Ned Kelly At Pentridge Prison
Ned Kelly is one of Australia’s most well-known historical figures and last bushrangers. An often-forgotten part of his story is the many years Ned spent within the grounds of Pentridge Prison, both in life and in death.
Ned was only briefly imprisoned at Pentridge in 1873 for the simple crime of stealing a horse (Jones, 1995). It is not clear whether Ned knew that the horse was stolen, having borrowed it from a family friend, but nonetheless was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to three years of hard labour (Jones, 1995). Ned started his sentence at Beechworth Gaol, until February 1873, when he was transferred to Pentridge with half the sentence left to serve (Jones, 1995).
On arrival, Ned was taken to a building now referred to as B Division for a brief six-week stint in the prison’s introductory isolation period. After this gruelling six weeks, Ned would have been moved to C Division, where he would serve the hard labour assigned to his sentence. He may have worked out down the Merri Creek quarries mining for bluestone, or in the stone yards breaking down this bluestone into the refined blocks that can still be seen around Pentridge today. This was all part of the Pentonville prison system which Pentridge operated under in this period, emphasising isolation and hard labour in the rehabilitation process.
Ned must have been skilled at stone masonry, as after only three months in C Division, he was transferred to the Sacramento, an old naval ship turned into a floating prison usually anchored in Williamstown, where he would have been given the task of building sea walls and artillery batteries (Jones, 1995). Ned returned to Pentridge after another three months, where in February 1874 he was let go on early release, having ultimately served two and a half years of his three year sentence (Jones, 1995).
Considering his time at Pentridge, Ned wrote “I would rather face the gallows, than go to gaol again.”
(Fitzsimons, 2015, p. 88).
Considering his time at Pentridge, Ned wrote “I would rather face the gallows, than go to gaol again” (Fitzsimons, 2015, p. 88). Unfortunately for him, facing the gallows did not stop him from coming back to Pentridge. In June 1880, Ned was captured by police in the famous shootout at Glenrowan and taken to the Melbourne Gaol, and after three months of recovery from his 28 gunshot wounds, he was executed on the 11th of November 1880 (Jones, 1995).
Ned was buried within the Gaol, as the law required executed individuals to be buried within prison grounds at that time. This could not last forever, however. In 1929, five years after the Melbourne Gaol closed, the site was redeveloped and the burials were to be exhumed (Fitzsimons, 2015). This did not go quite to plan, as a local newspaper wrote that as soon as the burials were discovered, “a crowd of young boys who had been standing round expectantly rushed forward and seized the bones”, leaving many of the burials disturbed by looters (Smith, 2012, p. 45).
Despite the chaos, the 47 individuals exhumed from the gaol were relocated to Pentridge, where Ned would remain for another 80 years (Smith, 2012). It was not until 2006, when it was Pentridge’s turn to be redeveloped, that archaeologists were given the task of relocating these graves (Smith, 2012). This was not an easy job, as prisoners were never given a proper burial with grave markers, and the last record of the grave sites was from 1955 (Smith, 2012). It took three years for archaeologists to identify the mass grave which allegedly contained Ned, but identifying his remains was still an issue. DNA analysis of the bodies compared with a living descendant of Ned finally identified his remains, which were remarkably untouched from the initial looting (Smith, 2012).
133 years after his execution, Ned Kelly’s remains were finally returned to his descendants in 2013. They buried him in the Greta Cemetery alongside his mother and siblings, which at last honoured Ned’s final request before his execution. Finally, Ned was rid of Pentridge, once and for all.
This article was written by Charli Phillipps, a National Trust Guide at Pentridge Prison Tours.
References
Smith, J. (2012). Bluestone burials: The discovery of Ned Kelly and the Pentridge graves. Excavations, Surveys and Heritage Management in Victoria, 1, 45-50.