Ned Kelly at Glenrowan

A man can be hunted into legend by the very institutions that mean to dispose of him. The colony writes him into the police gazette as vermin; the country writes him into its own mouth as a sentence it will repeat for a hundred and fifty years. Between those two records there is a single morning of cold and gunfire in the high country of north-eastern Victoria, and a young man in a helmet of his own making, who decides, in a field he has known since boyhood, not to walk away.

THE SON OF RED KELLY

Edward Kelly is born at Beveridge in Victoria on the second of December 1854, to John Kelly of Tipperary, a former convict transported in 1842, and Ellen Quinn of Antrim. The family is Irish, Catholic, poor, and known to the Victoria Police; the Penal Laws that drove his father's people out of Ireland do not follow the family across the water by name, but the habit of the constable at the door does. By the time Ned is twenty-two he has been gaoled twice, his stepfather has been gaoled, his mother has been gaoled with an infant at the breast for the supposed wounding of a trooper, and his younger brothers are in the bush. In October 1878 at Stringybark Creek he and his gang shoot three policemen dead. The colony declares them outlaws under a special Act. For two years they ride the Greta country, where every selector's hut is kin or sympathy, robbing two banks without firing a shot at a clerk and writing the long Jerilderie Letter, a manifesto dictated to Joe Byrne, in which he names the police a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish bailiffs or English landlords. In the Greta forest, through the winter of 1880, the gang beats the mouldboards of stolen John Deere ploughs into four suits of plate armour, helmet, cuirass and apron, weighing about forty-four kilograms apiece. They mean to take the colony's railway and the colony's bank with them.

THE TRAIN THAT DOES NOT COME

On the night of the twenty-seventh of June 1880 the gang rides into the village of Glenrowan, two hundred kilometres north-east of Melbourne on the line to Wangaratta. They tear up a rail north of the station and herd about sixty villagers into Mrs Ann Jones's inn beside the crossing. The plan is exact: a special police train will be sent up from Melbourne when word of the gang reaches the city; the train will leave the rails at the broken curve; the survivors will be finished by the gang from the embankment; the north-east of the colony will rise. Among the hostages is the village schoolmaster, Thomas Curnow, a small lame man with a sister and a wife in the room. He talks quietly to Ned through the long hours. He praises the armour. He asks, at last, to be allowed to take his family home, his wife is unwell, he is no danger to anyone. Near midnight Ned lets him go. Curnow walks his wife and child up the road, leaves them at his sister's, takes a candle and a red llama-wool scarf from a drawer, and goes down to the line. When the pilot engine comes round the curve toward Glenrowan at about three in the morning, he stands on the sleepers and holds the candle up behind the scarf. The driver brakes. The train does not derail. The plan is finished before the first shot is fired.

THE COLD DAWN AT MRS JONES'S

From three o'clock the police of Victoria, forty-nine men under Superintendent Hare and, after Hare is wounded, Inspector O'Connor with his Queensland native trackers, fire on the inn from cover behind the station house and the outbuildings. Joe Byrne is hit at the bar at about five, draining a glass of whisky, and dies on the floor. Dan and Steve are in the back rooms with the hostages on the boards. Ned has been hit in the left foot and the left forearm before he gets his helmet on. The Victorian high country in late June is dry and cold and the grass is white with frost. There is, when the firing pauses, the sound of a magpie working the gum trees behind the line. At twenty past five he comes out of the back door of the inn into that frost, in plate, with a Colt revolver in his right hand and the helmet slit narrowing the dawn to a long horizontal line of paddock, sleepers, and grey uniforms. The cuirass joins at the rear to free the legs for walking; below it, from the knee to the hip, he is in moleskin trousers and nothing else. He means to come round the police line from behind and break it from the rear, and bring Dan and Steve out through the gap.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A VICTORIAN PADDOCK

