The Vault is the only credible Kelly Museum, (and another one is not needed.)

The crumbling tourist attraction at Glenrowan

I had been giving Joanne Griffiths the benefit of the doubt because when she launched the Ned Kelly Center project in late 2015 she wrote “It doesn’t matter what you believe of Ned Kelly but it is important to understand that pivotal time in our history.” This is what all Kelly Facebook pages and websites say when they first get started, that all opinions are welcome but usually quite quickly it becomes apparent that all they really want to do is talk about Ned Kelly the hero.If you want to discuss anything else they expel you, which is why until a few days ago her Facebook page was the only place that hadn’t banned me. However, almost nothing was happening there until recently, so my comments there were few and far between. Even so, in spite of her statement that ‘it doesn’t matter what you believe of Ned Kelly’ many of my comments were deleted, not because they were offensive or rude but because they were perceived as “anti-kelly”. But at least until the other day I hadn’t been banned.

A few days ago on the NKCenter FB page someone asked if Buffalo Bill Cody was in some way related to Mary Cody who was Red Kellys mother. This question has been answered time and time again but still it gets asked – the answer is no they are not related. BBCs forbears originated from Guernsey, an island in the English channel quite close to France, and changed their name to Cody when they arrived in north America in the 17^th century.  I posted this fact to her site, and was thanked by the person who asked the question. A little later I responded to a claim on the same thread that the term ‘hostage’ should not be used in reference to the people Ned Kelly imprisoned.  I merely pointed out that numerous prominent Kelly authors used the term – people such as Ian Jones, Brad Webb, Paul Terry and Grant-Lee Kieza - but  the Kelly troll protested yet again to Joanne who finally gave him what he wanted, caved in to his bullying and deleted all my contributions to that site and I was blocked!

So her true colours were exposed at last! Leigh Olver and his crew will no doubt be saying  “What took you so long?”

Here is a comment I made on this Blog in 2015 when she first announced the project:

“One has to ask the question of the Kelly descendants : What the hell is wrong with you all that in 135 years you never managed to agree amongst yourselves on doing something together for your famous relative ? I’ll say one thing for that woman though : at least she had the courage of her convictions and actually tried to make something happen! Sadly for her, all she has achieved is to expose the internal divisions within Kelly ranks, a fact which will destroy any public support for her project which is virtually stillborn. 

The other even bigger problem she was facing was the status of the Kelly Legend itself, which has taken some massive hits in recent years thanks to Ian MacFarlane, Morrissey and now Dawson. The reality is that the truth about Ned Kelly and the Outbreak is
finally being revealed and there is declining interest in the fairy stories spun about him, and growing understanding that he was not Australias Robin Hood but a notorious liar and a violent killer and psychopath camouflaged by flamboyant language, clever use of Public relations, gimmicky armour and acts of bravado. The heyday of the Jones-Kelly mythology has passed. The Kelly people missed their chance to capitalise on it, and they would be better to get used to it, and give their support to the Kelly Vault.”

All that’s happened since then is that the status of Kelly mythology has declined even further, and the Kelly factional divisions have become deeper. Does anyone remember she announced there was going to be a website about her project? Didn’t happen. Does anyone remember that Joanne launched a crowdfunding venture to raise $2 MILLION dollars? She said at the time it was to try to buy the Beechworth Gaol, because she said Beechworth would be the perfect place for her Kelly Center. She raised an abysmal $1100 from 3 donors– a disastrous flop even worse than the recent Kelly movie Kickstarter campaign failure. So that didn’t happen either.

So now we read on the Ned Kelly CENTRAL FB page, that having failed to gain any public support for her schemes in Beechworth she is now hoping to get public money - not 2 million but 4 million -  to fund a different and even more grandiose Project in Glenrowan. She wants  to gain control over several “Kelly” sites, such as the site of the siege and some of the local Kelly tourist ventures which are currently on a death watch.  Leigh Olver, who I suspect is the operator behind Ned Kelly Central, the Facebook page set up in opposition to Joannes Ned Kelly Center has posted a fascinating list of the attempts made over 17 years to establish a Kelly Interpretive Center in Glenrowan. The really horrible fact he reminds us of is that an enormous amount of money has been wasted by local authorities on studies and plans looking at ways to revitalise the area using Kelly history and a Kelly ‘interpretive centre as a focus and draw-card, but so far not a single step toward such a development has taken place.

