The Jerilderie Letter
NED KELLY
was born in 1855 in Beveridge, Victoria, to an Irish convict father, deported for stealing two pigs, and an Irish immigrant mother.
Kelly’s father died in 1866 and his mother Ellen later married George King, a horse thief.
In April 1878, Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick of the Victorian Police claimed he was shot and wounded by Kelly while at the family’s home. Ned fled with his brother Dan. Accused of being an accomplice, Ellen was sentenced to three years in prison.
When Joe Byrne and Steve Hart joined their friends on the run, the Kelly gang was born. The police dispatched four officers to find the outlaws—but the gang found them first at Stringybark Creek, and shot three of the policemen dead.
The Kellys embarked on a spree of robberies which ended in Glenrowan, on 29 June 1880, when the gang held the townsfolk hostage at the Royal Hotel. After a shoot-out, the police set fire to the hotel, killing Byrne, Hart and Dan Kelly.
Ned Kelly was found guilty of murder, and on 29 October 1880 the most notorious criminal in Australian history was hanged at Melbourne Gaol. His last words were ‘Such is life.’
ALEX McDERMOTT is an historian and writer based in Melbourne.
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First published by
The Herald
1930
First published by The Text Publishing Company 2001
This edition published 2012
Designed by WH Chong
Primary print ISBN: 9781921922336
Ebook ISBN: 9781921921926
Author: Kelly, Ned, 1855-1880.
Title: The Jerilderie letter / Ned Kelly ; introduction by Alex McDermott.
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Text classics.
Subjects: Kelly, Ned, 1855-1880--Correspondence. Bushrangers--Victoria--
Correspondence. Jerilderie (N.S.W.)--History.
Other Authors/Contributors: McDermott, Alex.
Dewey Number: 364.1552092
of Edward Kelly
by Alex McDermott
O
n Tuesday 4 February 1879, the four members of the Kelly gang left the safety of their mountain fastness, the inaccessible and remote ranges of north-east Victoria, and rode north. They picked their way through bush during the day and rested at night, while the country sweltered in the grip of one of the worst heatwaves in memory. Waterholes had dried up, livestock were dying and the air was thick with smoke from bushfires.
The Murray River had dropped so low that
the gang could ford its waters. They kept riding into New South Wales, and didn’t stop until they approached Jerilderie, a small town that lay between Deniliquin and Wagga Wagga on the flat, scorched plains of the Riverina. It was now early in the evening of Saturday 8 February.
The outlaws were wanted for the murders of three policemen, in October 1878, at Stringybark Creek, a gully hidden in rugged country near the town of Mansfield in Victoria. So feared were these four riders that a new Act of Parliament had been passed, the Felons Apprehension Act, in order to make their capture easier.
Ned Kelly was twenty-three at the time of the shootings. His brother Dan was seventeen, old enough to have tangled with the law, yet still young enough to live entirely within his brother’s shadow. Even before these events, the older Kelly had established himself in north-eastern Victoria as a man to be reckoned with. Since his early teens Ned had been fighting grown men, and winning.
Three years spent working in road gangs and sleeping in prison hulks had hardened his body and mind still further.
Shortly after his release in 1874 Ned had gone twenty bare-knuckled rounds with Isaiah ‘Wild’ Wright, establishing himself as the finest fighter in the region. He had already begun to acquire a status and reputation that verged on the mythic. Aaron Sherritt, the man who managed to balance for two years the precarious roles of both police informer and Kelly sympathiser, and a toughnut himself, swore to the fact that Kelly was a type of ‘superhuman’.
The third member of the gang was Ned’s mate Joe Byrne, twenty-one, slim, handsome, for the most part a quiet sort of bloke. Growing up in close proximity to Chinese gold miners, he had acquired not only a rudimentary fluency in Cantonese but an opium habit to go with it. Lastly there was Steve Hart, almost eighteen, friend of Dan, small as a jockey and prone to fits of
brooding. He seems from all descriptions to have worn a look of constant surliness on his face. He used to demonstrate his prowess in the saddle every time he jumped his horse over the gates of the railway crossing, when riding in or out of Wangaratta, where his father had a farm.
The four halted a few kilometres out of Jerilderie at Mrs Davidson’s hotel, the Woolpack Inn. They had a few drinks and a bite to eat, mingling easily with the crowd of drovers, station hands, bush labourers and other members of the rural population who were passing through. While there Ned checked the names of the two policemen in the town—Senior Constable George Devine and Probationary Constable Henry Richards.
By the time the gang left, a full moon had risen in the night sky, and the men entered the town proper in a light so clear it could have been day. Outside the police station Ned yelled, ‘Mr Devine! There’s a row on at Davidson’s hotel—
come quick or there’ll be murder!’ The alarm had the desired effect. Devine and Richards stumbled out onto the verandah, fumbling over their belts and boots, soon to find themselves staring down the barrels of some very serious-looking guns. The Kelly gang had arrived.
