Bony - 25 - Bony and The Kelly Gang

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “Tomorrow, we finishes,” he said, when driving home one evening. “Tomorrow we put in new batteries at all the base points, and then we fixes up the sign outside Red’s house. After that we cleans our teeth and polishes our boots and gets ourselves ready for the shivoo.” Momentarily, his grey eyes examined Bony. “Like a bit of advice?”

  “Always open to advice.”

  “Eat hearty, for one thing. If you drink hard, eat hard.”

  “I shall do neither, except in moderation.”

  Joe laughed saying:

  “When you see what’s on the boards you’ll never want to stop eating. I’ve seen the little ’uns looking at what there is, and crying because they can’t eat no more.” His voice softened. “For centuries the people of Ireland wellnigh starved. For centuries they lived in rags. And all to support the English landlords and the Government. A lot of ’em came out to Australia and starved, too, for years and years, in the old days. And after what they done, and what they suffered, this Cork Valley is the only bit of Ireland outside of Ireland.”

  “It’s worth having,” Bony said, and meant it.

  “And it’s the only decent God-fearing place in the country, too. We have our faults. We have our notions of justice. We believe in doing unto others, and the rest, and there’s no more contented people in Australia.”

  “I can believe that, Joe. You said something of a sign out­side Red’s house. What sign?”

  “Electric. We put it up outside his front entrance: The Glenrowan Hotel. Everyone sees it at night while the festival goes on and it could be for three days.”

  “The Glenrowan Hotel,” repeated Bony. “That was the place where the Kelly gang came to a sticky end in 1880.”

  “That was it, Bony. As you reminded us at Red’s house, it was the booze at the Glenrowan Hotel what betrayed Ned into his carelessness and he paid for it with his life. You spoke well of Ned Kelly. And you spoke true when you said he was crucified by the Irish.” Joe sighed. “They’re all dead now. But their friends pay their respects every year here in Cork Valley.”

  “In the dinkum Irish fashion, eh?”

  “That’s so, Nat. The kids get their chance to join in. The young folk can get on with their love making. The oldees can natter and gossip and tell tales. You’re not going to forget it.”

  “Why, I think I could guess the name of the festival. It’s called …”

  “Don’t guess now, Nat,” urged Joe. “Guess when they ask you again at dinner.”

  Joe was right, but that night Bony’s guesses were wilder than usual. They dined on Irish stew and for dessert there was bread and jam and cheese. It was the plainest meal Bony remembered, and, the cause was the imperative demands on the cooks by the preparations for the festival. There was an undercurrent of excitement, especially marked in the chil­dren, the only person unaffected being Rosalie who, since her visit to Bowral, was withdrawn. There had been no music practice since that day.

  The next morning Joe and Bony conveyed to the big house a wide board studded with red reflectors to spell the name Glenrowan Hotel. This they affixed above the great entrance porch, and on the far side of the driveway a spotlight was rigged to a tree, Joe explaining that it would bring the sign into brilliance without producing light enough to be observed by anyone who might chance to be on the rim.

  Where the road at the settlement turned to reach the Kelly house, they erected another sign reading: ‘To Glenrowan’. For Bony this experience was unique. He whistled softly Irish airs. He noted the abnormal activities and the influx of strangers as a small boy watching a circus coming to town and helping to erect the tent. He forgot, for the time, Ma­homet’s Mountain, and the desirability of its approach to him. The responsibilities of his assignment became as light as thistledown—when he did remember them—whilst his career, with its rank and its importance of life was relegated to the chest where his Marie kept his uniform in tissue paper.

  After lunch he and Joe went again to the big house in which the huge living-room or banqueting hall was in process of being wrecked. The tapestries had been removed and the grey walls were bare and ugly. Jack, the Smuggler, and two helpers were building a low stage across one corner. Red Kelly was superintending the introduction of the trunk of a tree to the ten-foot-wide open hearth. He was shouting to someone out­side to “bar her in a bit more”. As a dozen men could stand inside the fireplace, the tree trunk didn’t look out of place although it was three feet thick.