Recently Joanne Griffiths made her pitch to Wangaratta Council for support for her ideas. They gave her ‘in principle’ support but deferred a final decision until they receive yet another horrendously expensive ($150,000) report from a Consultancy which is going to ‘re-imagine’ the Kelly story by “exploring and assessing the current tourism experience and (to) develop recommendations and concepts to revitalise the approach to a major national story”

This is what I think should happen. Someone needs to point out to Wangaratta Council that the age of Kelly mythology has ended and the public are no longer interested in the fairy tales of Ned Kelly. The demise of Kelly internet sites, the collapse of Glenrowan into ghost town status with Kelly attractions falling into disrepair and unable to be sold as going concerns, the abject failures of Joannes crowdfunding campaign and the Kelly movie Kickstarter campaigns – all these realities show that Kelly is  o longer the attraction he once was.  People mostly now see him as a criminal, an unattractive but still fascinating figure in the way major crime figures always have been. Someone should also remind Council that Glenrowan was intended to be the site of a massive police slaughter, an atrocity that was avoided because of the bravery of Thomas Curnow, the barely acknowledged true hero of Glenrowan.  Do they want to create a memorial to a triple police murderer? And do they realise there are massive and bitter divisions within the Kelly mob, and Joannes schemes are not supported by the majority of them? Is the Council going to take sides in the Kelly wars?

There is however one bright spot in Kelly country  that seems to be thriving : Beechworths Ned Kelly Vault. They actively promote themselves as a museum and not a shrine to Ned Kelly, and according to the Vault, they have huge numbers of visitors. However, the Old Treasury building that houses this collection is bursting at the seams – the vault needs bigger premises, and if the Council wants to spend money on Kelly history rather than Kelly idolatry and the personal dreams of one faction of the divided Kelly descendants then they ought to help the Vault.

I’ve visited the Vault twice and though I’ve been critical of certain relatively minor aspects of the place, its still a fascinating place to visit and its by far the best thing going for Kelly history in the North East.

Joanne should be dumped and the Council should turn its attention to helping the Vault.

Kelly Myth-making takes a huge hit.

To Steve Jager, Aidan Phelan and Matthew Holmes, Australia has spoken : there are 24,243,756 people who didn’t support your plan to make another movie about the psychopath criminal bully, thief, liar, hostage taker, triple police murderer and failed wannabe mass murderer, Ned Kelly and only 401 who did. There IS a message in those numbers. Please stay true to your word : “If we don't reach our target of AUD$2,500,000 by June 30th, the film will not go ahead.” 

How should "Glenrowan" be remembered?

The 2008 Excavation at the site of the Ann Jones Inn at Glenrowan. No cellar was found. The lines of bricks are nothing to do with Ann Jones Inn but are from 20th century buildings long demolished. 

The site of Ned Kellys last stand, the place where the Ann Jones Inn once stood is for sale. It’s a small block of privately owned vacant land on Siege Street in Glenrowan and in various places on the internet and in the press people are discussing what should be done with it. Some believe it should be left as it is, out of respect for the lives that were lost there. Others think a replica of the Ann Jones Inn  should be built and the site turned into a tourist destination. The self-confessed Kelly tragic and Wangaratta lawyer who owns the Kelly-series Nolan painting on display at the Kelly Vault in Beechworth told the Border Mail that he would like to expose the remains of the Inns foundations and erect a building with a glass floor over the top of them :

“You have to expose the foundation made of brick, the burnt stumps that are left and direct people to where the bodies are found with Father Gibney coming in to give the last rites for the lads,” Mr Suta said

“You would uncover it, build a structure, a glass floor, so you could walk over it and place information boards around it to explain the history.

“When you go overseas to Athens and Rome, those places, it’s like that, they have archaeological digs exposed and you walk over them.”

He doesn’t seem to realise that Adam Fords archaeological investigation of the site in 2008 found that almost nothing is left of the Ann Jones Inn other than a few post holes. The brick foundations Suta mentions (seen in the photo above) are nothing to do with the Kelly story - they are the foundations of a ‘wine shanty’ built in 1910 that later became a Café then a Hair Salon then two flats that were demolished in 1976. Hardly “Athens and Rome”! 

