Seventeen - The Tourists of Kelly Country

The road was an ashen scar cut straight as a spear throw across the flat and beaten landscape that stretched away on either side. Surrounding dry earth remained level, broken only by the occasional clump of yellow grass or black skeletal tree, as it stretched inexorably on toward the distant collision of land and sky. A solitary car stole along its length at a casual pace, swerving every now and then to avoid the largely toothless threat of divoted potholes. The vehicle was covered by a thin patina of dust and dirt, an ochre red adornment, the proudly worn tattoo of the road-tripping paddock basher. Sounds from the stereo pumped an aural latticework of electric guitar as Tim Freedman’s voice urged: “Kate Kelly, Kate Kelly… I’ll sing you to sleep...” As the last chords faded a hand reached out to the dash, giving the volume knob a swift turn to the left.

“I still don’t get it,” she shrugged from the passenger seat. “I mean, it’s interesting and all, but he was a criminal, right? They were all criminals – so why so much fuss?”

It was a question she’d repeated a number of times during their rambling peregrination, from the wide halls of the National Gallery where they’d looked at the coloured canvases of Sidney Nolan, his bushranger icon recognisable as an empty black letterbox, to the whispered aisles of the State Library, where the bush forge beaten and bullet cratered armour floated suspended in a case of glass. It was the very same library that held the Jerilderie letter, voice of a bushranger scribed by his best-friend Joe, scathing anger charged words discarding punctuation in place of passion. Yes, they were, murderers and criminals of their time, now lauded in the land’s most hallowed centres of art and knowledge. She still struggled with the why.

“Didn’t you have any famous freedom fighters you learnt about when you were growing up in India?” he asked, turning the wheel gently to navigate past a collapsed edge of asphalt. There were no other cars before or behind them as far as the eye could see.

“I don’t think you can really compare Ned Kelly to Mahatma Gandhi,” she laughed.

“No,” he agreed, laughing with her, “their philosophies aren’t quite in synch are they. What about the Bandit Queen though?”

“Phoolan Devi?” she asked. “Well, I mean, yes… she was a politician in the end… before she was murdered. So… yes, she was a bandit, but she was fighting against abuse and repression. And all of that made her a symbol of resistance to the poor and lower castes…”

“Well, that’s kind of like Ned Kelly. He was a bushranger, but whether you agree with it or not, he’s also seen now as something of a freedom fighter – fighting against the corrupt police and wealthy landowners and the injustices of his time...”

As he spoke he cast his mind back to the previous day when they’d sauntered through the Benalla Costume and Kelly Museum. Tucked into a corner across from the ticket desk, behind a witness stand that had once stood in the Benalla Court House, was a whitewashed wooden box, a room within the room, the transportable cell that had once housed Edward Kelly for a night, now the repository for a variety of memorabilia associated with him. Stepping inside a sensor light had clicked on, illuminating the interior with its glass cabinets, filled with bullet ventilated horse bridles, rusted colt revolvers and horseshoes from wounded mares. On one side, leaning against the wall, was the Benalla gaol house door that Joe Byrne’s dead body had been hung against, a grisly display for press photographers in the aftermath of the siege at Glenrowan.

However, it was another display case against the opposite wall that had drawn his eye, holding within it a crushed green swath of material, stained with blood. The sash. In his mind’s eye he saw it, young Dick Shelton floundering in the creek waters of Avenel, choking as he sank into the embrace of the covetous current. Then a rescuer, only ten years old, tearing back handfuls of water with each steadfast stroke as he pulled his way across the expanse to drag his friend back up from the depths. Together they lay on the bank afterwards, panting with exhaustion, coughing up great lungfuls of water. A life was saved and the hero was rewarded – Ned Kelly presented with his hero sash in thanks for his selfless courage. Then, just 15 years later, inside the Glenrowan Inn, all bullet holes and blinding flame, he was donning a skin of iron, bush forged from stolen ploughshares. Unseen, hid beneath the layers, once more he wore his precious hero sash. He had just tried to derail a train in a plot to murder a carriage-load of police troopers. He was about to exit into a hail of bullets in the last stand of the Kelly Gang. Did he think of himself as a hero or villain? Perhaps it was nothing so binary, but something much more subtle. Then again, perhaps he didn’t even know himself.

There it sat, crushed green beneath the glass of the display case. He saw his own reflection superimposed over it as he looked on with awe and reverence. He stood still for so long that the sensor light forgot he was there and clicked off, sending the room into sudden darkness. Even then he did not move, choosing instead to remain a few moments more as a motionless and silent sentinel over history’s bric-a-brac, feeling the press of ghosts all around him within the claustrophobic black of the wooden cell.