  Bony stood behind Red Kelly who was inside the fireplace, and he could see, beyond the opening at the side, the re­mainder of the tree extending outside the house, and two men employing crowbars to move the log on to iron rollers. The branches had been lopped off, and once the log was positioned, a boy could then nudge it into the fireplace with a light bar.

  “How long is that going to last?” Bony asked, and Red stood to turn about, saw him, and shouted the answer.

  “ ’Bout a fortnight, Nat, just about, according what we use of her. None of your piddling stoves and ’lectric heaters for us. Heat is what we likes and heat is what we get. Nice stick of iron-bark, eh? I’ve had me eye on her these three years. Out­side there’s a mark on her put there by me grandfather in 1861. Have a look some time. We’re going to burn history, Nat.”

  “History is painted on the walls, Red,” declared a cracked voice, and Bony saw a little old man with bright eyes in a weather-beaten face. He was wearing breeches and a coat like the one worn by Joe Flanagan, and on his white hair perched a top hat from which all the nap had long since been chewed by moths.

  “Day to ye, Gaffer,” roared Red. “Glad to see ye. How’s the pison treating you?”

  “ ’Tis me liver, Red,” replied Gaffer. “But if I go easy on the Dew then me sciatica gives me bloody blue hell.”

  Bony was beckoned by his boss, and with Joe he worked at rigging strings of lights beneath the ceiling.

  “Can’t see where Red booted a hole in it. Can you, Nat?”

  “No. Red did a good job of repair work,” and Joe chuckled at a memory he wanted to keep to himself.

  Brian and two girls were nailing a huge Eireann flag on to one bare wall and on the opposite side of the room men were building what looked like a bar counter, and others were building shelves against that wall. Several boys began bring­ing in chairs all of the one pattern, and now and then through the rear door there came the aroma of beef being gently bar­becued, and pastry being baked. The ancient in the top hat went out that way, like Cassius, with a lean and hungry look.

  Bony found himself standing with Brian and his girls, admiring the flag tacked to the wall. One girl said it wasn’t level, and the other agreed with Brian that it was. Men staggered in under the weight of the school piano, and Brian gave one of the girls his hammer while he went to assist them. Someone shouted and the girl dropped the hammer to the floor and Bony retrieved it. They were having trouble with the piano and he slipped the handle of the hammer down inside his belt and lent a hand.

  The chaos was invaded by a dozen young lassies. Several carried cups with circular hoops passed through the handles. Others brought trays of buttered scones and tarts and cakes, and two boys appeared carrying a dixie of tea. Aged about twelve, they shyly served the workers with afternoon tea, and even Gaffer enjoyed the tea, having his cup refilled a dozen times. Afterwards, Bony accompanied Joe to the up­stairs rooms where the light bulbs were tested and some replaced. Here women were making up beds. They noted him, slyly or openly, with interest. These rooms were without floor coverings, and only a few of them contained more than the beds: sometimes singles, often doubles.

  They had to go out to the rear to fix outside lights, and what Bony saw there astonished him. Two whole bullocks were being barbecued. Three great boilers were emitting steam and the aroma of cooking hams and bacon. At the back of an open-fronted shed stared the fronts of baking ovens. And at the rear of all this stood a line of old and new cars, buggies and traps and buckboards.

  T
he electricians’ work done, Bony was asked to join the workers at the counter. They were nailing down the top.

  “Time’s a-knocking,” said a slim, pale-faced man with a great shock of dark hair under a tam-o’-shanter. “Nails here. Ram in a few at your end of these boards.”

  Bony nodded, and looked about for a hammer, and was told there was one in his belt. He used this with good effect, and soon the job was accomplished, and the men turned to complete the shelves.

  All was uproar and banging and voices. Dusk came, and Joe turned on the new lights to aid the old ones. The shelves were finished, and a cable was strung from wall to wall to support floor to ceiling curtains of bright green which would banish the counter from the rest of the room.

