MELBOURNE: Australian outlaw Ned Kelly was finally laid to rest in a rural cemetery beside his mother on Sunday, with his grave unmarked and sealed beneath layers of concrete to guard against souvenir-taking.
A small group of Kelly family descendants escorted the bushranger’s remains to the Greta cemetery where he was buried in a deep and reportedly concrete-sealed pit beside his mother, Ellen.
Kelly’s last wish when he was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol 132 years ago was to be buried in consecrated ground in the family plot at Greta, not far from the town of Glenrowan where he had his final shootout with police.
But after his execution his remains were thrown into a pit and it wasn’t until 2011 that DNA testing confirmed the bones — except his skull which remains missing — were his.
“We’ve brought him home, back to his family and back to the area that he loved, we’ve given him his final wish, so that makes us quite happy,” said Joanne Griffiths, great-granddaughter of Kelly’s sister Kate.
“We’ve made a real effort to ensure that he’s going to be safe and he’s surrounded by family and friends, which is the way he would’ve wanted it.”
Kelly’s burial brings an end to a chapter in the story of one of Australia’s most famous and enduring legends, with his tale of defiance against land barons and corrupt policemen dividing the nation even today.
Some see him as a callous killer and criminal while others celebrate him as a folk hero and symbol of Irish-Australian rebellion against British colonial authorities. His exploits have been the subject of art, film and literature.
Hundreds gathered to bid farewell to him at a church service Friday ahead of his burial, but Griffiths said the family had also endured decades of judgment for his deeds.
“Regardless of what people might think now... this is not the day for judgment this is just the day for burying a family member,” she said.
Developers of the prison site where his bones were found wanted to keep the famous skeleton for a public memorial or display but the Victoria state government forced them to return it to the family for proper burial.
Kelly was the only one of his gang to survive the shootout at Glenrowan due to his iconic homemade suit and helmet of plate metal armor. Three policemen were killed.
“This man Ned Kelly has a certain immortality. Not just in our hearts, but in the hearts of Australia,” Monsignor John White told those gathered for Sunday’s burial.
Australian outlaw Kelly buried in cement
Australian outlaw Kelly buried in cement
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
