Politician: Exhume Kelly gang outlaws

An Australian historian and politician is calling for the bodies of two of Ned Kelly’s gang to be exhumed after disputing accepted facts about the group’s final gun battle.

Exactly 125 years after four outlaws, led by notorious bushranger Ned Kelly, squared off against police in the alpine town of Glenrowan, Queensland politician Paul Tully has called into question the outcome of the shootout.

The gun battle between police and the outlaws, who brandished pistols and wore suits of home-made armour, is part of Australian folklore, fascination fuelled by films, books and a series of iconic paintings by artist Sidney Nolan.

But Tully believes a key element of the story – the deaths of two Kelly gang members – may never have happened and is calling for a coroner’s investigation to hunt for the truth.

Ned Kelly, who has been portrayed in films starring Heath Ledger in 2003 and Mick Jagger in 1970, was arrested during the shootout, which began on June 28, 1880, and later hanged.

Another gang member, Joe Byrne, was shot dead by police.

The two remaining outlaws – Steve Hart and Kelly’s brother Dan – took refuge in the Glenrowan Hotel, and were presumed dead after police torched the building and two charred bodies were later pulled from the rubble.

But Tully says the men’s bodies were never formally identified, and that Australia’s history books may “need to be rewritten”.

Tully, a councillor in the Queensland city of Ipswich, said rumours about Kelly and Hart’s possible survival began in 1933 when an ageing farm hand named James Ryan walked into a Brisbane newspaper office claiming to be Dan Kelly.

“He had these massive burn marks on his back, huge scars which he said that he got in the fire when he was pinned by a burning beam, and he had the initials DK branded on his buttocks,” Tully told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The man lived in the area for 15 years – often recounting the exploits of the Kelly gang for local residents and challenging anyone to prove him as an impostor – until he was killed by a coal train outside Ipswich on July 29, 1948, Tully said.

Tully has presented a 35-page submission to the Victoria state coroner calling for the bodies of the two men pulled from the Glenrowan Hotel to be exhumed for DNA testing.

Samples of the Kelly family DNA were currently available, Tully said, and could be tested against the bodies to determine “for all time” whether Dan Kelly died in the furnace of the Glenrowan fire or escaped to Queensland to forge a new life.

“What I say is that it’s strongly possible,” Tully said. “It can’t be dismissed as a joke because the bodies were never identified.”

Tully said the Victorian coroner had agreed to review the submission, and would make a decision in the next few months.