save them all but he’s not here because he was hung at the age of twenty-four all this way from his home in Ireland and when he was asked if he had any last words he said ‘such is life’ and then they hung him and it’s their fault that the boy’s now locked out of his little moving house.
NOW
–How did we get back in the car? D’you remember?
Tony thinks. –I don’t, no. Probably called the AA or whatever they had over here in those days. Got back in somehow .
Beechworth is like Deadwood in a beating sun, a frontiertown with covered arcades lining the dusty streets and wooden boardwalks and a New Orleans-style jazz band playing. It’s very busy. Easy, here, to imagine sheriffs and shoot-outs and rearing horses and post-office robberies and stick-ups of stagecoaches. Almost unchanged from a century ago, it seems. There’s a Scottish shop, oddly. A caff from where I buy a Ned Kelly Pie, which is a grin in a pastry crust; meat and gravy topped by an egg and cheese then baked. It’s brilliant. When I return to Britain, I’ll have my blood tested and it will show high levels of triglycerides, which will worry my doctor. I blame Australia’s pies.
I visit the courthouse. Got to, really. How could I not? I’m alone inside it, and fascinated. I stand in the dock. I stand at the bench. When I go into the holding cells, a motion-activated recording clicks into operation and a croaky disembodied voice says: Awroight, mate. You got a smowk? The furniture and fittings are all original, including the dock and Ned’s cell, over 140 years old. I buy a load of stuff from the souvenir shop; posters, booklets, copies of journalistic articles from the time of the Kelly Gang trial. WANTED posters, Ned’s ‘certificate of execution’, which reads: ‘I, Andrew Shields, being the medical officer on attendance on the execution of Edward Kelly, at the Gaol of Melbourne, do hereby certify and declare that I have this day witnessed the execution of the said Edward Kelly at the said gaol, and I further certify and declare that the said Edward Kelly was, in pursuance of the sentence of the Central Criminal Court, hanged by the neck until his body was dead.’ All those bloody ‘said’s. Why do they have to do that, in legalese? I explore the town, guided by the ‘Ned Kelly Touring Route’ pamphlets which declare that Beechworth is ‘Australia’s Best Preserved Ned Kelly Town’. The Burke Museum houses Ned’s death mask and a suitof Chinese armour that, apparently, ‘sowed the seed for the Kelly Gang armour’. The Imperial Hotel, where Ned had a bare-knuckle fight with Isaiah ‘Wild’ Wright, and pummelled him.
All interesting stuff, as is the entire story of the Kelly Gang, and the position it’s now assumed in the Oz collective psyche. One of the booklets says: ‘Ned Kelly has never faded from our national consciousness. Indeed the passing years have seemed to build [his] legendary stature. Why? Perhaps because he had so many qualities ordinary Australians admire. He was a larrikin. Loyal to his family and ready to sacrifice himself for his mates. Represented the struggling classes. Thumbed his nose at the establishment. And he was fearless.’ How different this is to the figure of national shame and embarrassment that Kelly was when I was last here, all those years ago. A thug, he was then; a killer of policemen; a street-brawler; a disgrace. As was his mother, Ellen, tinker-Irish, bred like a rabbit, Mick harridan carting her clatter of snot-nosed kids up to be thieves and rustlers. Now, according to a leaflet written by Noelene Allen, she’s a ‘woman of spirit and courage’, who, when a child in Antrim, used to love ‘exploring the beautiful rolling hills around her home searching for wild berries, bird’s nests and flowers’, who ‘loved to sing and dance… A free spirit with a strong rebellious streak’. She came to Oz aged nine; her father wanted to emigrate to ‘improve their position’. At
NOW
–How did we get back in the car? D’you remember?
Tony thinks. –I don’t, no. Probably called the AA or whatever they had over here in those days. Got back in somehow .
Beechworth is like Deadwood in a beating sun, a frontiertown with covered arcades lining the dusty streets and wooden boardwalks and a New Orleans-style jazz band playing. It’s very busy. Easy, here, to imagine sheriffs and shoot-outs and rearing horses and post-office robberies and stick-ups of stagecoaches. Almost unchanged from a century ago, it seems. There’s a Scottish shop, oddly. A caff from where I buy a Ned Kelly Pie, which is a grin in a pastry crust; meat and gravy topped by an egg and cheese then baked. It’s brilliant. When I return to Britain, I’ll have my blood tested and it will show high levels of triglycerides, which will worry my doctor. I blame Australia’s pies.
I visit the courthouse. Got to, really. How could I not? I’m alone inside it, and fascinated. I stand in the dock. I stand at the bench. When I go into the holding cells, a motion-activated recording clicks into operation and a croaky disembodied voice says: Awroight, mate. You got a smowk? The furniture and fittings are all original, including the dock and Ned’s cell, over 140 years old. I buy a load of stuff from the souvenir shop; posters, booklets, copies of journalistic articles from the time of the Kelly Gang trial. WANTED posters, Ned’s ‘certificate of execution’, which reads: ‘I, Andrew Shields, being the medical officer on attendance on the execution of Edward Kelly, at the Gaol of Melbourne, do hereby certify and declare that I have this day witnessed the execution of the said Edward Kelly at the said gaol, and I further certify and declare that the said Edward Kelly was, in pursuance of the sentence of the Central Criminal Court, hanged by the neck until his body was dead.’ All those bloody ‘said’s. Why do they have to do that, in legalese? I explore the town, guided by the ‘Ned Kelly Touring Route’ pamphlets which declare that Beechworth is ‘Australia’s Best Preserved Ned Kelly Town’. The Burke Museum houses Ned’s death mask and a suitof Chinese armour that, apparently, ‘sowed the seed for the Kelly Gang armour’. The Imperial Hotel, where Ned had a bare-knuckle fight with Isaiah ‘Wild’ Wright, and pummelled him.
All interesting stuff, as is the entire story of the Kelly Gang, and the position it’s now assumed in the Oz collective psyche. One of the booklets says: ‘Ned Kelly has never faded from our national consciousness. Indeed the passing years have seemed to build [his] legendary stature. Why? Perhaps because he had so many qualities ordinary Australians admire. He was a larrikin. Loyal to his family and ready to sacrifice himself for his mates. Represented the struggling classes. Thumbed his nose at the establishment. And he was fearless.’ How different this is to the figure of national shame and embarrassment that Kelly was when I was last here, all those years ago. A thug, he was then; a killer of policemen; a street-brawler; a disgrace. As was his mother, Ellen, tinker-Irish, bred like a rabbit, Mick harridan carting her clatter of snot-nosed kids up to be thieves and rustlers. Now, according to a leaflet written by Noelene Allen, she’s a ‘woman of spirit and courage’, who, when a child in Antrim, used to love ‘exploring the beautiful rolling hills around her home searching for wild berries, bird’s nests and flowers’, who ‘loved to sing and dance… A free spirit with a strong rebellious streak’. She came to Oz aged nine; her father wanted to emigrate to ‘improve their position’. At
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