The two policemen were disarmed, handcuffed and marched into the lock-up, which was attached to the residence, much to the undoubted amusement of the drunk already cooling his heels there. Ned wanted to know who else was on the premises, and was told by Devine that, apart from his wife and children, the police station was empty. While making sure the two officers were secured Ned explained the reason for his visit: to have printed a statement he had written, and to rob the Bank of New South Wales.
Devine’s pregnant wife was kept up that night by Ned, who insisted that she cook the gang a late supper. During their stay he also insisted that she listen to extended passages that he read aloud from
his statement, a fixty-six-page epistle he had spent the last two months composing. We don’t know what she made of the performance—she was too much beside herself with fear and worry for the safety of her children to take much in—but the astonishing tirade she was subjected to was about to be enshrined in our history as the Jerilderie Letter.
The gang slept at the police station, and next day, Sunday, life in Jerilderie seemed to go on as it had before. While the others remained in the police station Dan helped Mrs Devine prepare the courthouse opposite for the visiting priest to celebrate mass. If any of the town’s inhabitants wondered who the new faces were they had their answer after lunch, when Constable Richards led Joe Byrne and Steve Hart round town. Both outlaws were wearing police uniforms. Richards introduced them to locals as reinforcements en route to Victoria, where they would help the hapless southerners run the Kelly gang to ground.
At our own comfortable historical distance the irony of this charade is delicious—bushrangers parading as the forces of law and order sent to apprehend them—yet for Richards and the Devines it must have been a terrifying experience.
Just prior to noon on Monday, Ned Kelly took charge of the Royal Mail Hotel, which stood next door to the Bank of New South Wales. Using the bar as a depot for their prisoners, Kelly and Byrne robbed the bank, netting more than £2000. It wasn’t the nine or ten thousand Ned had hoped for, but would at least form some sort of compensation for the assortment of friends, family and associates who had supported the gang in their months on the run.
Any ordinary bushranger would have been well pleased with events. Kelly, however, was no ordinary bushranger, and he was furious. Having deposited the bank manager, John Tarleton, the accountant, Edwin Living, and junior clerk James Mackie in the Royal Mail Hotel with the other
hostages he was interrupted by three men walking into the bank. He gave chase, yelling at them to bail up, but they kept running, through the premises and out the back door. Two of these men were local JPs. One of them, the 140-kilogram James Rankin, made the mistake of running into the pub where he was immediately caught by Dan in the hallway. The second, Harkin, escaped to his shop next door, only to be captured later.
The third man, however, did escape. This was Samuel Gill, editor of the
Jerilderie and Urana Gazette
, the town’s newspaper. He was the man who, perhaps more than anyone else, Kelly had come to Jerilderie to see.
Imprisoning police, robbing banks and taking a whole town captive must have begun to seem easy when compared to forcing the world at large to listen to the things Kelly had to say. For whenever he tried to get himself into print everything conspired against him. And if asked to name only one truth in the world at that moment, Kelly
would have needed no pause for doubt before telling it to whoever may have been standing nearby, whether a mate, a trooper, or even the arch-enemy of the Kelly clan Judge Redmond Barry himself. It was one of the common themes that ran through all his public declarations, written or spoken—‘Fitzpatrick is to blame’.
On 15 April 1878—six months before the events at Stringybark Creek and nearly ten months before the raid on Jerilderie—Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick rode to the Kelly property outside Greta, a village near Glenrowan, to arrest Dan for horse stealing. Charges had already been laid against the Baumgarten brothers, William and Gustave, two wealthy Germans who farmed eighty kilometres away in southern New South Wales. The Baumgarten’s close proximity to the Murray River and the stock theft routes had allowed them to prosper. It was their case which, as historian
Doug Morrissey describes, eventually exposed in systematic fashion ‘the shady world of horse and cattle thieves’.
The police net was closing, until that April day when Fitzpatrick, while drunk, attempted to arrest Dan, and in the resulting fracas received a wound to the wrist. He claimed it was a bullet wound inflicted by Ned. For his part, Ned claimed that he was in New South Wales at the time. On 16 April, Ellen Kelly, mother of Dan and Ned, was arrested along with two neighbours, William ‘Brickey’ Williamson and Bill Skillion, for the ‘attempted murder’ of Fitzpatrick. Ellen was nursing her three-day-old baby.
Dan and Ned fled to the nearby Wombat Ranges, where they spent their time panning for gold, practising their marksmanship with both rifle and revolver, and constructing a wooden cabin that was strong enough to withstand a siege.
