Ned Kelly

Ned Kelly, the leader of the infamous Kelly gang, has been described as Australia's only truly national hero. During a short but intense crime spree at the end of the 1870s, he led a gang of notorious outlaws who rampaged through the Australian bush, robbing banks and stealing horses as they evaded capture for more than two years. For some, Kelly embodies a certain rugged, masculine Australian spirit - a heroic anti-establishment figure, standing up for poor farmers against the corruptions of the government and powerful landowners. Yet to the Victorian police who hunted him, he was nothing more than a thief and murderer. So what put Ned Kelly on a collision course with the law? Was he a brave rebel, or a cold-blooded criminal? And how did the Australia he grew up in determine the course of his life – and the legend that formed after his death? This is a Short History Of Ned Kelly. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Professor Graham Seal, an expert on Australian folklore and the author of 'Tell em I Died Game': The Legend of Ned Kelly. Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Mirianna Pitman-Latham and Matthew Peaty | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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  It is Monday, the 28th of June, 1880, in a rural town in the Australian colony of Victoria. Though it is well past midnight, the Glenroan Inn is still abuzz with activity. A beacon of light and sound in the pre-dawn darkness. A tall, good-looking man named Joe Byrne leans against the bar, sipping a brandy. An accordionist nearby plays a jaunty tune as Joe's friend Ned whirls the inn's owner, Mrs. Jones, round the dance floor. Across the bar, the woman's daughter giggles with Ned's brother Dan. And in the corner of the room, their friend Steve plays a raucous game of cards with a group of older men.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  But there are signs that the party is wearing thin. Babies are grizzling. Exhausted children sit slumped in their chairs. They've been here for hours and not of their own volition. Because Joe, Ned, Dan and Steve are the notorious Kelly Gang. And everyone at the inn is their hostage, even if they are making the best of it.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Finishing his brandy, Joe puts his glass down on the bar and checks his watch before heading to the front door. Gesturing to Steve to lock it behind him, he steps out into the night air, clear and cool as crystal. The inn sits beside a railway line and Joe wanders a little way down the tracks, peering into the darkness. Still, nothing. A train full of police officers is coming for the gang and it should have been here by now. Suddenly, a whistle cuts through the still night air.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Joe freezes, heart pounding. Just beyond the edge of the town, on a steep bend, they have sabotaged the tracks. He waits, straining to hear the almighty crash that is surely coming. But the only sound is the squeal of the brakes as the steam engine comes to a controlled halt.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Cursing under his breath, Joe turns and races back to the inn. Throwing open the unlocked back door, he comes pelting into the bar, shouting that the police have arrived. The derailment plan has failed. At once, Ned orders Mrs. Jones to douse the lights and fires. The reek of kerosene fills the room as Joe follows the rest of the gang into a back room.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  There, shining in the weak moonlight streaming in through the window, lies Ned's proudest invention. Four suits of armour, fashioned from scrap metal, one for each member of the gang.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Joe shrugs out of his coat and begins to fasten the heavy breast and backplates to his torso, helped by Dan. When that is secured, he puts on a tall, bucket-like helmet that instantly reduces his vision to a thin strip. Groping for the shotgun he has lent against the wall, he warily follows the clanking sounds of Ned's footsteps to the front door.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  As their leader throws it open, Joe hears a shot ring out.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  The police must already have them surrounded. Through the narrow slit of his visor, he sees Ned's shoulders move as he takes a deep breath.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Then, in a hail of police bullets, he steps out of the inn and into legend.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Ned Kelly, the leader of the infamous Kelly Gang, has been described as Australia's only true national hero. During a short but intense crime spree at the end of the 1870s, he led a gang of notorious outlaws who rampaged through the Australian bush, robbing banks and stealing horses as they evaded capture for more than two years. For some, Kelly embodies a certain rugged, masculine Australian spirit. A heroic, anti-establishment figure, standing up for the poor farmers against the corruptions of the government and powerful landowners. Yet, to the Victorian police who hunted him, he was nothing more than a thief and a murderer. So what put Ned Kelly on a collision course with the law?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Was he a brave rebel or a cold-blooded criminal? And how did the Australia he grew up in determine the course of his life? And the legend that formed after his death? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of Ned Kelly.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Ned Kelly's story is deeply entwined with the history of Australia in the middle of the 19th century. Neither of his parents are native to the land of his birth. His father, John Red Kelly, is from Tipperary, Ireland, where in 1841, he is convicted of stealing two pigs and sentenced by the English authorities to seven years' transportation to Australia.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  It is a common punishment in this period, established by the British in an effort to secure the colony for themselves and alleviate the problem of prison overcrowding. By the time the practice ends in the 1860s, some 162,000 men, women and children will have been sent to this distant land and put to work building Britain's new colony. This is the life that awaits John Kelly when he arrives in Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, in 1842.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  After serving his sentence, John heads for the Port Phillip district of New South Wales. Within a couple of years, this region on the southeastern tip of Australia will become the separate colony of Victoria. Here, around 30 miles from Melbourne, he meets Ellen Quinn on the farm rented by her father.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  By now, John is 30 years old, a large man with striking ginger hair, while Ellen, dark, pretty and a proficient horsewoman, is just 18. She is also Irish, though her family migrated voluntarily. The life stories of this young couple reflect the changing demographics of Australia in this period. Professor Graham Seal is an expert on Australian folklore and the author of "Tell 'Em I Died" Game: The Legend of Ned Kelly.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Migrants come, free migrants. The place develops more or less in various ways. And then the gold rushers come in the 1850s and 60s and the population increases dramatically. After the gold rushers are over, the population is increased, but most of them haven't made their fortune and have got nowhere to go. So there's a great deal of pressure on colonial governments to what they call "open up the land". So they open up the land to what they call "free selectors", which is all fine and well, but there's already a group on the land who previously displaced the indigenous inhabitants and they're called squatters. They're the kind of group who got there a generation or two earlier and took up government grants or simply squatted out in the middle of nowhere and because they'd been there for however many years it was, everybody said, "Okay, well, it's your land."