“I think it’s the symbol,” he said, “more than anything else. The helmet makes him an icon and that is something that can be reinterpreted over time. In some films he’s a villain, in some a tragic hero. Peter Carey wrote a whole book called the True History of the Kelly Gang, despite the fact that everything he wrote in it was fiction. But what is truth? What is fiction? Doesn’t fiction hold its own truth in the end? A true story is something that speaks to us, something that means something, even after years have passed. Even if it never happened.”

“It sounds to me like a long bow you’re drawing,” she shrugged, opening her window a crack to let in the sound of whistling air and the faint whiff of heat from the world outside.

“Hey,” he said, motioning with one hand toward the car’s navigation screen. It was proudly waving a flag on its map, patriotically showing their destination just as the red arrow that denoted their vehicle finally struck its bullseye. “This is it – we’re here.”

As he pulled in they both looked across the empty cemetery that sat directly at the edge of the road. Headstones jutted from the earth like the neighbourless lower-jaw teeth of an aging man. Trees fringed the distant edges of the otherwise flat plain containing the small bush graveyard. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere, within or without.

“You can do this one on your own,” she said, gently patting him on the arm with one hand as she pulled out her phone with the other. “I want to check my emails.” He nodded once, treated her to a knowing smile and exited the vehicle.

Once he was past the waist high metal fence and within the confines of the burial ground he saw it straight away, rough edged marble hewn marker proclaiming: “Here within this cemetery in unmarked graves lie Edward Kelly, mother Ellen, sisters and brothers Margaret, Grace, James, Daniel and Anne buried nearby. Along with their extended family and friends may they rest in peace.” He had read that in addition to Ned’s burial place remaining unmarked, his coffin had also been encased in concrete, a strong deterrent to vandals and grave robbers.

Near to the entrance was a small gazebo, white lattice octagonal walls about a concrete slab, within which was a small wooden table, flaked white paint betraying the timber bones beneath. Atop the table was a visitor’s book and pen, the last entry from some months past reading: “Here’s to you Ned.” The next earliest one was weeks before that and scribed: “Long live the Kelly Gang!” He couldn’t think of anything to write, so he left the book as it was and began his meander amongst the graves. Around him he read the names of local pioneers and settlers scattered between more recent residents of the Greta district. In loving memory of Alexander McKenzie… here lie the infant sons of Fred and Greta French… beloved wife Myrtle May… sacred to the memory of Michael Kearney… erected by Margaret Franklin in the memory of James Bevan… our dear father… our dear mother… home in heaven… sleep on beloved, sleep and take thy rest… after life’s fitful fever… sweet rest at last…

As he wandered on, he saw up ahead an open sweep of turf, unremarkable in any way, yet somehow compelling to his eye. As he stared a sudden parting in the clouds above caused a finger of light to point downward with unerring accuracy, illuminating the very patch of ground he had been staring at. Silent and slow now, as if in a trance, he took one step after another, moving on towards the square of light. He stood upon the edge of it, looking down at the sparse brown grass, occasional weeds, dead leaves and yellowing sunburnt soil. Taking a deep breath, he stepped reverently across the threshold and into the light.

Upon taking that stride there came the instantaneous sound above him of a shrieking bird. He looked up and saw, hovering unmoving just a few metres above his head, the black and white silhouette of a magpie, wings outstretched as it swam upon an invisible current of air. It seemed to remain like that for a long time, the bush sentinel, motionless but for the slightest ruffling of its feathers. Then, suddenly, it turned its gaze upon the man below, eyes suddenly filled with malicious intent, the gaze of a hunter that had found its prey. It screeched once again and dropped like a stone, all beak and claws, malevolence targeted directly at his shocked expression. The man threw his hands upward in an instinctive protective gesture, eyes blinking once in the pressure of the moment. The instant that his eyes reopened however, the bird was gone, along with the patch of sunlight, as if they had never been. He was alone again, in the graveyard, silent in shock and confusion, turning this way and that as if expecting the bird to reappear, but of it there was not the least sign.

He almost jumped when the sound of a car horn startled the mute taciturnity of the field of remembrance. Simultaneous to that a chiming chord in his pocket alerted him to a text message landing on his phone. “Come on,” it said, “I’m STARVING! Let’s go find something for lunch.” He gave a responding wave across to the vehicle and heard the horn bip a second time by way of reply.

“Here’s to you Ned,” he muttered, to no-one in particular. “Long live the Kelly Gang.”

Soon he was back in the car, flashing indicator sending its message to no one at all, before the vehicle pulled out onto the empty road once again, moving away from the burial ground and on across the horizontal land. Moving onward through that locale of legends… skimming like a stone across a sea of bushrangers and stories… swimming across a plane of memories and ghosts.