Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang

The case

At first light on 28 June 1880 police surrounding the Glenrowan Inn saw a figure walking toward them out of the bush mist, a long iron cylinder where its head should have been. Their bullets rang off it. For about a quarter of an hour Ned Kelly, wearing about 44 kilograms of armour beaten out of plough mouldboards, moved from tree to tree firing a revolver with his one good arm, until Sergeant Steele brought him down with shotgun fire to the legs, which the armour did not cover. The Kelly outbreak, which had defied the colony of Victoria for twenty months, ended that afternoon when police burned the inn.

Edward Kelly was born at Beveridge, north of Melbourne, probably in December 1854, the son of an Irish convict transported for stealing pigs and of Ellen Quinn, whose family were small selectors in the north-east. His father died when Ned was twelve. The family settled near Greta, on poor land, among relatives often in trouble for stock theft, and at sixteen Ned was sentenced to three years for receiving a stolen horse, having already served a term for assault.

The outbreak began on 15 April 1878, when Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick went to the Kelly house to arrest Ned's younger brother Dan for horse stealing. What followed is disputed. Fitzpatrick said Ned shot him in the wrist and Ellen Kelly struck him with a fire shovel; the family later said he was drunk, made advances to Ned's sister Kate, and injured his wrist on a door. Ellen Kelly was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to three years' hard labour. Ned and Dan took to the bush in the Wombat Ranges, joined by their friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart.

On 26 October 1878 the gang came upon a police party of four camped at Stringybark Creek, sent out from Mansfield to find them. Ned shot Constable Thomas Lonigan when he went for his revolver. When Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constable Michael Scanlan rode back into the camp, the gang opened fire, killing Scanlan; Kennedy was chased into the bush and killed. Constable Thomas McIntyre escaped on Kennedy's horse and reached Mansfield the next day. Within weeks Victoria passed the Felons Apprehension Act, and from 15 November the four men were outlaws whom anyone could shoot.

The gang then did what made them famous. In December 1878 they held up a station homestead outside Euroa, took dozens of people hostage and robbed the National Bank of more than £2,000. In February 1879 they crossed into New South Wales, locked the two Jerilderie constables in their own cells, put on police uniforms and robbed the Bank of New South Wales. Kelly burned mortgage papers and left behind a long dictated letter, the Jerilderie Letter, setting out his grievances against the police, landlords and the English. Then they vanished for sixteen months, sheltered by a network of relatives and sympathisers, while the combined reward rose to £8,000.

They came back with a plan to kill. On 26 June 1880 Byrne shot his former friend Aaron Sherritt, a police informer, at his door in the Woolshed Valley. The gang expected a police special train to be sent up the line, and at Glenrowan they had railway workers tear up the track on a curve above a gully, intending to wreck it and shoot the survivors. They held some sixty townspeople in Ann Jones's inn through the night. One hostage, the schoolteacher Thomas Curnow, won Kelly's trust, was allowed home, and signalled the pilot engine running ahead of the train to stop before it reached the break.

In the shooting that followed, police fire into the weatherboard inn killed thirteen-year-old John Jones and the labourer Martin Cherry, and a third man, George Metcalf, died of a wound whose source is uncertain. Byrne was shot in the bar. Dan Kelly and Hart died inside before the building was set alight, by what means is unknown. Ned was taken to Melbourne, tried before Sir Redmond Barry for Lonigan's murder, convicted on 29 October 1880 and hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 11 November, despite a petition for clemency carrying more than 32,000 signatures.