Kelly · 1880
Ned Kelly at Glenrowan
On the night of the twenty-seventh of June 1880, the bushranger gang of Edward (Ned) Kelly, twenty-five years old, the son of John Kelly the Tipperary-emigrant convict and Ellen Quinn of Antrim, in the third year of his outlaw career across the north-east of the colony of Victoria in Australia, attempted to derail a special police train bringing reinforcements to the village of Glenrowan, in the dry interior country two hundred kilometres north-east of Melbourne. The plan failed because the schoolmaster Thomas Curnow, held hostage with about sixty other villagers in the Glenrowan Inn, slipped out to the railway line with a candle and a red scarf and stopped the train. The siege of the inn ran from three in the morning of the twenty-eighth of June through the early afternoon. Ned Kelly was captured wounded outside the inn at first light, in his now-iconic suit of armour fashioned from the mould-board plates of agricultural ploughs, having taken twenty-eight bullets in the legs and arms. His brother Dan Kelly and the gang's other members, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, died inside the burning inn. Ned was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on the eleventh of November 1880. His last words on the scaffold, by the tradition, are recorded as *Such is life*. He was twenty-five.
It is twenty past five on the morning of the twenty-eighth of June 1880, on the wooden veranda of Mrs Ann Jones's Glenrowan Inn, on the railway crossing at Glenrowan, in the dry winter cold of the Victorian high country. He is twenty-five years old. He is Edward Kelly, called Ned, born on the second of December 1854 at Beveridge in Victoria to John 'Red' Kelly, a former Irish convict transported from Tipperary in 1842, and Ellen Quinn of Antrim, in his fifty-second hour without sleep. He is in the suit of plate armour his gang fabricated in the Greta forest from the ploughshare mouldboards of two stolen John Deere ploughs, weighing about forty-four kilograms, with a helmet that reduces his vision to a horizontal slit and gives him no peripheral vision at all.
On the strait of grass between the inn's veranda and the railway line, in the dawn light, the police line of the Victoria Police under Superintendent Hare and Inspector O'Connor (forty-nine officers in total) is in cover behind the inn's outbuildings and the railway-station house. They have been firing at the inn since three in the morning. Ned has come out of the inn ten minutes ago through the back door, by his own statement at the trial, intending to outflank the police line to the rear and break it from behind.
The bullets are striking his armour. He can hear them, by his deposition at trial, like rain on a tin roof. The armour is holding. The plate at the upper torso is, however, joined at the rear and at the lower back to leave the leg articulation free. The legs and the lower back, below the cuirass, are not armoured. Ned has, in the past ten minutes, taken three bullets in the right leg, two in the left, and one through the elbow joint of the helmet visor.
He thinks: the helmet is too heavy. I cannot turn my head far enough to see the line on my left.
He thinks: the legs are gone. The legs are gone in twenty more minutes if I do not get back to the inn.
He thinks: Joe and Steve and Dan are in the inn with about thirty hostages. The inn will not hold. The police will fire it.
He thinks: I am the target. The police are not firing on the hostages because the police know I am out here. As long as I am out here the hostages have a chance.
He stays out. He fires a Colt revolver at the police line, by Constable Charles McNamara's deposition, three rounds. He takes a further three bullets in the legs over the next twenty minutes. The blood loss is serious. He is, by his own report at trial, seeing the country sideways by six o'clock.
He is captured by Sergeant Steele and Constable Charles McNamara at twenty past six. He has taken, by the medical examination at the trial, twenty-eight bullets in the legs and arms across the morning. The armour has stopped about a hundred more. He is laid in the Glenrowan railway station house and a doctor sent for from Wangaratta. His brother Dan and Joe Byrne and Steve Hart die inside the inn at about three in the afternoon when, by the police order, the inn is fired and the hostages are released through the front. Dan and Steve, by every forensic conclusion, are taken by the smoke; Joe Byrne is killed by a police bullet in the morning hours.
Ned Kelly was tried at Beechworth in October 1880 and at the Melbourne Supreme Court before Sir Redmond Barry in late October. The verdict was guilty of the murder of Constable Lonigan at the Stringybark Creek action of October 1878. He was sentenced to death. He was hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on the eleventh of November 1880, twenty-five years old. The tradition of his last words on the scaffold is, by the deposition of the gaol chaplain Father Donaghy, the line Such is life. The phrase has, since 1880, been the most quoted sentence in Australian English. The armour suit of plate (the cuirass with twenty-eight bullet-marks, the helmet with the elbow-jointed bullet-hole on the visor) is in the State Library of Victoria, where it has been on permanent display since 1929. The Glenrowan Inn was destroyed in the police firing of the morning of the twenty-eighth of June 1880; the site is, since 1962, a public park with a single bronze marker. The Kelly family graves are in the cemetery at Greta in Victoria, in unmarked plots. The tradition of Greta and the surrounding cattle-country, by the local memory, is that nobody marks the graves because everybody knows where they are.