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Though Ellen's family initially disapprove of her liaison with an ex-convict, their attitude changes rapidly when she falls pregnant. In November 1850, she and John are married and he builds a snug hut for his family on her father's land. And when John finds work as a gold digger and timber cutter, it seems he has turned over a new leaf.

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• 11:21Speaker 02

  Sometime in late 1854 or early the next year, Ellen gives birth to a son. She names him Edward or Ned, and soon has him baptised by a local Catholic priest, Father Charles O'Hair. The Kellys will go on to have eight children in total, five girls and three boys, seven of whom will survive infancy.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  The family settle in the picturesque town of Avonel. Ned attends the local school, where he learns to read and write. He is also something of an athlete, which proves crucial when, aged 11, he is crossing a bridge and sees a younger boy fall into the water. Without a second thought, he dives into the swollen creek.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  He saved a boy from drowning in a river, and for that he was given a green sash as a reward, presumably the green reflecting the Irishness of the community there. And he was extremely proud of that sash.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  But in 1866, everything changes for the Kelly family. Just after Christmas, John dies of alcohol-related illness, leaving 33-year-old Ellen to care for her seven young children alone. At 12, Ned becomes the man of the house, and it falls to him to ride into town on a bright day in late December to report his father's death.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  In the wake of this tragedy, Ellen moves her young family to the town of Greta in rural north-eastern Victoria to be closer to her Quinn relatives. Here, Ned grows up surrounded by a huge extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  They're all related to each other by marriage. So it's the Kellys, there's quite a lot of those. It's the Quins and the Lloyds, all of whom are related one way or another. And other people from the same area and from the same background also participate in the local networks.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Ireland may be on the other side of the world, but the importance of their heritage is instilled in all of the children.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Even if the kids are born here, they've inherited those kind of images and ideas of Irish antagonism towards the English. And they're also pretty unhappy about the situation they find themselves in when they do take up these selections of land and find that those squatters that have been there before have got the best land, they've got the water supplies sewn up, and they've also got the local policing and authorities sewn up as well. And they've also got access to the markets by and large sewn up. So that doesn't leave very much room for people like the Kellys to actually get out there and prosper.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  The precarious position of selectors, alongside a deep-seated hatred of the English authorities inherited from his father, will be important drivers of Ned Kelly's later actions.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  After the Kellys move to Greta, Ned leaves school and embarks on an education of a different kind with his uncles and cousins. He learns horsemanship, cuts timber and is shown how to shear sheep. These rural pursuits represent a vision of what his future could look like. And although Ned ultimately takes a different path, these lessons in bushcraft will not be wasted.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  During his adolescence, he also learns about the wrong side of the law. Several of his uncles and cousins have convictions for assault, drunkenness and horse or cattle theft, a common crime in the district. They live in a tight-knit world where everyone knows everyone else's business and everyone's sins.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Everybody knows everybody, basically, whether it's the police, the squatters, the selectors, the shopkeepers, and of course, the Kellys and everybody else. So when someone does something wrong, everyone knows about it straight away. And it's a very tightly compressed social situation we get in that north-eastern Victoria area.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  In 1869, Ned himself is arrested for the first time, although the charge of theft is swiftly dropped. But it is now that he embarks on a criminal apprenticeship under a local bushranger named Harry Power.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Bushranging is the Australian version, if you like, of the Robin Hood tradition, which is all around the world, of course, this idea that there are some kind of people who are noble robbers. Dick Turpin, of course, is the English example. Jesse James, Billy the Kid and so forth in America. And you get equivalent figures pretty well everywhere and everywhere going back to pre-Roman times. These people are convicts in particular. First, they escape into the bush. In order to survive, they rob people on the roads. They get to be called bushrangers. And that continues on. After the convict era is over and the gold era begins, the people who are called bushrangers then are basically robbing gold coaches rather than individual travellers, they do a bit of that as well. But they're the next generation, if you like, of bushrangers.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Harry Power is a middle-aged Irishman and escaped convict, a fearless rider with a booming voice, perfect for telling unwary travellers to bail up. The Australian bushranger equivalent of a highwayman shouting, "Stand and deliver."

