Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins (14 page)

A doctor treats him while his bleeding wrists and ankles are tied. A priest hears his confession and anoints him. Maggie and Kate are allowed to kiss him. Then four police carry him on to the train for Benalla. Six more with drawn pistols guard him, around them another ten with rifles.

Before they set off the fireman comes down for a stickybeak at his notorious passenger. Seeing the sooty face peering at him, he starts as if from a nightmare. As if the creature had come to drag off his burned body. ‘Send the devil away,’ he says.

When he next opens his eyes an officer is looking down at him. The bottom half of the carriage window is purple ranges streaming past, drifting leached-grey trees; the top half is white sky. The officer pours himself a brandy, then pours him a shot and holds it for him while he sips. ‘You’re ours,’ he says.

T
hey want him looking like an authentic outlaw but Joe’s refusing to hold a pistol for them, keeps dropping it on the ground.

All day Joe’s been outside in the street, busy with the latest trainload of photographers from Melbourne. The pressmen have persuaded the police to hang his body from a pulley in front of the police station in a manner intended to simulate life. A rope around his chest and under his arms is hidden by his jacket. The difficulty is in getting his feet just touching the ground. They don’t want him looking as if he’s, well,
hanging
. All day they’ve been laughing and bantering and hoisting Joe up and down the wall to get him standing just right.

In the Benalla lockup they’ve put Joe and him in adjoining cells. When he woke, Christ, there was Joe propped up on the bunk, winking, one eye open and looking straight at him through the bars. A draught from the corridor ruffling his hair. A bemused and pleasant expression on his face, arms bent stiffly in front of him as if he was carrying a heavy load of firewood inside or as if his hands were sore. (He’s slightly singed about the fingers.) A little self-conscious about his black-crusted pants.

Long shadows falling. Any moment now they’ll have to pack up their tripods and cameras. Soon they’ll bring stiff Joe back into his cell. Well, he’s done his dreaming but it’s a long night ahead.

B
ear with me, Jane, I ramble. These were well-laid plans and I want to do them justice, capture the mood and describe them right.

As I said, a storm blasted down from the Woolshed Hills. This was only two or three days ago but already seems an age away. Anyway, we took its violence as an omen, a clearing of the sullen air, fresh days ahead. The moon, as you can see now, was approaching the full. The Broken River south of town was brimming from the storm. Everything was – is – on our side.

We made our final plans in a shack off the Yackandandah Road. People and supplies arrived. My sisters sewed the linings for our armour. We tried out our new guns at targets. I sent Steve riding off to pass the word to our friends that we were ready. (I can’t mention names, you understand.) Dan and his dog stood on a hill keeping an eye on everyone who came and went. Joe? Joe was pretty calm.

This book is about a man whose story outgrew his life. Although it concerns some people who did exist and touches on actual events, it is a chronicle of the imagination. It owes more to folklore and the emotional impact of some photography and paintings like the famous Victorian photographer John William Lindt’s
Joe Byrne’s Body on Display at Benalla
and Sidney Nolan’s
Ned Kelly
series than to the bristling contradictions of historians and biographers.

I drew on the
Cameron Letter
and the
Jerilderie Letter
, both written or at least composed by Kelly (with Byrne’s help), and now held by the Public Records Office of Victoria, as an indication of Kelly’s feelings of persecution.

Other insights came particularly from
The Inner History of the Kelly Gang and Their Pursuers
, by J.J. Ken-neally, Moe, Victoria, 1929;
Australian Son
, by Max Brown, Sydney, 1948; and
The Kelly Outbreak 1878–1880: The Geographical Dimension of Social Banditry
, by John McQuilton, Melbourne, 1979.

The paragraph on
page 50
about the corpse fostering anxiety paraphrases a saying attributed to André Malraux.

I would especially like to thank my wife Candida Baker for her constant encouragement as well as her invaluable assistance on equine matters.

R.D.