Ned Kelly

Edward Kelly was born in the colony of Victoria, in south-eastern Australia, around 1854. Even the date is uncertain, which tells you much about the family he arrived in. His father, John Kelly — Red to everyone — had been transported from Ireland as a convict, sentenced for theft and shipped to Van Diemen's Land. His sentence served, he crossed to the mainland, married an Irish girl called Ellen Quinn, and set about scratching a living out of a few hard acres. The Kellys were Irish, Catholic and poor, and in colonial Victoria each of those facts came with a price. By the time Ned was about twelve his father was dead, worn out and recently out of gaol again, and the family he left behind was very nearly destitute. Ellen was raising a crowd of children on land that barely fed them, and Ned, the eldest son, became the man of the house long before he had finished being a boy. He grew up knowing exactly where the family stood in the order of things: at the bottom, and watched.

To understand what came next, you need the quarrel running through the district. The colony had passed laws to break up the enormous sheep runs of wealthy graziers — the squatters — and let ordinary families "select" small farms of their own. In practice the selectors got the poor country, the squatters kept the water and the grass, and the two sides settled into a slow, bitter war over fences, stray cattle and unbranded horses. The police stood, or seemed to stand, on the squatters' side. To a poor Irish selector family, a constable was not a neutral keeper of the peace; he was the sharp end of somebody else's property. Suspicion ran both ways, and both ways had evidence. Stock did disappear, and Kelly relatives were involved in some of it; equally, the police watched the Kellys constantly and treated the whole clan as guilty by name. Out of that daily friction grew the grievance later written down at enormous length: the conviction that the law in Victoria was not a shield for people like them but a weapon against them.

Ned was in trouble from his teens. At fourteen or fifteen he rode for a while with an old bushranger, Harry Power, learning the trade from the inside; he was charged, released, charged again, and at sixteen was sent to prison for three years over a stolen horse he insisted he had not known was stolen. He came out hardened. Then, in April 1878, came the incident that lit everything. A young constable named Alexander Fitzpatrick rode alone to the Kelly homestead to arrest Ned's brother Dan. What happened inside is disputed to this day: Fitzpatrick swore Ned had shot him in the wrist; the family swore Ned was not even in the colony, and that the constable had arrived half-drunk and behaved badly. The court believed the constable. Ellen Kelly, with a baby at her breast, was sentenced to three years' hard labour, and two neighbours got six. As far as Ned was concerned, that settled the question of whether justice existed for the Kellys.

Ned and Dan went into the ranges and did not come out. Two friends joined them — Joe Byrne, quick-witted and literate, and Steve Hart, young and reckless — and the four camped in the wild country of the Wombat Ranges while the police organised search parties. In October 1878 four constables rode out from Mansfield and made camp at Stringybark Creek. They were hunting men who were already watching them. The Kellys ambushed the camp. Ned called on the police to surrender; there was shooting; three of the four — Lonigan, Scanlan and Sergeant Kennedy — were killed, and the fourth, McIntyre, escaped on a horse and rode for his life. Whatever else was arguable about Ned Kelly, this was not: three officers of the law lay dead in the bush, one of them, by Kelly's own account, finished off at close range because he was dying anyway. Hardly had the news reached Melbourne when the colony's parliament passed a Felons Apprehension Act declaring the four outlaws: they could now be shot on sight by anyone, and anyone who chose to harbour them faced prison.

What followed made them famous. In December 1878 the gang rode into Euroa, held the staff of a nearby station quietly captive, and robbed the National Bank with a courtesy that astonished the witnesses. Two months later they crossed into New South Wales and took the whole town of Jerilderie, locking the two local policemen in their own cells, putting on police uniforms, and walking about the town for two days before robbing the bank at their leisure. It was there that Kelly produced the document that changed how he would be remembered. Over thousands of words, dictated to Joe Byrne, he set out his case: the treatment of poor Irish settlers, the conduct of the police, the injustice done to his mother — the accumulated grievance of his life and his class. He wanted it printed. The newspaper man could not be found, so it was pressed on a bank employee instead, and the Jerilderie Letter stayed largely unpublished for decades — a furious, funny, threatening, half-literate masterpiece that reads like a man shouting at a country.

For nearly two years the four simply vanished whenever the police came near. That was not luck: in the north-east the gang was fed, hidden, warned and lied about by a network of relatives and sympathisers who saw them as their own. Police arrested dozens of these supporters and held them for months without trial, turning many neutral farmers into Kelly sympathisers overnight. The reward climbed to £8,000 for the gang — a fortune beyond the imagining of any farm labourer — and still nobody talked. The government poured in police and black trackers from Queensland, and Melbourne newspapers raged about the humiliation of the colony. Officers watched the gang's relatives, cut off their supplies and offered money in every pub in the district; still the four moved by night through country they had known since childhood, sleeping in huts whose owners would later swear they had seen nothing at all. Out in the ranges, meanwhile, the outlaws' defiance began to look, to a certain kind of reader, less like crime than like politics: four young men whom the poor would not betray, whatever was offered.

The end, when it came, was planned as a massacre and turned into a legend. In late June 1880 Joe Byrne shot Aaron Sherritt, a former friend suspected of informing for the police. The killing was bait: the gang knew a special police train would be sent north from Melbourne, so they rode to the small town of Glenrowan, tore up a stretch of line beyond the station, and waited for the train to be thrown off the rails. Meanwhile they took over Ann Jones's hotel and held some sixty townspeople inside, feeding them, singing and even dancing with them through the night. It came apart because of a schoolteacher: Thomas Curnow talked his way out, and just as the train approached the broken line he stood on the track with a candle and a red scarf and stopped it. The siege ran through the dark hours, bullets tearing through the weatherboard walls, hostages screaming to be let out; a boy and an old man among the civilians were fatally hit. By the time the sun came up, Joe Byrne was dead on the barroom floor.

Then, out of the mist behind the police lines, came the image Australia has never got rid of. Ned Kelly walked slowly towards them in a suit of armour he and his friends had beaten out of the mouldboards and shares of stolen ploughs: a cylindrical helmet with a slot for the eyes, a breastplate, a backplate, an apron — tens of kilograms of farm iron. Bullets struck him and bounced. He tapped his chest and laughed at them. For several extraordinary minutes the police thought they were shooting at a ghost, and their fire did nothing at all. But a ploughshare covers a chest, not a leg. As they realised what they were looking at they fired low, and once his legs were hit he went down in the wet grass and was taken alive. His brother Dan and Steve Hart died in the hotel, which burned; whether they were shot or took their own lives has never been settled.

He was tried in Melbourne that October before Judge Redmond Barry — the judge who had sentenced his mother — and convicted of the murder of Constable Lonigan. Petitions for a reprieve gathered tens of thousands of signatures and crowds met in Melbourne to demand one, but the government would not move, and he was hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880, aged about twenty-five. Tradition says he met it with the words "Such is life"; the phrase is famous, but the evidence is thin and other accounts differ, so it is better treated as legend than record. Barry himself died less than a fortnight later. And then the argument began, and never stopped. To some Australians Kelly is a folk hero, a poor man's champion whose defiance spoke for a whole class; to others, a man who shot three policemen and hid behind hostages. Sidney Nolan's paintings of the black helmet against a burning landscape made him a national symbol, novels and films keep re-fighting his case, and the armour itself stands in the State Library of Victoria, dented and rusted, while people queue to see it and disagree.