In the footsteps of Ned Kelley – Day 16

Today saw us leave the spa town of Daylesford to travel northeast through the Victoria countryside; the picture shows how rolling it is, but everything is brown reflecting the prolonged period of drought that this part of the world has experienced. So just like Devon, but brown.

This part of Victoria could be dubbed Ned Kelley country; he was an infamous bushranger (highwayman) in the late nineteenth century. At the time the area was experiencing a gold rush boom, so there were rich pickings to be had. Apparently he is the most written about Australian of all time, and there is much debate as to whether he was a Robin Hood figure of just a desperado gangster.

The town of Beechworth was a centre of the Victorian gold rush and has well preserved government buildings, so it is possible to envisage what it might have been like in Kelly’s time. There is the treasury that handled all of the gold extracted from the surrounding area, the police station, and the courthouse. Even in the 1870’s this remote part of Victoria had a well-developed civic infrastructure, something that Kelley who had a sense of injustice as to the way his family were treated could rail against.

We stopped for lunch at the art gallery, beautifully situated overlooking a lake in the prosperous town of Benalla. The part that Kelley plays in the Australian psyche is captured in this large modern artwork. More graphically the town of Glenrowan, which was the scene of Kelly’s last stand and capture has installed a huge statue of him in his trademark armour.

Kelley is of course an iconic Australian figure, but following in his footsteps has allowed us to explore an interesting area of the countryside. We also discovered a good gallery and a more genuine more recent Australian hero. This was “Weary” Dunlop, so called not because of fatigue but because of his surname. He was an all round sportsman who became a surgeon and was captured by the Japanese in Java during Wold War Two. His leadership of prisoners in Thailand and in particular on the Death Railway ensured that the Australians suffered the lowest death rate. Later after the war he worked for reconciliation. He came from and is commemorated in Benalla, a poignant counterpoint to Ned Kelley.

Well Marion did not see a koala today, but she did have a near death experience with Australian wildlife when she spotted a snake slithering across the floor of the hotel dinning room. Both survived to fight another day, the snake being shovelled out into the grounds, and Marion by fortifying herself with Sauvignon Blanc!