The problem with “Kelly tragics” in general, when it comes to places like this in the North east of Victoria, is that they want to turn them into shrines and memorials to a wildly polarising and completely unhistorical view of Ned Kelly. When they think of Glenrowan they think of Ned Kellys brave ‘last stand’, they see what happened there as a sort of tragic destruction of the dreams of a revolutionary hero, brought down by the great corrupt juggernaut of police and politicians who conspired against a tiny band of freedom fighters. They blame the Police for the loss of life there, they think the people held hostage in the Inn by Ned Kelly had a terrific time until the Police arrived, they think there was a ‘sympathiser army’ waiting nearby to join the revolution, they venerate the  famous symbols of the siege, suits of home-made armour that the gang wore when they confronted the Police on the veranda of the Inn and they think if Ned Kellys plan had succeeded it could have resulted in some sort of positive political and social change. They think it should be revered like the site of the Eureka rebellion is, but Eureka and Glenrowan have absolutely nothing in common, except in the minds of Kelly fanatics who don’t understand history and don’t want to face the facts about Glenrowan.

Not that long ago, those views of the Kelly outbreak were seen as reasonable, even if many didn’t agree with them. The narrative put out by the Kelly writers like Brown, Jones Moloney and McQuilton at the very least suggested such an interpretation of Kelly history had merits, and it became commonplace for the Kelly story to be presented as a kind of almost unfathomable conundrum: ‘Ned Kelly –  Hero or Villain?’ was the often posed challenge. I am guessing that in that atmosphere of ambiguity the siege site was listed by Heritage Victoria.

In the light of more recent research and thinking into the Kelly story, those romantic notions of a heroic Ned Kelly have been more or less completely discarded, and replaced by the historically verifiable view that Ned Kelly was primarily a psychopathic criminal gang leader. Whereas no evidence has emerged of his involvement in any sort of political movement or to support the notion that he was a kind of Australian Robin Hood, much has emerged to show he was a charismatic liar, a forger, a bully, a thief and of course a multiple Police murderer, whose own writings exposed his obsessional hatred of authority in general and the Police in particular. Glenrowan, rather than some sort of Greek tragedy, on examination is revealed as an abysmally planned and completely bungled plot to carry out terrorist mass murder on a scale similar to the killings that took place at Port Arthur, a horrifying massacre that disgusts everyone. It is absolutely certain that had Ned Kelly achieved what he wanted to at Glenrowan, his memory would be reviled in the same way as the Port Arthur killer Martin Bryants is, and listed alongside Craig Minogue, Carl Williams and Julian Knght, the Hoddle Street mass killer.  The conundrum is not really whether or not Kelly was a hero or villain but why there are still a few hundred people in Australia who noisily and ignorantly promote the memory of a man for whom murdering three police wasn’t enough. Ned Kelly picked Glenrowan  to be the place where he would murder dozens more, and for some unfathomable reason modern Kelly sympathisers and descendants want this to be remembered.

The extent of Ned Kellys blundering, and the horror of what he planned for Glenrowan needs to be exposed.

Firstly, the day before the planned massacre of police, they murdered Aaron Sherrit in cold blood. They expected that once he had been murdered in the Woolshed Valley Police would race up on a train from Melbourne, speed through Glenrowan and then crash over an embankment where the Gang had ripped up the track. Many police would die, and any survivors would be killed by the gang wearing armour they had fashioned over the preceding months - an act of monstrous brutality and violence equal in its time to any act of jihadist terrorism today. They murdered Aaron in the mistaken belief that this friend and supporter of the gang had betrayed them but this idea we now know was a figment of the gangs collective paranoia – no evidence has ever emerged that Aaron ever betrayed the Gang – in fact the consensus nowadays is that he didn’t and wasn’t ever going to. So, Mistake Number 1 : the ‘champion of the poor’ killed an innocent man.

The plan relied on the Police quickly hearing about this murder, but the train didn’t reach Glenrowan until much later than the Gang had planned, and as a result it all fell apart. But why was it so late? The answer is mistake number 2 : Joe and Dan, the murderers, hung around Aarons hut for several hours daring the Police inside to come out, and then after those two left, sympathisers continued harassing and shouting at them until dawn, which was when it was finally safe for them to emerge and sound the alarm. 

