Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  The mercy of fresh food was occasional, and there were deaths at Pine Creek and elsewhere from that terrible dehumanising disease, scurvy. The conclusion was reached that only Asians could put up with the hardship and Captain Bloomfield Douglas chartered a ship in Singapore to bring 186 Chinese and ten Malays to Palmerston on two-year indentures. They were paid rice and preserved fish and £8 a month to work at Pine Creek and elsewhere. The Northern Territory attracted Chinese diggers from other colonies as well, and Julian Tenison Woods, Adelaide geologist, Catholic priest and confidante of Mother Mary Potter, wrote in 1886, ‘At present the whole gold-mining industry of the Northern Territory is bound hand and foot and handed over to the Chinamen. I have seen something of China and much of the Chinese, and I say we will one day regret any supremacy we give them.’

  SOCIAL BANDITS II

  Far to the south, Victoria had been transformed by new railways. The wheat farmers of the Wimmera—if they were able promptly to get a machine contractor to strip their crop—could send it to Melbourne on a train regardless of road conditions and without the high cost of road transport. To look a little way into the future, in 1887 the Victorian and South Australian rail systems met up, and in 1888 New South Wales and Queensland met at Wallangarra on the border. In their own way, the railways federated Australia, despite the different widths between rails which meant trans-shipping at the border, as it would become possible for a citizen to travel from Brisbane to Adelaide by rail. Borrowing heavily from London financiers, the Victorians built 2400 kilometres of rail lines by 1885. But even in the 1870s the railways and the telegraph made it easier for a centralised police force to deal with the bush riffraff, though the disgruntled small settler still had the advantage of knowing the remoter bush.

  Red Kelly, Ned’s convict father, who had served his time in Van Diemen’s land before coming to Melbourne and marrying Ellen Quinn, the daughter of free settlers, was continuously anxious about police attention. While farming at Avenel, north of Seymour, he was arrested for cattle stealing and having in his possession illegally one cowhide. His sentence was a £25 fine or six months in prison, and although £25 was an enormous sum for people like the Quinns and Kellys, the money was raised before he had served the full six months. He died soon after his release, ‘of dropsy’, or congestive heart failure, and was buried at Avenel in the last days of 1866.

  The Quinns were a large bush clan, wanted at various times for horse theft, and characteristic of the small, alienated selector and farmer to whom stock theft came naturally and was, if Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie letter can be believed, in the case of the Irish in particular, seen as an extension of vengeance on the stock of landlords in Ireland. So pervasive was the problem that Mr McBean, a squatter from Kilfera Station in north-east Victoria, grew disgusted at the lenient sentences the magistrates handed down and posted an advertisement in a newspaper addressed to sheep stealers.

  In consequence of the decision of the magistrate in the Benalla Court, the undersigned would be obliged if sheep stealers would take only what mutton they require for private use.

  Under the Land Act of 1865, the widowed Mrs Kelly took up a small area at East Greta in north-east Victoria close to the main Melbourne–Sydney road, a location which she hoped might help in the success of the farm. But it was poor country and Mrs Kelly found it hard to fulfil the cultivation requirements. The Kelly boys grew up as part of a group of wild locals known as the Greta Mob.

  As a selector, Ellen Kelly—like the men who married her daughters, such as William Skillion—was hampered in the taking out of acreages by the squatters’ stratagems known as peacocking, dummying, and the use of Duffy Certificates. Duffy Certificates were issued as compensation to those who purchased land at auction in the 1850s and had paid more than £1 per acre. They were used by pastoralists as proof of title to good land and so to frighten selectors away. And the demand that the police deal strenuously with all stock theft led ultimately to a relentless and vengeful bullying of the Kelly clan.

