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June 20, 2010

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


A  skull that could belong to notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly

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.


April 19, 2010

Very Rare Kelly Gang Postcard on eBay

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 !!!

April 18, 2010

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

Click on thumbnail to view image
'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)



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



Painting of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly sells for $4.9 million


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

Herald Sun

Ned Kelly shootout
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.