BILL WAS BANG ON WITH HIS BIGGEST AND BEST :SBC and the KENNEDY TREE

In his big new book “A Certain Truth’, Bill Denheld puts to paper his thoughts on a very wide range of topics that relate to the history of the Kelly gang. Bills approach seems to be to rake over the coals of dormant and even resolved controversies, to toss lots of interesting, not necessarily fully researched ideas out there, to suggest ways in which they may be related or have some sort of relevance to the Outbreak, and to provoke discussion. So far, the only place where such discussion has been taking place is on this Blog, where a few weeks ago I posted a discussion about Bills view of who Ned Kellys mother might have been, and in another, why I didn’t believe as Bill did, that Kelly was ‘dudded’ by Constable McIntyre. Then, in a series of Blog posts just concluded, Dr Stuart Dawson went over quite a few of Bills other ideas with a very thoughtful fine-tooth comb. Anyone who takes the time and the effort to carefully read what Dawson has written will learn a lot.

The reality though is that if Bill is going to be remembered for anything – and I hope he will be – it won’t be for his theories about class or the Republican movement or who Ned Kellys mother really was – no, it will be for very cleverly locating the exact spot along Stringybark Creek where the police search patrol had camped, and where Constable Lonigan and Scanlan were murdered by Ned Kelly.

The so-called Kelly Tree at Stringybark Creek had been labelled for decades as being at the place where the Police campsite was, but in fact this still extant “Kelly Tree” is the third tree in succession to have been accorded the title, as its predecessors died and disappeared. The second and third ‘Kelly’ trees were further and further away from where the original one once stood. The end result was that everyone forgot where the actual site really was.

 

Ian Jones, who, until a decade ago was widely regarded as Australia’s “foremost Kelly authority”, realised that the modern ‘Kelly Tree’ was no longer marking  the exact place where the campsite had been, and decided to try to  find it. After looking at photos taken of the actual site in 1878, and comparing them with the present-day topography at SBC he claimed to have identified the site : south of the ‘Kelly Tree’ and on the eastern bank of the creek.

 

However, sometime later it was realised that Jones was wrong, because he had missed a vital clue that firmly placed the camp on the western bank of the creek, and so Bill and some like-minded fellow enthusiasts set out to try to find it themselves. They also looked at the original photos, and at the original documentation and maps, and they also did the bush bashing up and down the creek, and on the western side of the creek almost directly opposite the Jones site Bill didn’t just find topography that matched the images, he found the ruins of two fireplaces from the huts that had been mentioned in the original descriptions. Associated with the fireplaces he found broken and melted glass, broken pottery, melted lead, wire, an axe head and parts of a gun.

 

In the book, Bill documents the difficult struggle he then had to get the Two Huts site recognized by the authorities. He had remarkable success in persuading Victorian authorities to list the entire area on the Heritage register, meaning that its all protected, but on the other hand, 20 years later he is still waiting for the archaeological investigation Bill asked for, and which heritage agreed to do. He also documents the way in which Ian Jones used his power and status to mock Bill publically and to undermine Bills efforts at almost every turn, including describing a newspaper article about Bills findings as ‘misleading’ in his Kelly biography ‘A Short Life’. On radio, Jones referred to Bills claims as ‘codswallop’. As far as I know Jones never conceded that the place he claimed was the site of the police camp was actually a place where nothing happened, but even though there are now other groups making alternative claims to Bills about where the police campsite is, all are in  complete agreement that Jones was wrong to say it was on the eastern side of the creek.

Bill describes the perplexing change of heart that resulted in his co-investigators rejecting the Two Huts site, turning their backs on Bill and making a case for a different location nearer the Kelly tree (Site #2). A  TV documentary featuring celebrity Archaeologist Adam Ford then nominated a third  site to the north of the Kelly tree (Site #3), and more recently, even further north yet another site has been nominated by a group known as the Kennedy Tree Group.(Site #4) None of these sites include topography that was always agreed could be seen in the original photographs, and two of them – site #2 and #3 – have got their photo orientation wrong by 180 degrees, and so can be dismissed on that basis alone. Those two groups misinterpreted the clues in the original photos that indicated what direction the camera was pointing, and they wrongly believed that there was a report from Sgt McIntyre that identified where the picture had been taken from: no such report exists. But if youre a TV celebrity, and the History channel makes a flashy documentary about the police campsite and killing ground, and about your claim to have finally solved the problem others had failed to do after all these years….who are the powers that be going to listen to? The celebrity Adam Ford and Channel Nine who swept in and out of SBC after a few days, or a lone ingenious Kelly wizard who spent hundreds of hours exploring the place and carefully assembling the evidence and the arguments to support his claim to know?  All of this is explained in detail in Bills book, and also on his fascinating website. Some of it is quite disturbing.

Bill also documents a more recent saga, the surprising claim by the afore mentioned Kennedy Tree group (#4) to have identified the actual tree seen in the 1878 photo where Ned Kelly murdered Sgt Michael Kennedy. The group making this claim saw a tree that reminded them of the one in the 1878 photo and then they went about constructing a tenuous convoluted and unconvincing argument that they had found the very tree and the actual place shown in the photo where Ned Kelly murdered Sgt Michael Kennedy. Once again Bill was attacked, this time for doing metal detecting around the tree, because if it had indeed been the place where Ned Kelly murdered Kennedy by firing a shotgun into his chest at point blank range, Bill knew that  shot might reasonably be expected to be found in the soil, but there was none. Even though there was no lead in the soil, and even though the Government experts they asked to evaluate their claim rejected it not once but twice, they continue to promote it. They colluded with the press to publish an article attacking Bill, the man who had the entire area listed and protected under the heritage legislation, saying he had no respect for history. Disgraceful.

 

Instead of picking a tree with what they believed were physical resemblances to the tree photographed almost 150 years ago – as if the idea that in 150 years a tree would change so little that it would still be visually identifiable isn’t a huge stretch in itself –  and then reverse engineering a theory, and retrofitting the evidence to explain why the two trees were the same tree, what the Kennedy tree group should have done is first of all assemble all the available clues and evidence from all the documentary sources in an objective way, and then see if a tree could be found that fitted the evidence. THAT is the correct and scientific approach to this sort of thing – and it’s what Bill did in conjunction with Sgt Michael Kennedys great grandson, Leo Kennedy. This also is documented in Bills book, and quite incredibly they found a tree big enough and old enough to fit the descriptions, and furthermore Bill found bullet lead in the surrounding soil. Bill however, has not asserted with anything like the inflexible dogmatism that the Kennedy Tree group do about their finding that this tree is the real ‘Kennedy’ tree but as he did in regard to his Police campsite identification, he has asked for professional investigation of it.

 

Bill details his long and disappointing struggle to arouse the interest of Heritage and other state bodies in his important claims about historical sites, and to have professional archaeologists investigate them. But to his unending frustration there always seemed to be other more influential interests and greater egos than Bills that worked behind the scenes to elbow him out of the way. When the celebrity  archaeologist appeared on the scene, Leo Kennedy abandoned his  support of Bills claims about a Kennedy tree and ended up making an appearance in the documentary supporting Fords tree. Bill records in the book a Blog post I wrote about this David and Goliath struggle that he was engaged in….but so far at least the giant seems to be winning.

 

In my opinion, nothing in Bills book is as important as his documentation of his clever amateur archaeological research and his claim to have identified a truly important, historically significant place.  Bill hasn’t given up, and neither have I given up hope that his findings will one day receive the attention and the recognition they deserve.