What Ever Happened to Ned Kelly's Head?

Eamon Evans

• Publisher: Affirm Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781922400451
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Who stole the priceless Picasso from the NGV? Was Errol Flynn a Nazi spy? Did an Australian kill the infamous Red Baron?
If you think Australia's history is straightforward, you're dead wrong. This is a land of the strange, the spooky and the unexplained. From the eerie ball of light that stalked a terrified family across the Nullabor, to the whereabouts of Victoria's parliamentary mace, to the unidentified body found propped up on an Adelaide beach, and, yes, to the whereabouts of Ned Kelly's skull, you'll find our history has plenty of mysterious twists and unanswered questions.
With his signature wit, Eamon Evans' investigates Australia's most curious mysteries, digs up the evidence and lays it out for the court of public opinion to decide. Whatever Happened to Ned Kelly's Head will have you scratching your head and wondering long after the last page.

MYSTERIOUS EVENTS

The Weeping Woman

One of the joys of early parenthood is that you get to be a sort of rubbish bin for all your child’s art. Day after day, these budding young geniuses get sent home from creche with crinkled bits of paper covered in strange, blotchy squiggles. Said squiggles may be self-portraits, or they may be spaceships. They may also be spiders, houses, cars, cats, birds or trees. There really is absolutely no way of telling, and there’s a pretty good chance that your kid can’t remember anyway. All that’s required from you is a few ‘wows’ and ‘greats’ as you discreetly reach for the recycle bin.

I mention this because much the same sort of reaction is often required in a modern art gallery, when one is confronted with a colourful splodge by the likes of Chagall. Such paintings are apparently better than they look. They have layers and hermetic forms. For God’s sake, don’t dispute this. Life is too short. Just look suitably awe-struck, say some ‘wows’ and move on.

A lot of Picasso’s work falls into this category, of course, not least Melbourne’s own Weeping Woman. The sort of shit my son would draw (though only if he closed his eyes and lost control of his hands), it’s a sort of jagged green lady with weirdly placed eyes, purple lips and a misshapen chin. She’s meant to be weeping because of the Spanish Civil War. But maybe it’s just because she looks like snot.

Anyway, there’s no accounting for taste.

But there was still quite a lot of accounting to do when the National Gallery of Victoria snapped this thing up in the mid-eighties for a then-extraordinary $1.6 million. The most expensive painting in Australian history at the time (surpassing the equally attractive Blue Poles by Jackson Pollack), it was a purchase that turned quite a few heads. And, probably, quite a few stomachs.

But the painting’s notoriety had barely begun. Just eight months after finding its way onto the NGV’s walls, it suddenly disappeared from them. It appeared that – using a special type of screwdriver not available in shops – the thief or thieves had removed the frame from its wall mounting and then the canvas from its frame, all without the gallery guards noticing a single damn thing.

Believed to have taken place on Saturday, 2 August 1986, the theft became public knowledge the following Monday when The Age began to receive a series of letters addressed to then–Arts Minister Race Mathews. Or ‘Rank’ Mathews, as his name was spelled in the missives. ‘We have stolen the Picasso from the National Gallery as a protest against the niggardly funding of the fine arts in this hick State,’ one read, ‘and against the clumsy, unimaginative stupidity and administration of that funding.’ Ominously, the envelope contained a burnt match.

‘Art gallery security in 1986 was primitive by today’s standards,’ Chief Conservator Thomas Dixon reflected years later. ‘At 5pm, attendants locked up the gallery and did a perfunctory walk-through and beat a hasty exit, leaving a skeleton staff overnight. Lacking CCTV and motion detectors, the four-storey building was secured by two attendants’ hourly patrols with hand torches.’ This meant that ‘a thief could simply conceal themselves until after closing and wait for a patrol to pass. They then had an hour or so until another patrol. Come morning they could mingle with other visitors and leave unnoticed. It wouldn’t take genius, just bravado.’