  Ned Kelly’s famous Jerilderie letter, detailing all his complaints against the established world and started in Euroa when he had held up the bank there in December 1878 and finished in the virtual capture of the town of Jerilderie in the Riverina of New South Wales in February 1879, was written to justify his path. By the time he crossed the Murray, his mother Ellen, with babe in arms (the father, her partner George King, an American), had been arrested by Sergeant Steele at the Kelly farm. After being handcuffed she was charged with aiding and abetting one Edward Kelly in a murder attempt. She had been sentenced by Redmond Barry at Beechworth to three years’ servitude. What else would be needed to enhance a young man’s sense of being engaged in civil war?

  The death of policemen at Stringybark Creek barely delayed the popular imagination when it applied itself to Ned. At an official and establishment level, though, Stringybark was seen as demonstrating Ned’s true nature as an irremediable killer. Sergeant Michael Kennedy, who had earlier in the month assisted in the court proceedings against Ellen Kelly, created a police camp at Stringybark Creek in the melancholy bush outside Mansfield in late October 1878. The detachment stationed there were all Irish themselves. On the afternoon of 26 October 1878, the Kelly gang were attracted to the place by tracks they spotted and because one of the constables, McIntyre, fired at some parrots and gave away the police position. The Kellys bailed up McIntyre and Lonigan, the other policemen then in the camp, late in the afternoon. Constable Lonigan, who in helping to arrest Ned the previous year on the charge of riding a horse across a pavement in Benalla and had resorted to twisting Ned’s testicles, began firing from behind a log and was shot dead. McIntyre, unharmed, became a prisoner. The gang then concealed themselves until Kennedy and Scanlon arrived back from their patrol at 6 p.m. McIntyre rose to advise his colleagues to surrender. Kennedy at first thought him joking, then drew his revolver and slid down off his horse, which McIntyre took hold of and immediately escaped on. Kennedy was mortally wounded and, in bloodlust or mercy or an instinct partway between, Kelly shot him dead through the chest. Scanlon too had been killed in the exchange. McIntyre rode into Mansfield to warn of what had happened.

  There are signs that Ned, who was not a killer by nature, became fatally haunted by the men murdered at Stringybark, and from then on set about, however aggressively, seeking forgiveness before man and God. Yet the events of the Euroa hold-up were still considered by his supporters as consummate bushranging accomplishments, Euroa itself being achieved with style and a considerable amount of tactical planning, and possessing a romance that the killing of the policemen at Stringybark Creek had lacked.

  At lunchtime on 9 December 1878, a party of four men had sauntered into the yard of Faithfull’s Creek station a few miles to the north of Euroa. The gang at that moment consisted of twenty-three-year-old Ned, his seventeen-year-old brother Dan, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne (both selectors’ sons from the Beechworth district). The manager and the whole workforce were ‘bailed up’, and when at dusk a hawker drove up to the station, Ned and the gang took him and his assistant prisoner and fitted themselves out from his stock with new suits, boots, hats and magenta Tommy Duds (neckties). Mrs Fitzgerald, the station cook, and other women were allowed to move about the station as they pleased, but the male prisoners were kept in the storeroom, where they played cards and talked to Ned about the killing of the policemen at Stringybark Creek six weeks before. Ned insisted that it had not all been deliberate murder.

  Euroa, like other of Ned’s acts of hostage-taking, was in part a kindly affair, and some of the men, without being pressured, even offered him money for his cause. The next day Ned’s lieutenants cut the telegraph wires north of town, and the hostage numbers increased with the arrival of some sporting kangaroo hunters and telegraph-wire repairers.