  Then it was time to return to the settlement and dinner, and Bony put his hammer down with the other tools on the lid of a chest. Although it seemed an impossible fluke, on the handle, which the palm of his hand had been gripping for more than an hour, were carved the letters E.T.

  Picking it up, he walked out openly with it and climbed into Joe’s utility.

  Coincidence! The thought occupied his mind still when he sat at the dining-table. Then his attention was distracted by Joe’s neighbour, the red-headed boy.

  “Come on, Nat! You have to guess the name of the festival.”

  “Have I? Now let me think. I know. The Fiddlers’ Festival.”

  “No,” chorused the children, and tonight were not checked by Mike Conway.

  “Well, then, is it called the Ned Kelly Festival?”

  “Yes,” they shrieked, and Inspector Bonaparte laughed with them.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Skeleton at the Feast

  DRESSED IN his smart new sports clothes and black shoes, purchased with money earned by digging spuds, In­spector Bonaparte was present at the official opening of the Ned Kelly Festival.

  The gathering in the great hall of Red Kelly’s mansion comprised not less than a hundred and fifty people, including children of all ages. The majority were sombrely dressed, and very few had obeyed the dictates of the current fashions, many of the women wearing costumes of bygone eras, while the men wore suits of mid- or late-Victorian vintage. But the cloth was of a high quality, and if the men scorned wrist-watches, their stomachs were decorated with heavy gold chains. It was a church congregation rather than a festival crowd.

  Mike Conway made his way through the throng to the orchestra stage. He was wearing a black suit, with a snowy white shirt and inch-long white sleeve-cuffs. His black curly hair contrasted sharply with his pale complexion, and as he stood facing the audience seated in rows and standing massed at the sides, it was obvious that he had something of great importance to say. His dark eyes roamed over the people for half a minute before he spoke, and all impressions of him received by Bony were to be confirmed.

  “It is good for us all to be joined again in a community spirit which has continued from its conception, in the days when life was indeed hard, down to the present, when we enjoy comparative luxury in living conditions and are still imbued with the faith and the ideals of our forefathers. They rebelled against oppression and fought for freedom. We are rebels against oppression, and we fight on for freedom. With­out faith, without ideals we would have become as the morons in the cities who are satisfied as long as they are provided with bread and games as were the slaves in Roman days.”

  A good beginning, thought Bony, and was to have this first opinion qualified by reservations and differing views. Mike declared that the people of Cork Valley and the adjoining mountains were oppressed by the seven governments, plus the two thousand politicians, ruling Australia’s population of a meagre ten million. He stressed the point that this small popu­lation was forced to support internal and external govern­ment agencies on a par with the great nations of a hundred millions and more. He stated as a fact that two thousand politicians, plus five thousand top civil servants, were batten­ing on the producers. They received enormous salaries, were provided with perks covering every possible need for them­selves and their families; the highest of them were given world tours, taking with them their wives and children, with secretaries and valets and maids, and the lowest managed to take long holiday tours in the north of Australia when the weather was cool, all paid for by the unfortunate taxpayers.

  “It is said,” he went on, “that you can do anything provided it is legal. These scoundrels have made it legal to rob the people. In the days of the great empires similar scoundrels looted and robbed without troubling to make their thieving legal. In those historic times the robbers were titled Caesars and Emperors: today they are Presidents and Cabinet Minis­ters. It matters not by what they are called; all are the same today as they were two thousand years ago; with the dif­ference that for every parasite the people had to support in ancient times, we have to support fifty.”

  Mike paused to allow this remarkable assertion to sink in. Then coldly deliberate, he said:

  “There have been many great tragedies in human history. The greatest tragedy of them all was the failure of a man named Guy Fawkes. Had Guy Fawkes succeeded in blowing up the English Parliament, the politicians even down to this day would have less contempt for the people they oppress … legally.

