The northern territory police magazine $4 c tat

IN THIS ISSUE :
Page
That First Edition . .		2
Tracking as a Fine Art . .		6
Commissioner Goes to Interpol	.	/2
Capturing a Killer .	.	16
Bangtail Muster Day . .	.	20
Routine Patrol		22
Solving it. by Science .		28
Universal Fingerprinting		28
86 Years' Police Service	•	31
Revolution for NJ, Mounties . .	.	32
Much Binding Down the Track		33
Bill Condon Remembered . .		38
Coorapinni .		39
Tracked, Tricked & Trapped		42
Avon Dawns Police District ,		44
The Log •		47

CITATION

The Northern Territory Police Magazine



And the Editor says

POOR NED - DEAD AND

FORGOTTEN: OR IS HE?

The news item clearly stated that Ned Kelly's armour had been utterly banished from display in the National Museum, Melbourne, to a place of permanent oblivion in the basement.

Here, surely, is an excuse to quote Avon Billy: " 0 what a fall was there my countrymen ".

For more than eighty years Australians have been busy weaving a veil of ersatz glamour and romance around the memory of a heady bush lout who, with three assistants, courageously shot and killed Policemen from ambush; held up at gunpoint, robbed and unlawfully imprisoned scores of citizens; conspired and actually attempted to murder a trainload of Police and Trackers going about their lawful purposes; who vanished into the darkness of the Glenrowan night, leaving his mates behind without their leader, only to be ignominiously shot down himself when the neutral dawn revealed him; and finally died a felon on the scaffold.

Here is one, you would surely think, who should have been quickly forgotten — except in his true criminal likeness — by his countrymen. Kennedy, Scanlon and the others — the murdered — are forgotten, but Kelly, the murderer, is kindly remembered in literature and art and even in the minds of a large section of the population.

The armour-banishing incident was a headline story in every prominent Australian newspaper, and provoked a lively follow-up correspondence, mostly in Ned's favour. Dorothy Drain, in the " Australian Women's Weekly ", was inspired to a burst of poesy on the strength of what she calls the " magic name ", concluding thus:—

" Affection, too, has kept your name alive,

Because there lurks, concealed most times by jest, An outlaw in each law-abiding breast ".

She might even be right, too. How else explain the complete anonymity of most victims of crime and the fabulous flood of legends surrounding so many of the most vicious and blood-thirsty criminals? How else explain the age-old phenomenon of willing aid to the fleeing or resisting lawbreaker and the refusal of aid, and even outright hostility, to the guardians of the law? It is not a sudden, modern development. It is not, unfortunately, only past history, either. Perhaps Dorothy Drain expressed it neatly in a one-line nutshell, after all.