Erik Skye Travel Blog

28 Dec 2011

Here’s the map: Google Maps – Wizard of Oz

I was antsy to get out of town. Melbourne’s nice, but the long road’s nicer. Perhaps I was too eager, or not quite awake, or most likely that I wasn’t so used to driving on the other side of the road yet, but my first move wasn't so smooth – I pulled out of the driveway right into the on-coming lane of traffic. The really, really scary thing about that is I was looking for traffic in the opposite direction from that which I turned (thinking I was in America I suppose), which means I entered into oncoming traffic blindly, so to speak. And there was an oncoming car too! Fortunately, he was a little ways off and zipped one way while I zagged the other. I don’t enjoy starting a day like that.

I’ve been wanting to visit the Ned Kelly Museum in Glenrowan ever since reading about it in Bill Bryson’s book “In a Sunburned Country”. Ned was a bad-guy folk hero similar to Jesse James of the American wild-west.   A write-up on the wall of the Glenrowan Hotel declares him “the world’s most famous Australian”. I figured if ever a wizard there was, surely like Ned Kelly he must be.

Here’s how Bill Bryson tells it:

“In 1880, after years on the run, Kelly was reported to be holed up with his modest gang (a brother and two friends) in Glenrowan, a hamlet in the foothills of the Warby Range in northeastern Victoria. Learning of this, the police assembled a large posse and set off to get him. As surprise attacks go, it wasn’t terribly impressive. When the police arrived (on an afternoon train) they found that word of their coming had preceded them and that a thousand people were lined up along the streets and sitting on every rooftop eagerly awaiting the spectacle of gunfire. The police took up positions and at once began peppering the Kelly hideout with bullets. The kellys returned the fire and so it went throughout the night. The next dawn during a lull Kelly stepped from the dwelling, dressed unexpectedly in a suit of armor of his own devising – a heavy cylindrical helmet that looked strikingly like an inverted bucket and a breastplate that covered his torso and crotch. He wore no armor on his lower body, so one of the policemen shot him in the leg. Aggrieved, Kelly staggered off into some nearby woods, fell over, and was captured. He was taken to Melbourne, tried, and swiftly executed. His last words were ‘Such is life.’”^7

Now, I think that’s humorous enough, but it gets even better.  Bill Bryson continues to describe how Aussies revere Ned, continuing:

“Not exactly the stuff of legend, one would have thought, yet in his homeland Kelly is treated with deep regard. Sidney Nolan, one of Australia’s most esteemed artists, did a famous series of paintings devoted to Kelly’s life, and books abound on the subject. Even serious historians often accord him an importance that seems to the outsider curiously disproportionate. Manning Clark, for example in his one-volume history of Australia, devotes just a paragraph to the design and foundation of Canberra, dispenses with federation in two pages, but gives a full nine pages to the life and achievements of Ned Kelly. He also allows Kelly some of the most florid and incoherent prose, which is saying a great deal, believe me. Manning Clark is an extraordinary stylist at the best of times, a man who would never call the moon ‘the moon’ when he might instead call it ‘the lunar orb’ – but with Kelly he was inspired to lofty allusions and cosmic musings of a rare impenetrability. Here is a small part of his description of Kelly’s fateful emergence from the compound after the nightlong shootout:

In the half light before that red disc [i.e., the sun] appeared again on the eastern horizon… a tall figure, encased in armor, came out of the mists and wisps of frosty air… Some thought it was a madman or a ghost, some thought it was the Devil, the whole atmosphere having stimulated in friend and foe alike a “superstitious awe”.

Personally – and this is just a stab in the dark – I think Manning Clark was taking way too much codeine. Here’s another of his well-juiced creations, this the merest fragment of a much longer passage discussing Kelly’s legacy:

He lived on as a man who had confronted the bourgeois calmdown with all the uproar of a magnificent Dionysian frenzy, a man who had taken down the mighty from their seat and driven the rich empty away. He lived on as a man who had savaged policemen in the old convict tradition… and denounced the brutal barbarism of those who clothed their sadism toward the common people in the panoply of the law.

About 2,800 milligrams talking there, I would say.”^8

So, that gives you a taste of the lore of Ned Kelly in Australia. Bill Bryson goes on to describe his experiences touring the Ned Kelly attractions in Glenrowan where he gets the greatest joy out of watching the show “Ned Kelly’s Last Stand”. He describes the show as being so absolutely terribly as to end up being a delightfully good experience.

I apprehensively approached the building where they were showing Ned Kelly’s Last Stand and took note of many peculiarities, such as: a sign which read “People with heart, health, or hearing problems can be effected – No refunds given!”; the man at the ticket counter had severely deformed first knuckles - all of which were about the size of golf balls (I kid you not); an older man in a leather trench coat and Aussie style cowboy hat ringing a large bell to get attention and who as I approached, looked intensely into my eyes and said ‘there’s 10 million dollars worth of equipment in there’; a skinny adolescent boy in 1880’s dress who acted like a butler; etc…

Yes, Ned Kelly’s Last Stand really is terrible. It’d be a big stretch for me to declare it was so bad as to be good. Perhaps it depends on your sense of humor, or to the degree of your pre-exposure (it had been built up in my mind by Bill Bryson’s recounting). Here’s a video I took – decide for yourself:  Ned Kelly's Last Stand - Saloon Scene

Ned’s no Wizard. But, given the way he liked to dress, I'm declaring him to be the “tin man” for Wizard of Oz.

Along the way, I dropped into the little town of Tallangatta, which had a sign along the highway indicating it had been moved here in 1950.  I asked the bar tender at the little hotel pub for the story.  'Bob can tell you', he said, pointing to the older gentleman, and only other patron in the place.  Bob started to eagerly tell me how he was born in the old town and because they added more height to the Hume Dam, causing water levels to rise, the town was moved in that year to accommodate.  He further indicated he was 20 when when they moved the town and that he comes in everyday for 2 beers 'for medicinal purposes' he added, taking the last drink from glass, placing it on its over onto its side on the bar, and briskly getting up to leave the bar.  He took a one dollar coin from his pocket and placed it in a gambling machine (of some sort).  As he began to open the door to leave, a bell went off.  He had won a one dollar ticket.  He promptly redeemed the ticket with the bartender for a one dollar coin, and as he began to leave the front doors, he place the coin back in the machine and won another one dollar ticket.  Bob was a happy guy, and when I took his picture and shook his hand he exclaimed "tell them I'm Bob Lewis when you get back to Alaska".  I responded, "I'm going to tell them right now".  

By end of day I made it to The Snowy Mountains (aka “Snowies”), crossing a hundred kilometers of thickly-forested, steep, rugged, beautiful, frightening terrain in the process. “The found the forest very thick on this side, and it looked dark and gloomy… they started along the road of yellow brick, silently wondering, each in his own mind, if ever they would come to the end of the woods and reach the bright sunshine again… To add to their discomfort, they soon heard strange noises in the depths of the forest…”^9  

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Footnotes:

7. Bill Bryson, In a Sun Burned Country (Broadway Books, 2001) p. 164.

8. Bill Bryson, In a Sun Burned Country (Broadway Books, 2001) pp. 164, 165.

9. L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1903) p. 57.