04/02/2026
Own a True Relic of Australian History
1:1 Plaster Replica of Ned Kelly’s Death Mask
This is not a mass-produced 3D plastic print. This full-scale, high-detail plaster replica has been created through meticulous research and skilled craftsmanship, capturing the solemn detail of the original death mask taken after Ned Kelly’s ex*****on in 1880.
Highly detailed and historically grounded, this piece preserves the likeness of Australia’s most infamous bushranger in tangible form - an arresting object for serious collectors, historians, and cultural institutions. It stands as both a work of craftsmanship and a powerful reminder of a turbulent authoritarian colonial past.
Criminal Death Masks were primarily important in the 19th century as tools for the now considered pseudoscience of Phrenology, which aimed to link skull shape to personality and criminal tendencies. By studying these Death Masks of criminals, phrenologists believed they could identify a "criminal type" and even predict future criminal behaviour. Phrenologists believed the skull's bumps and indentations revealed a person's personality, intelligence, and motivations. Studying the heads of executed criminals was a popular method to try and find a physiological basis for criminal behaviour and to prove the existence of a "criminal type".
In places like 19th-century Australia, public interest in ex*****ons meant crowds would gather to see the recreations of the heads of criminals displayed in waxworks for entertainment and to satisfy the moral consequences of crime against the authority of the Government.
Ned Kelly was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on the morning of 11 November 1880. Immediately after his body was taken down from the gallows, his hair and beard were shaved off and a Plaster Mould taken of his head by Maximilian Kreitmayer. There may have been only one cast taken from this original plaster mould, which is the one located at the University of Melbourne with partial neck, no shoulders and a mould seam-line dividing the frontal face, rather than the moulded seamline behind the ears and across the top of the head in the other Death Masks with full neck and with shoulders and neck, in the collections of the State Library Victoria, the National Museum of Australia and the Canberra National Portrait Gallery. Within Canberra’s National Museum Australia, ‘Dale White Collection’, a particularly unusual Ned Kelly Death Mask with odd distortions in the casting is displayed.
The plaster Death Mask pictured is a 'reconstructed sculpture' with those distortions removed, making this 'sculptural' rendition of Ned Kelly's Death Mask as close to accuracy as can be achieved without moulding the very first original Death Mask taken in 1880.
To purchase a copy of this original Death Mask is $350 +GST. Postage and Handling costs are an additional $25 anywhere in Australia.
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