They lived like this for six months. Despite the increased numbers of police combing the
district, the Kelly brothers, soon joined by their mates Joe and Steve, were not troubled by them. As one contemporary described it, ‘Every object was familiar; anywhere and everywhere they were perfectly safe, quite at home…they could for years resist with impunity all efforts to effect their capture.’
This ‘wild and trackless region’, then, was a place where the young men had grown up, and knew well. The cattle duffing and horse theft that Kelly and his larrikin mates—referred to collectively as ‘the Greta mob’—had pursued in the years preceding his outlawry, were predicated on knowing the land and its unbeaten paths better than the authorities did. Once stolen, the animals were driven along remote stock routes to holding paddocks—generally on the large properties of squatters, such as the Baumgartens, who were in collusion with the thieves. After a decent interval, when the brands had been altered in a suitably artful fashion, the beasts were turned loose. This
was so the local authorities would impound them, and the thieves could then ‘redeem’ them at public auction, at a price well below the actual value of the stock, and sell them later at a legitimate price.
This business, which Kelly would refer to as ‘a highly successful trade’, operated from regions as far apart as Gippsland and the Western District in Victoria to Dubbo and Tamworth in New South Wales, with Victoria’s north-east region—Kelly Country—often serving as a thoroughfare for the traffic. The Fitzpatrick incident was perhaps the immediate cause of the Kelly outbreak, but his visit was itself occasioned by the Greta mob’s spectacular success at stock theft. They were consummate bushmen, following the tracks first made in the 1850s by the notorious stock thief Bogong Jack, and were able to elude the police with ease.
It was into this territory that the Kellys retreated after Fitzpatrick’s visit, and it was here, in the stretch of country that lay between Greta and
Mansfield, at Stringybark Creek, that one of the police parties searching for the Kelly brothers made camp on the evening of 25 October 1878. Even visiting the place today one is still struck by the solitude of the shallow gully, its remoteness from the world, and the eerie wildness that characterises this bushland. Kelly and his mates were panning for gold near here, and the following day Ned came across the tracks of the police.
Towards five o’clock on 26 October Ned, Dan, Joe and Steve bailed up the police camp. By dusk Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlon were dead.
Only one man got away, Constable Thomas McIntyre, the youngest of the party, who had acted as cook and general assistant. He jumped on the horse Kennedy had just swung off in the midst of the gunfire and bolted. In the scrub that surrounded the camp, however, he didn’t last long in the saddle. A branch brought him down and he continued his escape on foot, certain that his
pursuers were just behind him. When it got properly dark he took cover for the night in an unoccupied wombat hole. He stumbled back into Mansfield the following afternoon. For the ‘Mansfield Murderers’ there could now be no turning back.
Two months later, on Monday 9 December, with much showmanship and skilfully orchestrated bravado, the Kelly gang took control of the Younghusbands’ Faithfulls Creek property in north-eastern Victoria. Here they prepared themselves for the short ride into Euroa and the National Bank. Ned’s main concern that night was with the farmhands and station workers he had imprisoned. They were being held in the store, a large shed near the homestead. Ned delivered a monologue that went into the early hours, explaining events, justifying his deeds, cursing Fitzpatrick and others. He kept them
awake for most of the night.
As with Mrs Devine, he had to talk. About how the police were his ‘natural enemies’, and how ‘a man killing his enemies was not a murderer’. Or, as the letter he was carrying in his pocket put it, ‘this cannot be called wilful murder, for I was compelled to shoot them in my own defence or lie down like a cur and die’. Kelly took every opportunity he could to make it abundantly clear that he was not the sort of man who approved of lying down like a cur and dying. What he didn’t mention, however, was that the ‘naturalness’ of this entrenched state of war with the Victorian police in large part resulted from his own, his clan’s and his friends’ involvement in the stock theft which had flourished for so many years in the region.
One of these prisoners in the store later described how Kelly kept ‘guard over us. He told us to make ourselves comfortable for the night…I could not sleep, as [Kelly] talked to me a good
deal.’ Ned was a man with a lot to say. On this night, as he would do in Jerilderie, Kelly held forth in the conviction that his version of events was definitive. He pulled out a gold watch and dangled it in front of his captive audience. ‘This is a nice watch, isn’t it?’ he asked them. ‘That was poor Kennedy’s watch. Was it not better that I shot the police, than have them carry my body into Mansfield as a mangled corpse?’
At dawn the following day, Joe Byrne was in the study of the homestead, still hard at work, making two good copies of Ned’s long letter which were to be sent to Donald Cameron and John Sadleir, a parliamentarian and superintendent of police respectively. While Kelly played orator it was Joe Byrne’s task to transcribe, to put these words into a copperplate respectable enough to achieve print. Yet the power—and the need—of declaration lay with Kelly.