The bullets are striking the plate. He hears them, by his own deposition at the trial, like rain on a tin roof, and the metaphor is a child's, from a bark-roofed selector's hut in a wet winter. The plate is holding. Three bullets in the right leg, two in the left, one through the elbow-joint at the helmet's visor, and the helmet too heavy to turn far enough left to see the constables there at all. He could, in this second, walk back into the timber behind the inn. The horses are tied in the scrub. The plate is heavy but the legs are not gone yet. He has known this country since he was a boy of seven on his father's selection at Avenel; he could be in the Warby Ranges by full light and out of the colony by Tuesday. Joe is dead in the bar. Dan and Steve are twenty-one and twenty, his brother and the boy who grew up with his brother, and the inn will be fired before noon, this he knows as well as he knows the frost is melting now on the toes of his boots. He is the target, and the police are firing on him and not on the inn because they know he is out here in the paddock in his iron. He stays out. He fires the Colt at the line, by Constable McNamara's deposition, three rounds. He takes three more bullets in the legs in the next twenty minutes. The country, by six o'clock, is sideways to him, by his own word at the trial; the frost and the gum trees and the grey coats turning on their axis as the blood goes out of him into the wet grass.

THE INN BURNS

Sergeant Steele and Constable McNamara take him at twenty past six, face down in the tussock about thirty yards from the veranda, the helmet wrenched off, twenty-eight bullets in the legs and arms across the morning by the medical count at the trial, the plate marked by about a hundred more. They carry him to the railway station house and lay him on the boards. A doctor is sent for from Wangaratta. Through the morning the hostages are released by twos and threes through the front of the inn, women and children first, hands raised in the cold. At about three in the afternoon, on the police order, the inn is fired. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart are inside. They have taken, by the rumour of the country afterwards, a draught of strychnine between them when the smoke began; the forensic finding is suffocation. Joe Byrne is brought out blackened from the bar. The bodies of the three are laid in a row in the burnt yard for the photographer. Ned, on the boards of the station house, asks after his brother, and is told.

THE COURT OF SIR REDMOND BARRY

He is tried at Beechworth in October 1880 and removed to the Melbourne Supreme Court for the capital matter, the murder of Constable Thomas Lonigan at Stringybark Creek on the twenty-sixth of October 1878. The judge is Sir Redmond Barry, an Anglo-Irishman of the Protestant Ascendancy, the founder of the State Library and of the University of Melbourne, the man who two decades earlier sentenced Ned's mother Ellen to three years for the wounding of Constable Fitzpatrick. The case is brief. The verdict is guilty. When asked if he has anything to say, Ned addresses the bench at length and steadily, the leg wounds still draining under his clothes, on the conduct of the Victoria Police and the conduct of the court, and finishes by telling Barry, I will go a little further than that, and say, I will see you there when I go. Barry pronounces sentence and adds the formula, May the Lord have mercy on your soul. Twelve days after the hanging, Barry is dead of a carbuncle on the neck and pneumonia, in his house in Carlton. The country notes it.

SUCH IS LIFE

He is hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on the morning of the eleventh of November 1880. He is twenty-five. The tradition, by the deposition of the gaol chaplain Father Donaghy, is that on the scaffold he says, Such is life, and the phrase has been the most quoted sentence in Australian English ever since, printed on tea-towels and tattooed on forearms and carved into the lintels of country pubs from Beechworth to Broken Hill. Thirty-two thousand people sign the petition for reprieve in the week before the rope; it is refused. His mother Ellen, still in the gaol on the Fitzpatrick sentence, is brought to him the day before. She tells him, by the tradition of the cell, to die like a Kelly. The cuirass of plate, twenty-eight bullet marks on it, the helmet with the elbow-jointed hole on the visor, is in the State Library of Victoria, the library Sir Redmond Barry built, on permanent display since 1929. The Glenrowan Inn is gone; the site has been a public park since 1962, with a single bronze marker on the grass where Mrs Jones's veranda stood. The Kelly graves are at Greta, in the cattle country he rode as a boy, in unmarked plots in the cemetery clay. The tradition of the district, by the local memory, is that nobody marks the graves because everybody knows where they are.

The colony meant to dispose of him and instead it housed his armour in its grandest room. The hinge of his life was the moment in the frost paddock when the legs were not yet gone and the timber was at his back and he turned, in forty-four kilograms of ploughshare, toward the police line and not away. A country recognises that turn when it sees it, and afterwards it will not let the man be only a man. The plate stands in a glass case in Swanston Street, Melbourne; the helmet beside it, the long slit at eye height, the elbow-jointed hole in the visor; and through that slit, at the right angle, on a winter morning, you can still see a strip of grey Victorian paddock.