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Harry was the tutor for Ned. And Harry told him and showed him how to conduct robberies, not that they were very sophisticated. Basically, you just ride up to somebody on the road and pointed your gun in their face and said, "Bail up." And generally speaking, they did, which was a pretty sensible reaction.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  After a thrilling few months holding up coaches and running rings around the police, Ned returns to his mother's house. Though he is soon arrested on suspicion of being Power's young accomplice, the charges are dismissed when witnesses fail to identify him. Power is not so lucky. Thanks to a tip from either Ned or his uncle, he is arrested and sentenced to 15 years hard labour.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Ned soon joins him inside. In 1870, he goes to prison for three months after an argument turns violent. And though he is released early the next year, he does not remain a free man for long.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  That April, a policeman sees Ned riding down the street in Greta on a handsome horse. Ned will later claim he was returning it to an acquaintance who had lost it. But if that's true, this friend neglected to tell him that he had stolen it from the postmaster.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  The attempted arrest is a mess. When Ned tries to flee, the constable pulls out his revolver and fires it three times at the teenager. Three times, the gun fails. After a violent struggle, Ned is coshed around the head and dragged off to the police station.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  While he is initially arrested for horse theft, it soon becomes clear that the initial crime had taken place while Ned was still in prison. His friend is convicted of illegally borrowing the animal, but the technicality doesn't extend to Ned, who is convicted of receiving a stolen horse. He is sentenced to three years hard labour in Pentridge Prison.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Pentridge Prison was the main prison in Melbourne. That's away from Beechworth, away and in the city. And of course, three years in that kind of environment at the age of 14, 15 or so, didn't do him a great deal of good.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  He will spend the best part of his teenage years in solitary confinement, sleeping on a coconut mat on the floor of his cell or else building seawalls to protect Melbourne with a gang of other convicts. It is a hard life for a young man.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Ned Kelly is 19 by the time he walks free in February 1874. By now, a strapping young man of almost six feet tall. After the enforced haircuts and shaving in prison, he will spend the rest of his life growing out his beard.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Upon reaching the homestead, he finds the family much changed. His oldest sister Annie is buried under a stand of willow trees alongside her infant daughter, having died in childbirth after being impregnated and abandoned by a local police officer. His 14-year-old brother Jim has been convicted of stealing cows and is serving a five-year sentence.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  But there are new arrivals too. As well as a newborn half-sister, he also has a stepfather, a young American horse thief named George King, whom Ellen marries two weeks after Ned's release. The lessons of prison still fresh in his memory, for now, Ned goes straight. He works as a timber cutter and farm labourer, and colleagues from the time describe him as quiet and diligent, if somewhat impulsive.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  But in 1877, his stepfather convinces him to help with stealing livestock. The youngest Kelly boy, Dan, a wild 16-year-old soon joins them, galloping around town with a band of fellow Hellraisers. For months, Ned and George lead a well-oiled stock theft operation across Victoria and New South Wales, stealing horses in one state and selling them in the other.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Everything is going smoothly, until April 1878, when a warrant is issued for Dan Kelly's arrest. The law has caught up with them.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  It is an unseasonably warm evening in April 1878. Ellen Kelly, now in her mid-forties, stands in her small, neat cottage, stirring an aromatic pot of stew on the stove. In the corner of the room, her teenage daughter Kate sits, rocking her baby sister.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  The quiet is disturbed by an aggressive hammering at the door.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Wiping her hands on her apron, Mrs. Kelly goes to open it and finds local police officer Constable Fitzpatrick standing on the doorstep. When he opens his mouth to speak, Ellen detects the strong scent of brandy on his breath. He tells her that he has come to arrest her youngest son, Dan.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Shrugging, she tells him Dan isn't here and goes to close the door in his face. But Fitzpatrick slams it open and whips out his revolver. "If her son isn't here," he says, "then he'll come in and wait for his return."

