After a Requiem Mass held on Friday at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Wangaratta that took place one hundred and thirty-two years after the fact, the bones of bushranger, convicted murderer and divisive Australian icon, Ned Kelly, were interred during a private burial earlier this morning in a secret plot at a country cemetery in Greta, northeastern Victoria, because ‘better late than never.’
A report in today’s Herald details the scant details of today’s ceremony, during which some of Kelly’s estimated 450 descendants are believed to have stood a vigilant guard at the Kelly plot – understood to be next to his mother Ellen’s grave – until it was reportedly sealed with concrete to prevent further threat to the exhumation of his bones by grave robbers and/or Kelly fanatics.
“They know pouring concrete in could be the only way to ensure his body remains untouched. But even then I guess there is no guarantee. There are still a lot of Kelly fanatics out there,” said one source.
Kelly’s remains were officially identified in 2011. Following a lengthy bureaucratic dispute, his direct descendants won the right to bury his bones in accordance with his last wishes – in consecrated ground on a family plot; which, if Six Feet Under and common decency have taught us anything, is an important last rite that should be honoured and treated with the respect it deserves.
In a flourish of colour and symbolism, the remains were placed in a wooden coffin adorned with native flowers and a green sash resembling the one awarded to Kelly after saving a drowning boy in his youth. A family spokeswoman, Joanne Griffiths, said that precautions were being taken to ensure that his bones and his grave would escape the desecration that has unfortunately marred the graves his descendants:
“Our preference is that nobody ever knows exactly where his final resting place will be.“
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