Ned Kelly Lives On

Just last weekend three protestors dressed in Ned Kelly armour accompanied by another hundred protestors actually held up a train at the town of Glenrowan. The steam train was making its last trip on the wide gauge line before it was torn up. This was a protest against the Victorian Government for neglecting to include a platform at Glenrowan in the laying of dual standard gauge tracks right through to Melbourne from Sydney. The protest might have done enough to help the government to realise there is public interest in the place because of what happened there 128 years ago. It seems that our government is thinking only of improving its freight capacity and commerce, the sort of thinking that raised the ira of those on the fringe of society like the Kelly family of yesteryear.

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The changing of the gauge width has really messed up the Australian Railway Historical Society - Victorian Division.

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This non-profit organisation has collected a wide gauge rolling stock over the years and is having to make conversions (if they can) to these to be able to continue to run their rail excursions for the public. We recently went and saw the work they were doing at their centre in Seymour and were amazed at the effort so many volunteers were putting in for the cause.

The former Ann Jones Hotel at Glenrowan, the place of the Kelly Gang's last stand (June 1880), has just had a team of archaeologists comb through the site for signs of the gun fight and how life was like back then. All the Kelly 'exploits' have become genuine tourist destinations, hence the argument for a platform at Glenrowan.

We visited a friend's home on the same weekend and saw a school grade six project in construction. It was none other than on Ned Kelly. The project involved making acted out video footage at school, complete with the son dressed up as Ned Kelly with armour and beard. We were very impressed at the ingenuity in the effort. Another part of the project was a three dimensionally constructed scene of one of Ned Kelly's confrontations with the law. It has a free standing cardboard policeman on a horse and a cardboard black tracker is behind a tree. The trees are made of coloured plasticine and one of them is complete with a plasticine koala. The central plasticine fire looks so good. Ned Kelly looks fantastic as a plasticine figure in his armour.