Dan Death

News header from The Herald in 1880.

How Dan and Hart perished.

It is now generally believed that Dan Kelly
and Hart were both dead before the hotel was
set fire to. This impression is strengthened
by the statement of the priest who bravely and
amidst loud cheers rushed into the blazing house.
He states that when he picked up the dead body
nearest to him, which proved to be that of Byrne,
he saw the bodies of the other two lying together
further away in the room.

Source: The Geelong Advertiser June 30 1880.

Remembering Dan

THE recent debate about the birthplace of Australia’s most infamous bushranger
has sent many in the district scrambling through history books and searching for
historical documents.

However, a “second generation Kilmorite” is relying on a more personal history
for her estimation of the Ned Kelly history.

Frances Tyrrell remembers well the day she, her grandmother Norah Alward,
and her mother Florence Freyne, were walking down a street in Carlton on their
way to visit the Adelphi Theatre when they noticed a tall man leave a house and
walk onto the footpath ahead of them.

“I remember my grandmother said ‘That’s Dan Kelly’,” Mrs Tyrrell said.

“My mother didn’t believe her and so Gran said ‘I’ll prove it to you’ and she called
out and said ‘Hello Dan’.”

“He turned around and said: ‘Oh . . . Little Norrie Alward’, and he gave her a big hug.

“I’ll never forget the day we saw him – Gran was very excited.

“It always stuck in my mind because he called her Norrie and I’d never heard her
called that before.”

Mrs Tyrrell said the chance meeting occurred about 1923-24 when she was a child,
and her grandmother would have been in her late 50s or early 60s.

“He’d have been around the same age,” she said.

Mrs Tyrrell, 85, said her grandmother had gone to school with all the Kelly children,
including Ned.

“She grew up with them and went to school with them all,” she said.

“She told us a lot of stories about the Kelly family.

“She would never hear anything bad said against Ned – it was Dan who was the wild
one and Ned was always trying to get Dan out of trouble.”

Mrs Tyrrell’s grandmother was born in Ireland and came to Australia as a three-year-old,
and she and her father were born in Kilmore.

Mrs Tyrrell said she wasn’t sure where Ned was born but believed it “was somewhere
up country” — not in Beveridge.

Source: Kilmore Free Press November 2002.

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A snippet from The Age, circa 1931, as regards a
Dan "resurrection story" written by B.W. Cookson

......There is at present being circulated [word missing] the country
press of New South Wales and Victoria the latest and most fantastic of
the "resurrection stories"
in connection with the Kellys. The author of this particular cauard,
according to a Salvation Army officer, Brigadier Rixon, of Melbourne,
became converted to the Army in a small country town in New South Wales,
and avowed most solemnly that he was Dan Kelly, and that he and Steve
Hart had escaped from Glenrowan, had met "a man in the street," or, to
be exact, on the road to New South Wales, accepted from him, without the
need of credentials of any sort, a commission to take a drove of horses
to India, and thenceforward blossomed forth in new careers in various
parts of the known world-and some parts so little known as to cause
the astonished Salvation Army officials to look sideways on the rest of
the story. The convert alleged, amongst other absurdities, that he was
known to the police of the district as Dan Kelly, and that they had
advised him to stay in New South Wales, as if he crossed into Victoria
he would get into trouble. The "conversion" proved a brief one, and the
reclaimed sinner went suddenly and silently on his way, following a few
pertinent questions as to his name and aliases. But he left behind him a
story so circumstantial in small details as to warrant its
publication-in the minds of the Salvation Army officials. And that
story, preposterous as it is, may be credited by many people ignorant of
the facts.....

(courtesy of Roselyn Drake)