  In Euroa, the two bank tellers and a manager opened the safe and over £2000 in cash, gold and jewellery was removed. The outlaws, as was always
their custom, also took mortgage papers held by the bank against local selectors, an act which further enhanced the sympathies between the gang and the small farmers. The bank manager’s family, the Scotts, were gathered up from the bank residence at the rear of the bank for transport back to Faithfull’s Creek station. Since it was a busy day in town, with people having come in from their selections to renew their licences, Mrs Scott insisted on wearing a new dress just sent from Melbourne. The Scott family having been taken to Faithfull’s Creek station, Ned sat down to write a detailed letter to Donald Cameron, MLA, member for West Bourke, who in the House had asked the Premier of Victoria to look into the issue of whether the behaviour of policemen in Benalla had provoked the Stringybark Creek murders. Then the outlaws, who as a result of these and other raids and acts of self-justified depredation had become known as ‘The Gang’, issued graphic threats against any of their captives who tried to leave the station before 11 p.m., and departed, shouting and jumping their horses over fences, in the direction of the wild Strathbogie Ranges. As the Kelly Gang crossed the Murray and rode to New South Wales and their consummate raid on Jerilderie, Ned carried in his pocket the pages of what would become his Jerilderie letter, over 8000 words long when finished, a document in which his denouncement of police competed with his plea for absolution for the Stringybark killings.

  In Jerilderie, late on a Saturday in early 1879, Ned captured the police station and Senior Constable Devine, whom he locked up. Next day, dressed in Devine’s uniform and posing as a visiting trooper, he would accompany young Mrs Devine to Mass, treating her entirely as the good, devout Irish young woman she was, but letting her know her husband’s survival depended on her behaviour. The other constable, Richards, was more easily cowed than Devine and took the uniformed Ned Kelly and his brother Dan, similarly attired, to the Royal Hotel, the Bank of New South Wales being located within the building.

  They held up the Royal Hotel, including any customers who happened to be there, then went on to the bank. There they found the manager, John Tarleton, having a bath. The safe was opened and over £2000 was taken along with all the papers, including mortgages. Once the robbery was over, Ned Kelly went to find the town newspaper proprietor, Samuel Gill, to give him his letter for printing in his Jerilderie and Urana Gazette. However Gill had left town on hearing of the gang’s arrival, and was hiding in a drain in the countryside. Ned instead handed his manifesto to Samuel Gill’s assistant, Living.

  At an unspecified time that day, the child John Monash, some ten years old, was in town from boarding school and visiting his parents, who ran a store there. Ned chatted with him on the street, meeting through him the Diggers who in World War l would attempt to re-produce his, ‘Tell them I died game’ style of gallantry in a chaos of high explosive and gas.

  When it was time to leave, Ned gave the normal fiery and eloquent speech about what had turned him into an outlaw. His anxiety to justify himself is telling. No other bushranger sermonised to pubs full of citizens or went searching for someone to publish his apologia. The gang then gave an exhibition of rough and skilful riding in the main street before vanishing, back across the Murray and into the mountains of north-eastern Victoria, the country in which they were utterly at home.

  At the time of the Jerilderie raid, despite the fact that under the Outlawry Act the Kelly brothers and their companions were considered to be beyond the normal protection offered by the law, but could be shot at any time by anyone, though twenty-three Kelly relatives and associates were in gaol in Beechworth and though a fabulous reward sum for turning the Kellys in was on offer, information and aid continued to flow to the gang. Seven of the twenty-three gaoled men were Kelly relatives; contrary to the view of Kelly’s support being entirely Irish-based, three were Scottish and the rest were English. For every man locked up there were now even more willing to defy the police.

  The Jerilderie letter Ned had left with Living seems to come directly from the language of Irish protesters, and of Irish transportees who saw themselves as victims of a system rather than, as the authorities would have it, criminals. There existed a pernicious system which had not let him live in peace, Ned claimed. The Victorian police were successors of those Irish who were willing to serve ‘under a flag and nation that has destroyed, massacred, and murdered their forefathers’. In his view an Irish policeman was ‘a traitor to his country, ancestors, and religion’. He had ‘left the ash corner, deserted the shamrock, the emblem of true wit and beauty’. The persecution had extended to Ned’s family. ‘Is my brothers and sisters and my mother not to be pitied also who has no alternative only to put up with the brutal and cowardly conduct of a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splay-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords which is better known as officers of Justice or Victorian police?’ One aspect of Ned’s instinctive republicanism emerged in the universal Irish peasant hope that America would declare war on Britain, ‘as it is all Irishmen as has got command of her armies forts and batteries . . . would they not slew around and fight her [Britain] with their own arms for the sake of the colour they dare not wear for years and to reinstate it and rise old Erin’s isle once more from the pressure and tyrannism of the English yolk which has kept it in poverty and starvation and caused them to wear the enemy’s coat.’