  “We may not do anything which isn’t legal, but we may do anything at all which we consider to be moral. Morality is a greater power than legality. Thus we hold ourselves morally justified in resisting unmoral taxes. We are morally responsible for continually struggling to retain the last small vestiges of freedom left to us. As exemplars, I give to you the original Kellys. I call on our own Red Kelly.”

  Instead of wild cheers, there were respectful murmurs of sincere agreement, and then Red Kelly stood, his small blue eyes glinting in the subdued daylight, and the large mouth opening slowly amid the mass of fiery whiskers. Coming after the low voice of Conway, his words pounded on their ears.

  “Kelly! Ned Kelly! The greatest Irishman of all toime. We all know about him, rest his soul. We all know how he fought back the police. We all know how his mother and sister, his brothers and himself were persecuted until he took up arms against the persecutors. They declared war on him and his, and he proved how great an Irishman he was by fighting back. He opened the banks and gave the money to the poor. The enemy locked up his mother without a trial, and his sister Kate, and many of their friends. Held ’em in durance for months and years. We know how they got Ned in the end. They got him not because they had guts and brains, ’cos they had neether, but because Ned and his gang had a party at the Glenrowan Hotel and weren’t expectin’ the enemy on the doorstep. So they shot it out with the police, and the police fired the hotel without mercy for the many unoffending people inside.”

  Groans came from the congregation, and Red Kelly pro­duced a sheet of paper and held up a hand for silence.

  “Now we could forget and forgive if the enemies of the Kellys had been English or Scotch, or German or Chinese. But, friends, the Kellys’ antagonists were Irish, damn their eyes. Here is a list of ’em, the bastids who was paid blood money for murderin’ their own countrymen. Listen here! I’ll give you their names: Thomas Curnow, Constable Kelly, Stanhope O’Connor, Sergeant Whelan, Constable P. Kelly, Constable Dwyer, Constable Ryan, Constable Reilly, Con­stable Cawsey, Constable Healey, Constable Mullane, Con­stable McColl, Constable Meager, Constable … Ar, why go on. They all took their blood money, the dirty Irish bastids.”

  The echoes of Red’s voice faded into the silence, and the silence was broken by a unified yell of horror. The reaction of the listeners convinced Bony that this was a new line to them. Red continued:

  “We know that after the last great fight at the Glenrowan Hotel Dan Kelly and Steve Hart were dead, and Ned Kelly severely wounded. We know that the people in the hotel were fired on, although they had nothing to do with the fight. We know how his Riverence Bishop Gibney went into the burning building and, in spite of the police fire, brought out people and saved them from death. And we
know how Ned was tried, before ever he was took to court, before Judge Barry, and how Judge Barry condemned him to death, and then went home and died of a foul disease, smitten down by the God of Justice he had offended.”

  Red glared at the meeting, and the meeting groaned and rocked. He looked about till he found Bony, and then drama­tically pointing, said:

  “There’s a heathen what has become a Conway. I tell you now of Nat Bonnay, my friend and my conqueror. He named us a name. He calls the Irish in government and departments as no good bastid Irish, and us he names the dinkum Irish. We are dinkum Irish and proud of it. Thank you Nat for speakin’ true. Now come up here and say a word before I call on Gaffer to open the festival.”

  Not unprepared because Red had threatened to call on him to address the gathering, Bony stepped to the platform and smiled all round, ending with Grandma Conway. They smiled back at him, and he knew then that for the first time in his life he was free of the colour bar. He said:

  “I will not make a speech. I will, however, recite a poem written by an old friend of mine. This is how it goes:

  “In days of old, when men were bold,

  The Kellys roamed the scrub.

  They flitted about from bank to bank,

  And finished up at the pub.”

  Doubtful of the reaction to this, Bony went on to the next verse of the ode:

  “The police couldn’t tell what Ned would do,

  Nor when and how he’d act.

  In the broad of day or the dark of night,

  He’d give to the lean and take from the fat!”

  The audience stirred, looking one at another, beginning to smile, and Bony went on courageously: