![]() ![]() Melville said the two Australians were brought to his hotel room in Pretoria one night in Africa at midnight by a mutual acquaintance. Melville, an ex-Sydney pressman, was at one time private secretary to Sir George Dibbs, three times Premier of NSW. In a second Sunday Mail article, this one by Ken Blanch, which published on 26th November, 1989, it was revealed that a man by the name of William Bede Melville, in August 1902, had cabled several Australian newspapers from Capetown in South Africa, that two men had identified themselves to him as Kelly and Hart. Gibney had never set eyes on Kelly or Hart but later, when he heroically entered the burning Glenrowan Inn in an attempt to rescue anyone inside, he said he had discovered the then unburnt bodies of Dan Kelly and Hart, who he surmised had committed suicide.īut the bodies were never positively identified by the police and the Kelly family, who took charge of the blackened remains, refused to give them up for an inquest. Their identification however, was solely based on the word of Matthew Gibney, a priest from Western Australia, who was on a trip to the colonies on the east coast of Australia and was travelling by train between Benalla and Albury when he heard about the siege while the train was stopped at Glenrowan. No-one disputes the fact that the remains of two very burnt bodies were later retrieved from the smouldering ruins of the inn and it was simply assumed they were the charred corpses of Dan Kelly and Steve Hart. Hunter, of Ipswich, contacted the Sunday Mail saying his sister, who had been a trainee nurse at Royal Brisbane Hospital, had told of a dying patient with burn scars who said he was Dan Kelly. Ms Hornberg said Dan was on his way to a station to see Steve Hart and the man calling himself Dan Kelly had shown her and others his burn scars. Rolleston said that because of the rumours of an escape, for years afterwards, any old greybeard camped in isolation was not only suspected of being Dan Kelly but a published series about a man who said he was Dan Kelly had brought protests from at least five other “Dan Kellys” living in various corners of Australia.Īmateur historian, Hilda Hornberg, of Redland Bay, also told of a meeting she had had in Roma in 1933 with Dan Kelly, then in his seventies. A Queensland Sunday Mail article by Wayne Kelly (no relation to Ned and Dan) which published on 17th July, 1988, said that one person who scoffed at the stories of Dan Kelly’s and Steve Hart’s escape was Frank Rolleston of Eton near Mackay. The gentleman, in his travels, had also met Steve Hart who had shown him burn scars on his back and said that he and Dan had hidden in the cellar and escaped during the night. ![]() What if Dan Kelly and Steve Hart didn’t perish in the Glenrowan Inn fire? One year, while fossicking on Chinaman Creek, I met an elderly gentleman who said he had met Steve Hart’s sister who claimed Dan Kelly had moved north to live in a hut outside of Mitchell in western Queensland. But what if some of that history is wrong. His “reported” last words were “Such is life”. He was hung at Old Melbourne Gaol on 11th November, 1880, aged 25. ![]() Ned Kelly was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. There were in fact more than 60 hostages in the Glenrowan Inn when the first shots were fired. Ann Jones’s 13-year-old son, John, and the hostage, Martin Cherry, later died from wounds suffered in the shootout. The body of Joe Byrne, who was killed earlier in the siege by a police bullet, was retrieved unburnt from the inn. ![]() Dan Kelly’s and Steve Hart’s charred bodies were returned to Kelly family members in the evening of the siege, on Monday 28th June, 1880. By the time the siege was over, with Ned Kelly captured and the rest of the gang dead, the inn had been destroyed by fire, lit by police to flush out gang members. History tells us that an enterprising woman named Ann Jones established the Glenrowan Inn in 1878 to service travellers, but that it only ran for two years before it was the scene of the last stand the Kelly Gang. ![]()
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