Such is life: reflections on the death of Ned Kelly

Kelly’s last request in the letter he wrote to the Prison Governor asked: "if you would grant permission for my friends to have my body that they might bury it in consecrated ground."

Kelly biographer, Ian Jones, reported that: "the headless, mutilated corpse was put in a rough, red gum coffin, covered with quicklime and buried in the gaol yard the following day, without any marking on the wall beside it". He noted that one newspaper gloated: "The body of the last Victorian bushranger was laid to rest in un-consecrated ground".

Take a visit to the tourist town of Mansfield, and as you enter the township there is a magnificent monument in the central roundabout commemorating the deaths of Sergeant Kennedy and Constables Lonigan and Scanlon, killed by the Kelly Gang. Down the street in the Mansfield cemetery, the Victorian Government provided funds for substantial tombstones to be erected in their memory.

In contrast there is no grave site for Ned Kelly, neither at the Old Melbourne Gaol where he was buried for 50 years, nor at the former Pentridge Prison site where he remained for a further 80 years until his remains were exhumed last year.

Last month, the Victorian Attorney General, Rob Hulls, directed the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and the State Coroner to assist in the identification of Ned Kelly’s remains, which were exhumed in 2008 from the former Pentridge Prison site. He set a 12 month deadline for the examinations to be concluded and noted that the identification of Kelly’s remains were "a matter of historical significance".

Ned Kelly’s remains were originally at the Old Melbourne Gaol but were disturbed during some renovations and construction work for the Melbourne Working Men’s College (now RMIT University) in 1929. The Herald Newspaper reported on 12th April of that year that "After being undisturbed beneath the stone-flagged yard of the Melbourne Gaol for nearly half a century, the skeleton of Ned Kelly was unearthed about noon today".

The day after Pentridge Prison closed in May 1997, the Victorian Government announced through the front page headlines of the Herald Sun on 2nd May that a monument would be erected in the former prison grounds to acknowledge 149 individuals executed in Victoria. Those buried at Coburg included not only Ned Kelly, but also Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in 1967, and Colin Ross, wrongfully convicted of murder in 1922 and finally pardoned by the Victorian Government in May 2008.

Some in our community would suggest that Kelly should have no monument recognising his burial place, keeping the tradition that convicted criminals executed by the State should be buried in unmarked graves.

This practice in Victoria commenced after the 1853 execution of bushranger, George Melville, whose wife was the proprietor of an oyster shop in Collins Street. Having obtained her late husband’s body, she proudly displayed it in a semi-frozen state and surrounded it with flowers in the window of her shop. This display led to the 1855 Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals, specifying that the remains in future were to be buried within the gaol where the execution took place.

The failure to recognise Ned Kelly’s gravesite and that of other prisoners executed by the Crown simply indicate the conflicts that we continue to experience in our community in addressing the complex issues of crime and punishment.

What lessons can we learn from history and from our futile attempts to control deviant or unlawful behaviour?

Even in a country with a rapidly expanding prison population over the last twenty years, as a nation we continue to place impossible burdens on the instrumentalities of the criminal justice system.