The Guardian 14 June, 2006
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
The unquiet dead
My father used to sing in the bath. It was usually Danny Boy or a song about Ned Kelly whose title I do not remember. But I do remember the closing refrain:
When I look around at the people I see,
and the prices of things that I buy;
"I say to myself, Ned wasn’t such a bad guy.
The Kelly family were Irish immigrants, imbued with a deep-seated hatred for the British ruling class and their hangers-on. Ned’s father, according to one account, was transported for killing his landlord, an offence with which many would have sympathised at that time.
They lived as poor peasants in the Victorian scrub, augmenting the meagre living they scratched from the soil with cattle-duffing and horse stealing.
Ned was very intelligent and, like many bushmen of his time, was highly contemptuous of the ruling class and its laws, recognising that they were there solely to enshrine and protect its wealth and power.
In the decades following the Eureka uprising (Ned was born in 1854), egalitarian ideas grew apace in Australia, especially in the bush. So did individual acts of rebellion.
Bushrangers proliferated, buoyed up by the support and admiration of friends and neighbours. The sympathy of poor rural communities for bandits who preyed on banks and the well-to-do was a common feature of Australia, the USA and Tsarist Russia.
Ned Kelly was no revolutionary, but he captured the spirit of rebellion among the poor and hard-done-by. Despite the government’s posting of a huge reward (by the standards of the time), he and his gang were able to remain hidden from the police while continuing to operate in relative security for almost two years.
In the end, Ned and his gang were betrayed by one Aaron Sherritt in return for 4,000 ($8,000). In the ensuing shootout, Ned was wounded and captured, the others killed (trapped in a house the police had set on fire, they are believed to have taken their own lives rather than surrender).
Ned Kelly was eventually hanged at Pentridge prison on November 11, 1880. He was buried in the prison graveyard.
Although the graveyard is listed with Heritage Victoria and recognised by the National Trust, the prison site as a whole has been flogged off to a private developer and is now — predictably — Pentridge Village.
This is in keeping with the ethics and interests of capitalism, of course, for it is without doubt a system that can see no point in preserving anything unless a way can be found to make a profit from it.
Pentridge would have made a splendid museum on bush-ranging or some related subject, but it would have needed to be a public, subsidised enterprise. Capitalist governments today do not believe in putting money into such "unprofitable" activities, so instead this historical site was sold for development.
The last I heard of the matter was in November, at which time the developers were proposing to "return the graveyard to its original state of a grassed area with rose bushes and no marked graves". In other words, they were proposing to destroy any trace of Ned Kelly’s grave.
Only under capitalism can a private owner have that kind of power over a historical site. There were protests of course and I hope they have had some impact over the intervening period.
If any reader has information on the current state of the Pentridge Prison graveyard and of Ned Kelly’s grave in particular, I would appreciate it if you could drop me a note (or an email: rgowland@cpa.org.au ).
One of those protesting was former prison chaplain Father Peter Norden, parish priest at St Ignatius in Richmond. Father Norden described Ned Kelly as "a national figure" and called for his grave to have "an appropriate tribute".
Have you noticed how the revelation that Scotland Yard had confirmed that Princess Diana’s driver on the night she died was a French secret agent has been allowed to just fade away? Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed were killed when her car crashed in the Pont d’Alma tunnel in central Paris in 1997.
Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of Harod’s and Dodi’s father, has always maintained that Diana and his son were murdered by British Intelligence. He says that MI6 agents visited the morgue on the night of the crash and interfered with the blood samples taken from his son.
The official story given out by the French police is that Diana’s driver, Henri Paul, crashed the car while speeding away from paparazzi while under the influence of drink and drugs.
However, according to Britain’s Sunday Times, requests by the official British inquiry into the crash (under former London Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens) for the French domestic intelligence service, the DST, to make available its "agent handling" files on Henri Paul have become bogged down in "incredible bureaucracy".
Some would say, how very convenient. The British investigators want to know "where he was and what he was doing" that evening. They also want to see the complete records of tests taken on Paul’s blood after he died.
After Paul’s death, French police discovered that he controlled secret accounts in some 14 banks containing more than 100,000 ($250,000).
The Sunday Times also reports that the British inquiry into Diana’s death "has been complicated by the apparent refusal of the French to allow [Scotland] Yard detectives to see several key witnesses to the accident".