Searching for Ned Kelly in a foreign country

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33653, 1 October 1974, Page 6

Searching for Ned Kelly in a foreign country

I By

JANET PARR)

SYDNEY. Ned Kelly's house is falling down. The gaol that held him is being rebuilt. A highwaycovers the place where he made his last stand. In fact, poor Ned is gone along with most of the things he touched and the places he knew — at least as he knew them. One thing remains and. surprisingly, remains much as it was when Ned knew it — the bank at Euroa in Victoria where the Kelly gang lifted £2OOO just 96 years

ago. And we learnt about . that in the way one usually learns about these things ■ nowadays. It too. it seems, !is threatened. There are ! plans to build a new office olock on the site. If that happens the last! ■ physical link with Ned Kelly will have been snapped, according to lan Jones who wrote the script for the Ned ; Kelly film which starred ■Mick Jagger. All that will be left would probably be the famous I armour, a few bits and i pieces.' some documents. But you cannot get at Ned; •through documents, says lan; Jones, who developed a tre-i 'mendous liking for Ned! :while working on his life. > The Euroa bank manager, it i seems, developed a tremendous liking for Ned personally, so much so that he. | became something of an! •embarrassment to the Crown (Prosecutor in the case’ iagainst Ned. Heritage Documents are just words.! j says Mr Jones, and Ned wasi |a tremendous person who i I cannot be pinned down that - ■ way. (I suppose it would be' fashionable today to say that Ned had charisma). But • when you can visit the places where he lived, fought, and died, where you' can make some sort of physI ical contact with him then I I Ned comes to life. We need to examine our! attitudes, . says Mr Jones.

along with the machinery i we have for preserving Things, whether what machinery we have is being used ... Mr Jones’s is the latest ' voice raised against the desi traction of what is usually j called “the national heritage.” And. though obliquely, yet i another voice crying for -some recognition that “the (national heritage” is a -pretty diverse thing, a thing I of bits and pieces, shreds :and patches and not always I tangible. The opening lines of “The ,‘Go-Between,” by L. P. Hart- ; ley, seem to have some (bearing — “The past is a •foreign country. They do things differently there.” Folk museums I suspect that I am the one who has got a bit 1 muddled up with the past after three weeks wandering (round the country towns of northern New South Wales. For on the surface at least [ the preservation business • seems to be doing very nicely if only in the endless succession of folk and pioneer museums springing up everywhere, helped, no doubt, by the fact that there are still a good many people around to whom the past was not a foreign country. The remarkable thing is; that there seems to be so i ■ much left of yesterday’s ' trivia —all those sulkies and ! hand-turned butter churns, cooking pots. medicine bottles, hand dressed dolls. One doll had a three-faced head, silk crinolines worn for a winter ball and handcrocheted gowns worn for a christening. Gold-sifting pans, picks, shepherds’ huts, harness, letters, books and old records are to be seen. And not just things alone, but old remembered ways of doing things. $lO town In a “mock up” of an old kitchen, mantelpiece and shelves have been edged with cutout newspaper "lace” and who remembers how to do that nowadays? That was at Gulgong, about 200 miles from Sydney, in an excellent and expanding pioneer museum in the town that has added to its early associ-

ations with Henry Lawson, the contemporary folk legend, that it is the town on the $lO bill—which it is. By and large it might seem that" Mr Jones does not really have all that much to worry about. Attitudes have changed and are changing. Most people have approved of the National Trust’s decision to classify two whole suburbs of Sydney—the old stone houses of Hunters Hill and the terrace houses of Paddington—as being unique environmental value. Even now a member of the Royal Ballet in London is raising a petition among fellow members of the company to try to save an old theatre in his home town of Glen Innes in northern. New South Wales. Ned, we hope, and all his works, good or ill, may yet find such a champion.