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Shaken, Ellen steps out of the way and Fitzpatrick immediately strides over the threshold, leering obscenely when he sees Kate. Then he stomps over to the kitchen table, slightly unsteadily, and pulls out a chair.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Soon after, Dan arrives home. Ellen watches his shoulders droop as he sees who is sitting at the table.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Suddenly, seeming very young, he asks if he can have just one last home-cooked dinner before they go down to the station. Ellen doesn't wait for Fitzpatrick to answer and quickly ladles stew into a tin bowl for him.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  In the corner, the baby begins to wail, and Kate rises to pass her to her mother, who takes her into the bedroom for a feed.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  She has barely settled herself down before she hears Kate shouting. Laying the infant in the middle of the bed, she rushes out into the main room. Fitzpatrick has one large hand clamped around Kate's slender wrist, trying to pull her onto his lap. She is resisting, twisting this way and that to free herself. Dan leaps to his sister's aid, but his mother is quicker.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Snatching up the coal shovel from the fireplace, Ellen swings it at Fitzpatrick, landing a ringing blow on his helmet. As the stunned constable clutches his head, the front door bursts open, and Ellen turns to see her son Ned silhouetted against the evening sunlight. She has only just registered that he's got a gun when he lifts his arm and aims.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  But as he fires two warning shots over Fitzpatrick's shoulder, the constable jerks back and throws up his hands to protect his face.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Fitzpatrick screams, and everyone in the room goes still. Ellen gazes in horror at the constable's wrist, where a bright patch of blood is rapidly soaking through the white cuff of his shirt. Her son has just shot a police officer, and in doing so, he has changed the course of all of their lives.