At Glenrowan, in the dark Ned Kelly and Steve Hart attempted to stealthily rip up the rail tracks : Mistake number 3 – they hadn’t bought the right tools. Mistake 4 was that they then destroyed their plan to do this all secretly, by waking up railway workers sleeping in tents nearby to do it for them. Mistake 5 was that these guys didn’t know how to do it either so they woke the stationmaster and forced him at gunpoint to get two platelayers to get the job done. Now the only way to stop news getting out of what the gang was planning was to take everyone hostage, so they bailed them all up as the numbers grew in Ann Jones Inn.  The whole plan was spiralling into chaos, and the leader hailed since by some as a potential General had no idea what to do. There were a few ‘sympathisers’ posing as hostages but most were innocent passers-by, including women and children whom later the gang used as human shields. Letting Curnow go was obviously a mistake (#6) , as was the decision to engage in a battle with the Police when the Inn was surrounded and the Gang knew their plan had failed. (#7) And of course the Kelly Gang armour was a mistake (#8) as well – it was incredibly heavy and cumbersome, the wearer had little mobility and a greatly reduced field of vision, and as the Police eventually noticed, it didn’t protect the legs.

Glenrowan wasn’t a heroic last stand but, from the Kelly gangs perspective it was an absolute debacle that was entirely of Ned Kellys making. The gang had been surviving in the bush for many months and could have devised any number of escape plans but even Kelly sympathiser Ian Jones said the one Ned chose was “madness’. It was triggered by the murder of an innocent friend and resulted in the death of Neds own brother and two other gang members, the death of two or perhaps three innocent hostages, and the capture of its leader. The plan to kill police and perhaps to somehow free Ned Kellys mother ended with no police killed, Ellen Kelly still in Gaol and her son joining her, soon to be on death row, and in a matter of weeks hanged. Complete and utter humiliation.

There were also two other innocent lives lost at Glenrowan – Johnny Jones and  Martin Cherry, killed in the mayhem by Police bullets. Some criticisms of police behaviour at Glenrowan, as at the Lindt Café siege are justified – mistakes were made in both sieges  but everyone but a few extreme Kelly fanatics accepts that responsibility for those deaths lies with the individual who deliberately placed them in harms way : Ned Kelly in 1880, Man Haron Monis in 2014.

The land for sale in Glenrowan marks the place where the murderous Kelly gang was finally brought to its knees in a bloody showdown. It’s the site from which the true hero of Glenrowan, brave Thomas Curnow escaped, stopped the train and saved many innocent lives. In those respects therefore it is a place that carries a modicum of historical significance but its not a place that should be remembered for a heroic ‘last stand’ so much as the place where the Kelly Gang created a calamitous self-inflicted finale, and the Police bought the Kelly outbreak to an end.  It’s a place of death and terror and shame where the only hero was Thomas Curnow. Why on earth would anyone who knew what really happened there ever want to remember it?

A former Wangaratta Mayor and Kelly descendant Anthony Griffiths  said “from a community perspective and certainly from a family perspective it needs to be treated with the respect it deserves” – which raises the question, what IS the respect that it deserves?  No doubt as a Kelly descendant he thinks it should be respected as the site of a brave ‘last stand’, but that would be a deceit. He has suggested Government should take control of the land, and John Suta has said he would be seeking Government funding if his proposal was accepted. If John Suta becomes the new owner and he wants to create a memorial there, rebuild the Inn, invite tourists in for drinks, and pedal the unhistorical rubbish that he clings to against all the evidence about Ned Kelly, it’s a free world and he is entitled to do it, if he is prepared to fund it. However, he and perhaps more importantly the Council when he asks them for money - should take note of how little interest there has been in the Kelly movie – less than 400 people in the whole of Australia- he should take note of how Glenrowan has become a ghost-town since the highway bypassed it, and ask himself why the existing ‘attractions’ are mostly failing and up for sale. The reality is that almost nobody believes the Kelly myths anymore, and local Councils and Government bodies should not be supporting them.

In the end, if its privately owned land, the owner should be able to do whatever he wants to with it. I am not familiar with how Heritage Listings work but I imagine if something can be placed on the register it could also be removed from it…and that’s what I think should probably happen - this is a not a site where anything other than a crime happened, and a far worse one was avoided. 

A simple plaque and the  famous Ann Jones Inn sign  should be enough to mark this infamous place, and if any heroes are mentioned, it should only be Thomas Curnow. There are no memorials to murderers Man Haron Monis, Julian Knight, Craig Minogue or Carl Williams and there shouldn’t be any to Ned Kelly either.