Historical highwaymen

Updated October 19, 2010 12:27:55

At Glenrowan, the proprietor of 'Ned Kelly's Last Stand' was spruiking his show, an animatronic representation of the famous bushranger's career.

'It's great for autistic kids,' he whispered confidentially.'They love it. There's always something happening, you see.'

A strange recommendation, perhaps, but one soon learned what he meant. The performance that ensued commenced with a strange invocation of Halloween, complete with dancing spiders and jerkily animated rats, before Kelly himself manifested in the bar of the Glenrowan Hotel, an establishment that, it transpired, was, during the famous siege, populated by stuffed animals and implausibly bearded manikins (one of whom was urinating noisily into a bucket while another performed acrobatics from a roof beam) with gunshots, explosions, barking dogs and ye olde fiddley-dee music sounding more or less entirely at random.

This remarkable presentation reached its crescendo with Kelly's execution. His body came crashing down through the hangman's drop in the ceiling, dangling over a coffin that, confusingly, also somehow contained Ned's corpse. A rousing folk ballad played and the second Kelly lurched up in his casket to declare himself immortal - and then a screen opened to display - of course! -- a third Kelly, this time rendered as a severed head upon a table.

'Arr,' Kelly number three explained, in bizarrely piratical fashion, 'they cut off me head!'

Not surprisingly, the Ned Kelly animatronic show transported the American travel writer Bill Bryson into a state something like awe. In his book In a Sunburned Country, Bryson writes: 'I can honestly say that I have never seen anything so wonderfully, so delightfully, so monumentally bad as Ned Kelly's Last Stand. It was so bad it was worth every penny we paid. Actually, it was so bad it was worth more than we paid.'

Which may well be true. Yet, even if, like Bryson, you're an aficionado of kitsch, it's hard not to leave 'The Last Stand' wondering about Australian history and its representations.

The Melbourne to Sydney highway once passed directly through Glenrowan. Not anymore - and nor is there a rail service. The town thus depends, perhaps more than ever before, on its connection to the past. Quite understandably, every shop proclaims its affiliation to Kelly and his associates.

Yet it's a strange kind of devotion, one that's done little to preserve the town's actual history. On the site of the famous Glenrowan siege, there's a trail on which you can trace the incidents. The statues representing the main players are not quite as hallucinogenic as the animatronic display (it's hard to imagine what could be) but they're still hideously tacky. Ned sits upon the roof of a reconstructed hotel like a demented gargoyle; the police are represented by amateurish statues that render the blacktrackers as offensively Samboish caricatures.

The whole area reeks of neglect: a tourist trap fallen on hard times.

You see the same phenomenon throughout north eastern Victoria. In Beveridge, for instance, you can visit the hut in which Ned was (most probably) born. Or, rather, you can't visit it, since it's encased in wire - and within that fencing, it's quietly falling apart. Ned completed his basic schooling at the nearby Catholic church: also closed, also dilapidated. In Greta, Ellen Kelly's cottage has collapsed into a pile of stones, fenced off and abandoned. And so on and so, depressingly, forth.

Of course, this cavalier indifference to history is neither particularly new nor unique to rural Australia. In A City Lost and Found, Robyn Annear presents a social history of Melbourne exclusively through the architectural marvels that were systematically and consciously destroyed by Whelan the Wrecker.

Yet in northern Victoria the past might be ignored but it's not forgotten - at least, not in any simple way.

After all, the tourist maps all tell you that you're entering 'Kelly Country': in most towns, you dine at Ned's Hamburger Grill (or some variant thereof) and drink at bars adorned with representations of that iron armour. In Beechworth, the tennis court even advertises with a rather charming picture of a helmeted Ned smacking a volley across the net.

Yes, there's history aplenty - but a strangely postmodern form, with the blank visage of the Kelly helmet divorced from any context, any meaning. Ned's thus everywhere and nowhere: universally recognisable and infinitely plastic, a bushrangering equivalent of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe or Campbell's soup can.

That's why the genuine Kelly sites slowly disintegrate - not because the man's forgotten but because he's remembered in a way no longer tethered to the external world, with the real Beveridge house signifying no more and no less than the giant Kelly statue in Glenrowan. Hence the psychedelic animatronics. Why not add some glowing pumpkins to the narrative? Why not a chicken covered in cobwebs? Why not anything at all?

During the so-called History Wars, conservatives called for a return to straightforward facts and figures as an antidote to the theorising of university know-it-alls. But what's happened to Ned Kelly in rural Australia illustrates how old fashioned historical empiricism actually walks hand-in-hand with the crassest postmodernism.

Put simply, without a unifying narrative, names and dates become almost meaningless, a random jumble of disconnected facts adding up to nothing in particular.

The Kelly story was revived and promulgated in the post-war period by a generation of historians inspired by Manning Clark's Left nationalist perspective. John Malony, for instance, explained his classic I am Ned Kelly in response to the decision by Victorian anniversaries not to commemorate the centenary of Kelly's execution in 1980. 'To the members of that committee,' he explained,'Ned was unworthy of any recognition, but to me any attempt to eliminate his memory was both absurd and futile.'

The recognition and preservation of the past depended upon a strong and convincing narrative, with Kelly embodying the downtrodden Irish, oppressed by the Melbourne establishment. Since then, subsequent researchers have complicated the story, in all kinds of interesting ways. You can argue about Joe Byrne's relationship with the Chinese community, from whom he supposedly cultivated a fluency in Mandarin, an opium habit and the basic design for the iconic armour (modeled, it's said, after an exhibit of Chinese weaponry held in Beechworth) or you can speculate about what Ned's devotion to his mother and sister says about the influence of women in frontier society.

What matters, however, is that there's some connection made between the past and the present, some reason to regard history as of ongoing significance. Without that, the bare details of the past become, as the proprietor at Glenrowan unwittingly suggested, meaningless - almost autistically removed from any context.

In some respects, you can draw a parallel with the Anzac revival. The Dardanelles landing, like the story of the Kelly gang, has become ubiquitous, a tale we can all now recite by rote. Yet the more Anzac gets told, the less it meaning it communicates. Today, the events of 1915 can be invoked in almost any patriotic context: a kind of free-floating signifier of national virtue. The quintessential Anzac Day interview involves, after all, an earnest schoolchild explaining how the diggers defended our freedom, almost as if it were the Turks who were seeking to invade Australia.

Nonetheless, the artefacts of Gallipoli aren't suffering from the same neglect as those connected to the Kelly story. Why not? Perhaps it's because a post-modern version of Anzac actually serves a conservative agenda quite splendidly. It is, after all, much easier to venerate an ever-shifting fairy tale version of 1915 than to think too much about the historical parallels of an ill-thought invasion of a Muslim country carried out on behalf of a powerful ally.

By contrast, the historians of the Kelly Outbreak tended to be aligned with the Left. As such, the story's become something of a casualty of the History Wars. Without a convincing narrative of progress, we're left with Ned as a helmeted Paris Hilton - famous simply for being famous. Kelly Country has accordingly become a kind of rural Disneyland in decline, a depressing mixture of hucksterism and indifference.

Yet it's hard to visit the area and not feel that, in some ways, Ned's more relevant than ever before. The decline of the Kelly clan into poverty and crime began when Red Kelly's hopes for his property were dashed when the Sydney to Melbourne road bypassed Beveridge. Today, with so many towns in the area struggling for survival, a tale of rural poverty and forbearance is not without contemporary resonance. Saving the relics from the Kelly outbreak might, in that sense, spur interest not just in the region's past but also, perhaps, in its future.


Topics: community-and-society, education, person, rural

First posted March 19, 2010 13:00:00