• 23:48Speaker 00

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• 24:14Speaker 01

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• 24:40Speaker 02

  Though this seems the most plausible version of events, pieced together from a variety of statements, exactly what happened in the Kelly House on the 15th of April 1878 will forever remain uncertain.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  In the months and years after the incident, different stories are told by Ellen, Kate, Dan, Ned, the Kellys' cousin Tom, and the officer himself.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Constable Fitzpatrick said he went out to arrest someone, and according to him, he was then shot by Ned Kelly. He shot him in the wrist, he said, and of course, he barely escaped with his life and so forth. That's more or less his version of the story. But the other version of the story is that he also was drunk and didn't behave himself very well. And the Kellys simply denied that Ned was there, and said that didn't happen. And so, we don't really know. Basically, you can take one view or another view.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  It is Fitzpatrick's version that his superiors choose to believe. Immediately after the incident, Ned and Dan Kelly flee into the bush. They assume that they are the only ones the police are planning to prosecute, but they are devastatingly wrong.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  And that particular incident was the thing that set off the outbreak, because as a consequence of it, Ned Kelly's mother was arrested, sent to jail, and some various other ones who were there at the same time also went to jail, but Ned had escaped by then.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Ellen Kelly is sentenced to three years imprisonment for her involvement in the attack on Fitzpatrick. It is a sentence that even the chief commissioner of police thinks is too harsh. In her absence, the care of her young children falls to her eldest daughter Maggie.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Ned is racked by guilt after his mother is sentenced. There is some evidence that he offers to turn himself in if his mother is released, but the deal is refused.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  And so, two weeks after the Fitzpatrick shooting, with Ned and Dan still at large, a £100 reward is placed on Ned's head, twice what a laborer might hope to earn in a year. By this point, they have well and truly gone to ground. They are joined by two friends, and together they make up what will come to be known as the Kelly Gang.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Ned, their leader, is 23 years old. He is tall, with dark brown hair and a reddish beard and moustache. Dan is 5'5", and with his beardless face and over-large clothes, looks even younger than his 16 years. Their friend, Joe Byrne, is tall and thin, fair and good-looking, while the fourth member of the gang, Steve Hart, is shorter and stout. All of them soon adopt a peculiar sartorial signifier of their gang membership by wearing their hats with a chin strap hooked under the nose. It is an incident in October 1878 that ensures the gang's notoriety. At a place called Stringy Bark Creek,

• 27:45Speaker 02

  the gang ambushes a group of four police officers who have been tracking them. Ned kills three of them, later claiming that they pulled their guns on him first, having come to execute rather than arrest him.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  The fourth policeman escapes, jumping on his colleague's horse and galloping off to raise the alarm. But his steed quickly becomes lame, and he is forced to hide for hours in a wombat hole, afraid that the gang are searching for him. In the end, Ned and his associates get a 30-hour head start. But the law has another avenue by which to pursue them.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  A week or so after that, Ned Kelly and the other three members of the gang were outlawed. Outlaw is a pretty ancient form of legal procedure by which an individual is effectively cast out of a community. And back in medieval era and before, they would say that a person bore the wolf's head. They were no longer considered to be a human. All their property was forfeit to the authorities, and they could be killed on sight by anybody with impunity. In Australia, they had legislation called the Feelans Apprehension Act, which was in the South Wales that the Victorians, where Ned Kelly was operating, quickly adapted that earlier legislation which had been brought in to control those earlier bushrangers and turned it into a piece of legislation that was specifically targeted at the Kellys.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  So they were outlawed under that legislation, and pretty well, anyone could have a go at them.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  A bounty of £200 is also placed on each gang member's head, soon raised to the phenomenal sum of £500, more than enough to buy a luxury house outright, with enough left over for a first-class return trip on a steamship to England. It is a sign of how seriously the police are treating the so-called Kelly outbreak.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  After the killings at Stringy Bark Creek, the Kelly Gang stays in northeastern Victoria, disappearing again into the bush. They are helped by a network of supporters, including Ned's sister Maggie. Come nightfall, she regularly mounts her horse and sets out to deliver provisions to her brothers, skillfully evading any police who try to pursue her. The gang sometimes sleep in the houses of friends and family. But much of the time, they must rely on their bush skills to survive in the wilderness.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  They're not seen again until the end of the year.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  On Tuesday, the 10th of December 1878, they rob a branch of the National Bank in the town of Euroa, stealing around £2,000 in gold and notes from the safe and taking a number of people hostage.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  After the robbery, the Kelly Gang eat and drink with their prisoners in a homestead outside of town and show off their horse-riding skills. Then, with a final warning not to call for help for at least three hours, the outlaws gallop off into the night.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  But it's what Ned does after the Euroa bank job that establishes the fact that he is no ordinary bushman.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  In the weeks that follow, the gang distributes some of the money between family members and supporters, paying their rents and clearing debts. The furious Victoria government raises the bounty on Ned's head. It is now £1,000 for him and £500 for the rest of the gang. And the police scale up their efforts by persecuting suspected Kelly supporters, an avenue now open to them thanks to the outlawery legislation. Farmers believed to be helping them are dragged off their land during harvest time and locked up for months without trial. Unsurprisingly, the police's heavy-handed actions help to turn public mood against them. Sympathy for Ned grows, and all the while, the gang plan their next move.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  It is mid-morning on the 10th of February 1879, as Constable Richards walks down the main street of the town of Girildery. A fierce summer sun beats down on the dusty road, and he sweats inside his heavy jacket.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  A surreptitious glance at the two men on either side of him, fitted out in smart blue police uniforms, shows they are similarly suffering.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  It is a relief to push open the door of the Royal Mail Hotel and enter the relative cool of its shadowed interior.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Richards walks up to the bar and hails the publican Charlie Cox. Even this early in the morning, a few men sit nursing drinks. Cox wanders over, and Richards introduces the men on either side of him, whom he says are new officers here to help in the search for the Kellys.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  But when Cox goes to shake the men's hands, his eyes suddenly widen with fear as the one standing on the constable's right pulls out a gun.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Richards cringes as realization dawns on Cox's face that this is Ned Kelly himself and the other man, his associate, both of them dressed in stolen police uniforms. Kelly cocks his revolver and points it at the publican, then addresses himself to the room, telling everyone in the bar that they need to stay exactly where they are. Horrified, Charlie Cox throws a glance at Richards, who shrugs helplessly. Ever since the Kelly gang held up the police station at the weekend, he has been as much of a prisoner as the publican is now. An unwilling participant in this charade, he's been warned that if he steps out of line, his colleague locked up at the station will pay the price.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Once Kelly has the room under control, the other two members of the gang enter dressed in their normal clothes. While they are left to guard the prisoners, Richards is shepherded outside and over to the bank by Kelly and Joe Byrne.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Barging through the front door, the outlaws quickly abandon the pretense that they are police, shouting at the two clerks within to open the safe.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  It soon becomes clear there is a problem. They need the manager's key, so the outlaws herd Richards and the bank staff into the bank manager's apartment in the back of the building. A clerk gestures at a closed door. From within, Richards can hear a faint splashing. It must be the bathroom.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  At a nod from Ned, the clerk opens the door, and the outlaws barge in to where a middle-aged man lies in a deep bathtub, almost fully submerged.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  At the sight of an armed man in his bathroom, he jerks into a sitting position, soapy water streaming down his chest. After a swift negotiation, he is allowed to dry and dress himself before being forced out into the bank to open the safe. Richards watches helpless as Ned and Joe take in the piles of notes and coins before turning to look at one another, identical grins splitting their faces.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 35:42Speaker 01