  Then the letter takes on a manic tone. ‘I give fair warning to all those who has reason to fear me to sell out and give £10 out of every hundred towards the widow and orphan fund and do not attempt to reside in Victoria . . . Neglect this and abide by the consequences, which shall be worse than the rust in the wheat in Victoria or the druth of a dry season to the grasshoppers in New South Wales.’

  In fact Ned’s justification, threats and appeal for absolution would not be published in the time left to him. It was suppressed. The New South Wales attorney-general sent a cable to Jerilderie warning Living against selling it to Melbourne papers who clamoured for it. Instead the manuscript was seized by the New South Wales police and sent to the government of Victoria.

  On a weekend in June 1880, Ned put into action a plan that centred on the town of Glenrowan. Ned had brought to Glenrowan the famous armour hammered out of ploughshares which he and the others would wear at various stages during the coming siege.

  At pistol point on Saturday night, he made several railway platelayers lift segments of the line by a steep embankment just north of Glenrowan. He had reason to believe a police special would come up from Benalla pursuing him. Had Ned passed over into a state of nihilism in which death-dealing was the chief principle of his life? If so, he had not displayed that tendency at Euroa or Jerilderie—and he was so haunted by Stringybark that it was unlikely.

  According to a kinder view of Ned, and that of eminent historian John Molony, as the train arrived from Benalla he would have the stationmaster flash a danger signal, and the occupants would be informed by an emissary, a Kelly supporter, of the situation they were in and warned that if they tried to reverse, the line behind them would be blown up by blasting powder. Indeed, had Ned intended loss of life by train wreck he would surely have derailed the line to the south of Glenrowan. He wanted to use the captured police, including Superintendent Francis Hare, Kelly-hunter-in-chief, as hostages to exchange for his mother’s freedom. He expected the police to come post-haste during Saturday night, resulting in an early Sunday morning confrontation. Instead the police in Melbourne and not Benalla put together the response. Everything would be delayed a day.

  Ned expected police to come to Glenrowan from Benalla because he had organised an event to attract them. While Ned was attending to pulling up the rail, he had sent his brother Dan and his lieutenant Joe Byrne to threaten a police informer who had grown up with the Byrnes, Harts and Kellys in the Beechworth area, one Aaron Sherritt, who was sheltering in his hut under a guard of five police. Unfortunately, words which Sherritt, in a fit of guilty anger, had uttered to Joe Byrne’s m
other—‘I’ll kill him and before he’s cold I’ll fuck him’—provided Joe Byrne with an absolute warrant for Sherritt’s death. Despite the five police guards hidden in the bedroom, Aaron Sherritt was shot dead by Joe. The outlaws then rode away to meet Ned at Glenrowan. To acquire some hostages the gang took over Mrs Anne Jones’ Glenrowan Inn, where some sixty people were detained, including a local schoolteacher named Thomas Curnow.

  Ned’s expectations grew in grandeur during that Sabbath. He would capture the train, its police and horses, and with them as his bargaining pieces, advance down the line raiding banks, perhaps even kidnapping the ultimate hostage, the Governor of Victoria.

  In Mrs Jones’ pub there was singing—even a Kelly ballad was performed by one of Ned’s guests. ‘Ned would go through the waltzes, he was laughing and amused all around him,’ Mrs Jones later told the police. Mrs Jones said that not everyone approved of the idea of derailing trains—a sign that in the eyes of the hostages Ned did contemplate a train wreck. ‘But the devil was in us. We had to be looking at the darling man, but sure Ned was a darling man.’ Towards three o’clock on the Monday morning it was decided that all the women at the pub could go home, but first Ned gave his obligatory self-justifying speech, and while he was still speaking, a train was heard.