corrupt British constabulary, robbed banks, wrote an explosive manifesto — and in a final shootout in which he wore homemade metal armor, he was shot, arrested and hanged in 1880 by the Anglo-Irish establishment he despised.

As with any semimythical hero, Kelly’s public has always hungered to get closer to the legend. His armor, cartridge bag, boots and a bloody sash became state treasures.

But perhaps the most priceless among them is his missing skull — the subject of a tangled forensic drama that was finally resolved on Wednesday, at least in part, after decades of investigation, debate, tantalizing leads, stalemates, false starts and what can only be called skulduggery.

After his execution, Ned Kelly was buried in a mass grave at a prison, the Melbourne Gaol. There his remains might have quietly and invisibly decomposed but for a mistake by 19th-century gravediggers: they used a type of lime that slowed decomposition instead of hastening it.

So when the grounds were dug up for development in 1929, startled workers found the site full of skeletons. Officials began to move the remains to another prison. But in a scene of chaos that became a local scandal, a watching crowd of schoolboys and onlookers ran amok between the coffins, seizing bones — including, it was thought, the skulls of Ned Kelly and Frederick Bailey Deeming, the notorious British serial killer who may have been Jack the Ripper.

While the gaol remains were reburied at Pentridge prison, the skulls were recovered soon after they had been stolen. They then embarked on a separate, winding journey through the back doors of a number of institutions.

In the 1970s, one skull was put on display in a gaol museum alongside Kelly’s death mask, a plaster cast impression made shortly after his execution. (It is unknown whether that mask was the original or a copy.)

But in 1978 the skull was stolen again, and a man named Tom Baxter told journalists that he had it.

Mr. Baxter held onto the skull for over three decades, promising to return it if the government gave Kelly a Christian burial. The government did not respond, and the stalemate continued until 2008, when yet another excavation uncovered more prisoners’ remains. At least 3,000 bone fragments were exhumed and sent to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. It was thought that Ned Kelly’s bones might be among them.

Shortly after that, Mr. Baxter handed over a fragile, sun-bleached skull to the authorities.

The forensic institute conducted a 21-month investigation of the skull, mixing historical detective work with an array of innovative scientific analyses.

Scientists used historical photographs, cranial plaster casts and a copy of the Kelly death mask to make sure that the skull from Mr. Baxter had indeed been unearthed in the 1929 exhumation. When it came to the skull’s genetic material, however, the scientists faced some serious obstacles. DNA is well preserved in bone but highly vulnerable to contamination. Furthermore, they could not simply cut a square out of the skull, grind it to a powder and extract DNA from that; Joy Beyer, a molecular biologist at the institute, says she was told that the skull could not be damaged.

Finally, the institute sent samples from the skull and other remains to a forensic laboratory in Argentina that specializes in degraded and aged remains. That lab successfully extracted DNA from almost all of the samples.

Even so, the DNA meant little in isolation. The investigators needed something, or someone, to match it against.

Hoping to find DNA in Kelly’s dried blood, they located the boots, bag and sash he wore the night he was shot. “Dried specimens on cloth can preserve DNA for hundreds, even thousands, of years,” said David Ranson, a pathologist at the institute.

But the boot and the bag had no usable DNA. The sash, which they found in a country museum, had been thoroughly washed before it was put on display. And a search for the original of the Kelly death mask — which might hold a stray eyelash or some skin — came up empty.

Next, the investigators looked for relatives. They found Leigh Olver, an art teacher who was descended from Ned Kelly’s mother, down a direct line of women. He donated blood for analysis, and they compared his mitochondrial DNA to that of the skull.

On Wednesday, the forensic institute announced the disappointing results of that analysis. It appears that after all this time, after being abducted more than once, placed on display for the world to see, hidden for decades, cherished, handled, sought after and tested, the skull is not Ned Kelly’s. “Mr. Olver’s DNA and the DNA from the skull do not match,” said Fiona Leahy, a legal adviser at the institute who conducted research for the project.

There was one rather powerful note of consolation. The investigators found a match between the Olver DNA and one set of bones dug up at Pentridge, including a palm-size fragment of skull. So while most of Kelly’s skull is still missing, the rest of him appears to have been found.

As for the stolen skull, it could belong to the serial killer, Frederick Deeming, who died in 1892. The forensic institute is seeking a maternal relative to test DNA.

What of Kelly’s skeleton? Should it be returned to the extended family? Or should there be a public grave? Many Australians regard Kelly as a national hero. Countless books and movies tell the story of his life. But others see him as a villain.

“You can’t just bury the man,” Mr. Olver said. “Someone is going to dig him up again in half an hour.” .

Please forgive my question, but why would a Dominican be so interested in Australian history? I have trouble finding Dominicans interested in their own history.
It is interesting that some Australians consider Ned Kelly a hero, others (like me) consider him a villain. Opinion seems to be divided on left-right political grounds, or even Catholic vs. Protestant lines which may be based on Irish vs. English sentiments.