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• 36:08Speaker 02

  Dressed in stolen police uniforms, the Kelly gang steal around £2,000 from the Girildery Bank, having taken the local officer's prisoner and locked them in their own cells. They also burn the mortgage deeds they find in the safe, in theory freeing local people from their debts. Back at the Royal Mail Hotel after the robbery, Ned gives a speech to the assembled hostages.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  He makes one of his habitual speeches about how much he's been wronged and how bad the police are, etc., etc., and how his situation is very bad, and he's been forced into this kind of outlawery situation because of that. And he always says he doesn't mean to hurt anybody and actually pretty much keeps to that until the end, really.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  The burning of the mortgage deeds and debt records suggests an ideological bent to Ned's criminality. But whether he really is a champion for the working classes is up for debate.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Yes, he was a very good PR man. I mean, they understood that they were working in this tradition, the noble robber, the idea that you shouldn't offer unjustified violence to people. If you did kill somebody, it should be seen to be justified, which was the argument that he made about killing the policeman, of course. They were out to get me. I knew they were going to kill me. It was me or them, rightly or wrongly. That was the argument. So they were smart people. They weren't stupid. And they knew that that was the way they needed to be perceived by the public and by their own supporters, of course, because it was vital that their supporters continued to sympathize with them and to provide them with the information they needed to stay free in the bush, tell them when the police were coming, give false information to the police about where they were, which is what they did. And they had a very effective network that did all that for them. And so they operated in that way.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  So that's why Ned went to such trouble, not only to spruik himself and his cause as it was, but also to be seen to be doing stuff like burning mortgages.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  One reason why Ned is seen as someone with genuine political convictions is the extraordinary 8,000-word document he leaves behind after the robbery, known as the Girildery Letter. Part self-justifying rant, part reasoned tirade against the abuses of squatters, the colonial government, and the judicial system. The letter is likely dictated by Ned to the more literate Joe Byrne. It ranges widely, from the injustice of Ellen Kelly's imprisonment and Ned's reasons for shooting the officers at Stringy Bark to the oppression of Ireland by the British and the iniquity of the transportation system. A hybrid autobiography and manifesto, he leaves it in Girildery to be published, but the authorities suppress it,