A few days of frantic investigation turned up nothing at all, beyond unfounded rumours and some bad blood between staff. Police searched every nook and cranny of the building, even draining its famous moat, but were quite literally left without a clue.

Then a second letter turned up, once again addressed to The Age. Describing themselves as ‘Australian Cultural Terrorists’, the thieves declared that they would burn Picasso’s masterpiece to ash unless the Victorian Government announced ‘a 10 per cent increase in arts funding and an annual prize for painting open to artists under 30, consisting of five prizes of $5000 each’.

Hmm.

The story of exactly what happened next has never really been told, and I’m afraid that it’s not really going to be told here. It’s basically a game of join the dots, only one with a lot of dots missing.

What we do know is, somehow or other, NGV Director Patrick McCaughey received a tip-off that a certain Melbourne art figure might have something to say. Meeting up with McCaughey, this person said that, no, in fact, he had nothing to say and indeed had ‘almost forgotten’ the theft. This despite the fact that the walls of his studio were lined with articles about it.

No matter, McCaughey was happy to say something instead. He told this entirely innocent art figure that he actually had no interest at all in prosecuting the thieves. All McCaughey wanted was the painting returned. And, apropos of nothing at all, he mentioned that one quick, easy and anonymous way to return said painting might be to put it in a luggage locker at Spencer Street Station.

Two days later, another communique came. Addressed to both McCaughey and The Age, it said that the Woman could be found at said railway station, in locker 227.

‘When I got to locker 227, Age journalist Margaret Simons was the only person there,’ McCaughey later wrote in his memoir.

‘She had already tried the locker but it was – surprise, surprise – locked. The police did not show up for another hour. Gradually a sizeable crowd began to assemble around locker 227. Television news crews and other reporters got wind of the story and showed up in force. The police arrived, told everybody to stand back and summoned an assistant station master, who jemmied it open. The police beckoned me to look inside and there was a brown paper package exactly the dimensions of Picasso’s Weeping Woman. The gallery’s chief conservator [Thomas Dixon], who was now on hand, whipped the package into a waiting police car with journalists running after us. We were whisked up to the forensic laboratory where the painting was unpacked and Weeping Woman emerged unharmed.’

Accompanying the painting was one last letter from the Australian Cultural Terrorists. ‘Of course we never looked to have our demands met,’ it insisted. ‘Our intention was always to bring to public attention the plight of a group which lacks any of the legitimate means of blackmailing governments.’

To this day, we still have no idea who this group was – or, rather, we have a hundred ideas, at least ninety-nine wrong. Just like Jack the Ripper or the murderer of JFK, everybody in Melbourne says they ‘know’ who did it, but each knows something different from everyone else.

For my part, all I really know for sure is that, for $1.6 million, I could paint something better.

An Explosive Theory

Now, I like a deranged cult as much as the next man but it could be that some take things too far. The Manson Family, for instance, might have just crossed a line, and the same goes for the good folk at Waco. One or two people have also been known to argue that the residents of Jonestown were not living their best possible lives.

Into this category of ‘kooks who bear watching’ we may also need to put the guys and gals at Aum Shinrikyo. Named after the Japanese term for ‘Supreme Truth’, this cult’s members were drawn to the teachings of one Shoko Asahara like moths to a mentally ill flame. Described as the second coming of Jesus Christ and the most enlightened being since Buddha, Asahara was an old, blind man with a long beard and bright robes who liked to meditate while sitting on satin pillows. He banged on about Nostradamus and yoga a lot, when he wasn’t quoting Hindu texts and little bits from the Bible. Somehow this kind of thing managed to get him thousands of followers. If I tried it, I’d get slapped in the face.

Anyway, the bit of the Bible that these cheerful young cult members most liked was the one which says that the end is nigh. They were convinced that Armageddon was imminent, and that it was their job to wage war on behalf of the Lord. In retrospect, this should probably have been a red flag for the rest of us. But hindsight’s always 20/20.

