Ned Kelly's House (Beveridge)

Kelly House is the boyhood home of the infamous bushranger where he spent his early childhood years. The house remains today and has been restored with interpretive signage and landscaping. A wooden fence surrounds the property. Ned Kelly attended the Beveridge Catholic School with his 2 sisters, Annie and Maggie.

This simple house was built in stages spanning about 40 years. The first stage was built around 1859 by Ned's father, John 'Red' Kelly. The Kelly family lived here for about five years before moving to Avenel when Ned was 10. They ran a small dairy farm here, with fruit trees and a vegetable garden to supplement their kitchen.

The cottage was based on traditional Irish construction methods of the time, using bush poles, timber roofing shingles, log beams and split-timber weatherboards.

This simple dwelling comprised a single living room and kitchen, and a separate bedroom, all with dirt floors. The house would have been cold and draughty in winter and hot in summer. Crude attempts at insulation would have included daubed mud, or bricks and stones set in mortar. Life would have been tough and cramped in the Kelly's house, with six small children sharing the bedroom with their parents.

There was a drain in the dirt floor dividing the living and cooking area from the bedroom.

As milk production increased, a small dairy was added to the back of the house where John and Ellen Kelly made butter to sell and a bluestone-clad water tank dug under the floor to keep the room cool. In more recent times the roof was raised, you can still see the wall extensions.

Milking sheds, stockyards and the outhouse toilet that once surrounded the house have long gone - but the doorway to them remains to this day.

In 1864 the Kelly family sold the property to James Stewart for 80 pounds, and moved to Avenel.

The next owners, the Stewarts, extended the house in the 1880s with an additional four rooms built on the western side, and a bathroom and laundry added at the rear in the early 20th century. The house lay derelict for many years, and has now been conserved as an important site linked to the Ned Kelly story - as well as a rare surviving example of colonial bush carpentry.

Ned Kelly's House (Beveridge)

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