The new
owner of the mid-19th century Imperial Hotel in Avenel, near
Seymour, need only walk a few
hundred metres to a creek to reflect on his debt to Ned Kelly.
Avenel-born Bill Shelton, 68, says this is the likely spot where
a 10-year-old Kelly saved Mr Shelton's
grandfather Richard, just seven at the time, from drowning in a
swollen Hughes Creek.
"He was a champion bloke, an absolute bloody champion," Mr
Shelton says of Kelly, whose family lived
here for a few years until they moved to Eleven Mile Creek, between
Greta and Glenrowan, after Ned's
father died in December 1866. "Because of him here I sit."
A city-based commercial real estate agent and auctioneer, Mr
Shelton farms 700 merino ewes and 22
cows on about 160 hectares outside the small town 117 kilometres
north of Melbourne where his fore-
bears settled in 1852.
The Imperial Hotel's previous owner, the Dominion wine companies,
went into voluntary administration
in July. Mr Shelton paid an undisclosed amount for the Mitchell
Street establishment built in the 1850s.
He has renamed it The Avenel Pub and will install a district
information centre, celebrating among other
things Ned Kelly's boyhood here. He aims to ensure the pub is
integral to a new Ned Kelly Touring Route
launched this week, in which six local councils aim to have 40 story
boards between Melbourne and
Jerilderie in the next few years.
"Kelly will be marketed in Avenel as Ned the hero for saving
young Richard," says Mr Shelton, who recently
drove to a museum in Benalla to photograph a green silk sash,
blood-stained and fringed with gold bullion
thread, worn by the outlaw beneath his armour at the 1880 Glenrowan
siege.
The Shelton family presented the sash to Kelly for saving the
youngster. The family of a Dr John Nicholson,
who treated Kelly's 28 bullet wounds after the siege, donated it to
the Benalla museum in 1973.
"He was a bit of a rogue, clearly," says Mr Shelton. "I think he
did kill two policemen but it was him or them.
They were after him."
Mr Shelton believes his great-grandfather, Esau, had also paid
the ££25 required to free Ned's father, Red,
from jail, where he was serving a sentence for stealing a cowhide.
While some have put Kelly's birth date at June 1855, historian
Ian Jones believes this month could be the
150th anniversary of his birth. He was born "on an unrecorded day or
night in December 1854," Jones writes
in his biography, Ned Kelly, a Short Life.
The Imperial is one of two hotels in Mitchell Street, Avenel. Mr
Shelton says a perusal of documents since
its purchase reveals that his grandfather bought it in 1891. The
other, the Royal Mail, was owned by his
great-grandfather on a mid-1860s morning when, as Jones has written,
"Ned made his enduring mark on
Avenel and the lives of its people".
Jones writes that seven-year-old Dick Shelton was wearing a new
straw hat as he made his way to school
from his home at the rear of the Royal Mail. The hat fell or blew
off as he crossed a brownstone toll bridge
and caught on a fallen tree branch. Dick lost his footing and fell
into the turbulent creek while trying to
retrieve it.
"Ned, on his way into town along the opposite bank, perhaps with
milk to sell, saw what happened," Jones
writes. "He sprinted down and dived in. He probably wasn't a good
swimmer but was strong enough and
determined enough to reach Dick and drag him to safety."
The sash, Jones notes, "would remain one of Ned's most treasured
possessions, to be worn on very special
occasions... last worn by Ned on a day when all his courage was
needed".
Mr Shelton has long been mindful of his family's Ned Kelly
connection. "It's always been known but we've
been a fairly understated, easygoing country mob, you know," he
says.
His great great-grandfather, also Richard, migrated from
Staffordshire, England. Mr Shelton's father, Jack,
was the second youngest of 11 children. He was killed at the siege
of Tobruk in World War II.
Mr Shelton and an elder brother boarded at Ivanhoe Grammar. He
went on to play football for Hawthorn
from 1957 to 1960. He has worked at Allard & Shelton for several
decades. He has a cottage on the creek
and says locals urged him to buy the pub.
Bill Shelton and his wife, Letitia, have three children, two
grandchildren and, he says, "one on the way".
Each is indebted to the courage of Ned Kelly, as are several other
descendants of the boy who fell in the creek.
The Shelton family plots at Avenel. (Photo's D.White)
www.nedonthenet.com