• 38:43Speaker 02

  and it is not released in full until 1930.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  After the robbery, the Bush Rangers again share a drink with their hostages before riding out of town, disappearing this time for nearly 18 months.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  After Girildery, the Kelly gang all but disappear. A frantic police force brings in indigenous officers from Queensland who work as trackers. But the racism of their white superiors means they are not deployed effectively, and Ned continues to hide in the bush, undiscovered.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Sometime in this period, Kelly begins to plan for a final showdown with the authorities.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  It seems that the Bush Rangers eventually determined they'd been in the bush for about 18 months or so, and it's a very hard life living in the bush, obviously, in their situation. So I think they came to a point where there was going to have to be a showdown. They were going to have to end it one way or another.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Various theories have been offered for Ned's desire to bring the situation to a head. Perhaps he wants to provide cover for a massive bank robbery, one that will allow the gang to leave the colony and disappear. Or maybe he hopes a confrontation with the police will be the spark that lights the fire of revolution in Victoria.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Either way, with his next big move on the horizon, he now decides that if the gang is to survive a shootout, they're going to need some serious protective equipment.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Apparently, what happened was that the outlaws and their friends went around the countryside, getting old ploughshears. A local blacksmith, who was one of their sympathizers, fashioned those ploughshears into those suits of armor, the helmets and the breastplates and the groin guards that were such famous icons of the Kelly story.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Now armed and armored, Ned concocts a plan. First, the gang will kill Aaron Sherrett, a one-time friend turned police informant, and hold up a hotel in the nearby town of Glenroan. He figures that once the police hear the gang have resurfaced, they will rush to the scene on a special train. But if the Kellys sabotage the railway line where it bends sharply coming into Glenroan, the train will derail, taking the majority of the local police force with it.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  The first phase of the plan goes off without a hitch. On Saturday, the 26th of June, 1880, Dan and Joe head for Aaron's house. When their erstwhile friend answers the door, Joe shoots him in the face and chest with a double-barrelled shotgun.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  His pregnant wife is in the same room, while four police constables, sent to protect Aaron, cower in the bedroom.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  This vicious deed accomplished, Dan and Joe head off to rejoin the others. As they ride away, the only sound to be heard is the howling of Aaron's loyal dog, chained up outside.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, Ned and Steve are busy dealing with the railway line near Glenroin.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  They sabotaged the tracks by kidnapping a few railway fettlers working on the track and had them dig it up. And they all collected all the local people around that area, around Glenroin, and took everyone to the Glenroin Hotel, where they again had a party. It was one of the features of the Kelly's raids and holdups, everyone had a party.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  The party goes on much longer than expected. With Aaron killed on Saturday night, Ned assumes the police will arrive the next day.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  But Sunday wears on with no sign of the train. It is at this point that another fateful character enters the Ned Kelly story.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  One of the people that they did take was the local school feature, a man named Thomas Kerner. Thomas Kerner had a wife at home and he asked Ned Kelly if he could go and look after his wife. Kelly, perhaps unwisely, trusted him to do so and sent him off out into the night. And of course, he went down the railway line as far as he needed to and flagged down the police train, which by that time had started to appear in the distance. And warned them. So the Kellys knew then that the game was up, as it were, because they heard the whistle blow.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  In the early morning hours of Monday, the 28th of June, the Kelly gang don their armour. With the police closing in, they walk out onto the veranda in front of the inn. As dozens of civilian hostages cower inside the building, the infamous Glenroin shootout begins.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Within a minute, over sixty shots have been fired by the police. The armour holds, but Ned is struck in his unprotected arms and legs. Unfortunately, the flimsy walls of the inn prove less impervious to bullets and a teenage boy and an old man are killed by police firing from outside. One bullet even passes through the shawl of a baby held in her mother's arms, grazing her forehead.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  During lulls in the fighting, many try and make a run for it.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  As more police arrive, the gang retreat. Ned, bleeding heavily from a wound to his arm, passes out in the bush behind the inn. Standing at the bar, Joe is hit in the leg by a police bullet as he tosses back a whisky. It severs his femoral artery and he bleeds out within minutes.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  As the sun rises, Ned emerges from the mist of the cool winter's morning and engages in one last desperate gun battle with police. Shot repeatedly in the hands and legs, the bushranger is finally brought down, borne to the ground by the weight of his own armour. Still losing blood, he is disarmed and rushed to the police train for lifesaving medical treatment.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Desperate to bring the situation to an end, the police set fire to the inn. Once it has burnt out, the charred corpses of Dan Kelly and Steve Hart are found. The Kelly gang is no more, and Ned is the only survivor.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  From Glenroin, Ned is brought straight to the infirmary at Melbourne Jail, the prison where his mother is still being held. After being told of Dan's death, she is allowed one day off work in the prison's laundry to grieve. She is also granted a precious twenty minutes with her surviving son.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Ned's health stabilises, but he is kept in virtual isolation. He is charged with the murder of a police officer from the Stringy Bark incident, the only one whose death police are certain can be attributed to Kelly.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  The trial takes place in October, with Ned represented by a barrister with just ten months' experience before the bar. The judge is Sir Redmond Barry, the same judge who condemned Ellen to three years hard labour. The outcome is all but a foregone conclusion.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  When it ended and it decided that he was guilty, the judge went to pronounce sentence and started doing so, but then Ned jumped in and started saying that he wasn't really guilty and we could have proved that he wanted to and that the whole thing was really just a charade. The judge, who was a Protestant Englishman of the upper classes, he was not happy about this. So he started to come back, Ned, of course, and there was a bit of banter and exchange between them. Anyway, he did eventually get the death verdict out and the death sentence out and said, "You'll be hanging by the neck until you're dead." And Ned Kelly replied, "I will see you there."

