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Almost 128 years after he was hanged from a first-floor gibbet, the ghost of infamous bushranger Ned Kelly refuses to settle.
The Victorian Government confirmed yesterday that his bones may be among those of 32 victims of the former colony's gallows uncovered in a mass grave on the
site of Melbourne's former Pentridge Prison.
State Planning Minister Justin Madden said forensic tests might be able to identify Kelly's remains, and those of the other prisoners whose bones were exhumed from the city's original jail in 1929 and reburied at Pentridge.
Prisoners executed at the grim, bluestone Old Melbourne Jail were buried within its walls, rather than in cemeteries.
Kelly, the son of an Irish convict transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1843, is one of the most iconic and controversial figures of Australian history.
With a criminal record beginning with an arrest for assault on a Chinese pig farmer at the age of 14, Kelly was later jailed on other charges and eventually fled into the bush to escape further allegations of assault.
In the ensuing hunt, Kelly and the gang that had assembled around him killed three policemen, robbed two banks and were eventually cornered with 70 hostages at an inn at Glenrowan, north of Melbourne.
The following gunfight, in which Kelly was wounded and his companions killed, ensured a legendary status for the bushranger because of the hand-made, 44kg, suits of armour they used to protect themselves.
Kelly also has won widespread, enduring, sympathy for his claims to have been a victim of British oppression of the Irish, and persecution of Catholics.
His complaints were detailed in an 8300-word letter dictated in a hotel at Jerilderie, North Victoria. As he went to his execution, Kelly is reputed to have said: "Such is life."
But even in death there was to be little peace. It is believed that some of his bones, and possibly his skull, were stolen after his death.
"Identifying the remains of Ned Kelly may prove difficult as his were not handled with a great degree of care," Madden said. "It is also possible that his skull and body parts were stolen immediately after his execution."
But even with the possible discovery of Kelly's remains at Pentridge, the bushranger never fully left Old Melbourne Jail, where visitors can visit his cell and see the scaffold from, which he was hanged.
Among the macabre exhibits is Kelly's death mask. And until the early 1980s, a skull reputed to have been Kelly's rested in a glass case along with others of the 136 prisoners executed there. The skull was stolen, allegedly surfaced briefly in Western Australia, then disappeared again.