Another warning sign, perhaps, may have occurred in 1993, when twenty-five cult members flew from Tokyo to Perth. Instead of backpacks, cameras and a few Lonely Planets, they arrived with two huge crates full of hydrochloric acid, perchloric acid, sodium sulphate and ammonium chloride. Plus some diggers and a whole heap of gas masks. But you’ll be glad to know that customs wasn’t going to put up with this nonsense. No, sir – they issued said cult members with $4800 in fines before letting every single one of them into the country.

But the biggest danger sign of all came a couple of years later, at a bustling train station in the heart of Tokyo. On 20 March 1995, a handful of cult members released vast quantities of sarin, a Nazi nerve gas, killing thirteen people and causing hundreds more to fall ill. Think convulsions, seizures and paralysis. ‘For behold, the LORD will come in fire, And His chariots like the whirlwind, To render His anger with fury, And His rebuke with flames of fire. For the LORD will execute judgment by fire, And by His sword on all flesh, And those slain by the LORD will be many.’

Anyway, in the ensuing police investigations, the group’s little sojourn in Australia became the subject of questions. The main one being: What on Earth were they doing there? And we’re still not quite sure that we have the full answer.

What we do know is that they’d been living in the Western Australian desert on a 400,000-hectare sheep station a few hundred kilometres inland from Kalgoorlie. And we know that, when they eventually abandoned said station, they left at least twenty-nine dead sheep behind them, every single one of which contained traces of sarin. Police also found a whole heap of soil that contained traces of methylphosphonic acid, another wholesome ingredient of the Nazi nerve gas. Not to mention a homemade laboratory full of Bunsen burners and little glass tubes. So it seems very clear that the cult members were in the quiet seclusion of the West Australian desert preparing to poison a big chunk of humanity.

But – and pardon me if this seems silly – is that really all they were doing? Could the full story actually be even worse?

Maybe. Consider the strange incident which occurred not all that far from that sheep station on a dark autumn night in 1993. At exactly 11.03pm on 23 May, a few months after the cult members arrived, truck drivers and gold prospectors from far, far away reported seeing a sudden bright flash in the sky, and hearing a very loud boom. The ground seemed to shake just a tiny bit and ‘a large, deep-red-orange-coloured hemisphere of opaque light’ covered much of the sky. An opaque light described by an observer as looking a lot like a ‘deep-red … and half-set sun’.

Imagination?

No: geological fact. Seismograph needles all over the Pacific Ocean registered a significant ground disturbance at the very same time, one equivalent to the force of a small nuclear bomb or around 2000 tonnes of standard explosives. They tracked the source of said disturbance to ‘a location 28.47 degrees south latitude, 121.73 degrees east longitude’ – an area very close to the sheep station.

So, what was it? At the time, most geologists assumed that it was caused by a meteorite. And as explanations go, that still seems pretty plausible. But on the other hand, no one’s ever managed to find a crater, or any other telltale signs of an impact. And if eyewitness accounts are to be believed, this ‘large orange-red spherical fireball’ was ‘heard as a pulsed roaring or loud diesel engine sound well before it arrived’. Moreover, ‘it dropped off no glowing fragments, and had no long luminous tail or sparks – as is common in meteor activity’.

The other standard explanation is that it was some sort of earthquake. The Australian Geological Survey Organisation said that the event ‘showed … characteristics consistent with typical seismic activity for Western Australia’.

But according to Dr Gregory Van Der Vink, a professor of geology at Princeton, this was not the case at all. He said that it was a ‘rather unusual seismic recording’, in that its ‘epicentre was very shallow, near or at the surface’ of the ground. Most earthquakes, in other words, start somewhere deep underground. And, needless to say, they don’t involve bright lights in the sky.

But geological mysteries are apparently more common than you’d think. So most geologists just gave a little shrug, got back to doing whatever they do, and there the my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Copyright
• Title
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Mysterious Murders
• Mysterious Events
• Mysterious people
• Ned’s Head
• Mysterious Places
• Thanks