Friday 13 November 2009

Ned Kelly and Gareth Jones brought back to life


Discovery of skull of Australian bandit Ned Kelly
Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne Pentridge Prison, aged 25, on November 11th 1880. However, what happened to his body has remained a mystery ever since. What was allegedly his skull was displayed in Melbourne Goal until 1978, when it was stolen.
But, at the beginning of the week an Australian farmer, Tom Baxter, handed a skull over to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine claiming that it belonged to Ned Kelly. He said that he had been in possession of the skull for years, but did not explain how he first came across it.
The skull is currently being analysed in order to determine if it does belong to the famous bandit. The identification tests are expected to last a year.
Read the reports on the Mail Online and the website of The Times.

Gareth Jones brought back to life
Gareth Jones’ diaries, which he wrote in the Ukraine in 1932-33, went on display for the first time, today, in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a student. In 1932-33, Jones travelled to the Soviet Ukraine to report on the famine known as the Holodomar. He was the first journalist to reveal the horrors of the famine to the western world. According to modern estimates, 4 million people died in the famine, which is now formally recognised as an act of genocide in the Ukraine. Two years after the publication of his articles, Jones was killed, aged 29, by Chinese bandits in Mongolia. Gareth Jones is regarded as a hero in the Ukraine and last year he was awarded the order of freedom, the highest order that the Ukraine gives to non-citizens, for his reporting.
The exhibition coincides with the première of Serhii Bukovs’kyi’s documentary The Living, this evening, as part of the Second Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film.
The exhibition will run until mid-December. Read the press release on the website of the University of Cambridge.
There is also a website devoted to Gareth Jones.
http://www.garethjones.org/

Mining company under investigation for destroying part of Great Wall of China
It was announced on Wednesday that the Chinese gold mining company Hohhot Kekao Mining Co. is being investigated for damaging one of the oldest sections of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia, which dates from the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC). According to Wang Dafang, the head of the regional cultural relics bureau, company officials could face up to 10 years in prison if they are found guilty. Read the report by the Associated Press on CBS News.

New website devoted to Robert Louis Stevenson
The New Scotsman reports on a new website dedicated to the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson, launched yesterday at Edinburgh Napier University.
The website includes pages devoted to each of Stevenson’s texts with information about their publication and reception, a biography of the author, as well as information on his family, friends and literary network, and a photograph gallery with images from the photograph albums that the Stevenson family kept in Samoa, many of which have never been seen by the public before.
http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice post on Victorian Gold Mines.....

 
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