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Thirty-two thousand people sign a petition asking the governor to commute Ned's sentence, but it's a futile effort for such a notorious criminal.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  On the 11th of November, 1880, Kelly is executed by hanging in Melbourne Jail. He is accompanied to his death by Father O'Hair, the very same priest who had baptised him twenty-five years earlier.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  A royal commission is later set up to examine the failures of the police during the Kelly case and the resulting delays in apprehending them. When it concludes, several officers are demoted or recommended for early retirement.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Ellen Kelly is released the following February. Though she lives with many of her family for nearly another half-century, she is forced to witness the deaths of her daughters Maggie, who succumbs to rheumatic gout, and Kate, who dies in her mid-thirties, possibly by suicide.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Ned Kelly's short, bloody life was indelibly marked by the struggles of the Australia into which he was born. It was a time of great upheaval, with the colony striving to become a nation of respectable white settlers. As he began his brief criminal career, he seemed to belong to a world that was already passing into memory of bushrangers and outlaws, wild men who eked out a living beyond the boundaries of polite society.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  It is this nostalgic view of the nation's past that may account for the longevity of his legend, in spite of the shocking and violent acts he committed.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Whether he is remembered as a political revolutionary, an embodiment of rugged masculinity, or the ultimate persecuted underdog, his story has indisputably become a touchstone of Australian colonial folklore.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Bushranger is generally a part of the Australian bush myth, where we've romanticised the bush and all those things with it, the bushman, the bush hero, bullockies and shearers. And by the 1880s, which is around about the time that Ned Kelly was executed, all that was starting to become a bit mythologised because the country, although it had been very rural previously, was very rapidly urbanising and would have very quickly become one of the most urbanised countries in the world. And he's a very, very powerful figure. It's such a great story. It's an Australian story, but it's also an international story. He's the Australian Robin Hood, and that's a very, very powerful mythology.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Next time on Short History, we'll bring you a short history of Nellie Bly.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Journalism is ephemera. It is meant to disappear. No one is meant to have a legacy in journalism. It's fish paper the next day, as we know. The nature of the beast is, it's not meant to last. So when someone could still have a legacy that we sustain till 2026 is something unbloody believable. It just is.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  That's next time.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www-noiser.com/subscriptions to unlock more episodes today.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.