Ned Kelly

0:02It is Monday the 28th of June 1880 in a rural town in the Australian colony of Victoria. Though it is well past midnight, the Glenrowan 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 of 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.

0:47But 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. 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.

1:32Still 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.

1:46Joe 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.

2:10Cursing 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.

2:36There, shining in the weak moonlight streaming in through the window, lies Ned's proudest invention. Four suits of armor fashioned from scrap metal. One for each member of the gang. 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. As their leader throws it open, Joe hears a shot ring out. The police must already have them surrounded.

3:22Through the narrow slit of his visor, he sees Ned's shoulders move as he takes a deep breath. Then, in a hail of police bullets, he steps out of the inn and into legend.

3:46Ned 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.

4:26So 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? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Ned Kelly.

4:54Ned 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 Island, where in 1841 he is convicted of stealing two pigs and sentenced by the English authorities to seven years' transportation to Australia. 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.

5:41This is the life that awaits John Kelly when he arrives in Van Diemen's land, now Tasmania, in 1842. 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. 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.

6:34Professor Graham Seale is an expert on Australian folklore and the author of Tell Em I Died Game, the legend of Ned Kelly. Migrants come, free migrants. The place develops more or less in various ways. And then the gold rushes come in the 1850s and 60s and the population increases dramatically. After the gold rushes are over, the population has increased, but most of them haven't made their fortune and they've 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.

7:15They're the kind of group who got there a generation or two earlier and took up government grants or simply squatted out the middle of nowhere and because they'd been there for however many years it was everybody said okay well it's your land. 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. This August, on the Noiser Podcast Network Jane Austen Stories returns This time, Dame Julie Andrews will be reading another beloved classic, Emma Step into the village of Highbury, home to the handsome and clever Emma Woodhouse Witness the delicate art of matchmaking Where appearances can deceive And true affections are not always easily guessed On Short History Off, we're herring around the world with the groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly and grappling with the surreal with Salvador Dali.

8:22On Real Survival Stories, we're in the shark-filled waters off the coast of Florida and trundling down the Birdsville track deep in the Australian bush. And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, Holmes investigates the disappearance of a missing star rugby player in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser+.

8:48Sometime in late 1854, or early the next year, Ellen gives birth to a son. She names him Edward or Ned, and soon has him baptized by a local Catholic priest, Father Charles O 'Hare. The Kellys will go on to have eight children in total, five girls and three boys, seven of whom will survive infancy. 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.

9:29He 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. 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. In the wake of this tragedy, Ellen moves her young family to the town of Greta in rural northeastern Victoria to be closer to her Quinn relatives.

10:18Here, Ned grows up surrounded by a huge extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. They're all related to each other by marriage, so it's the Kellys, there's quite a lot of those, it's the Quinns 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. Ireland may be on the other side of the world, but the importance of their heritage is instilled in all of the children. 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 the 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.

11:15So that doesn't leave very much room for people like the Kellys to actually get out there and prosper. 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.

11:35After 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. 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.

12:18Everybody 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 kind of tightly compressed social situation that we get in that north eastern Victoria area. 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. 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.

12:59Dick 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 bush rangers, and that continues on. After the convict era is over and the gold era begins, the people who are called bush rangers 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 bush rangers.

13:34Harry 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.

13:55Harry was the tutor for Ned, and Harry told him and showed him how to conduct robberies, not that they were very sophisticated. Basically, he just rode 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. 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 labor.

14:36Ned 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. 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 and neglected to tell him that he had stolen it from the postmaster. 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.

15:17After a violent struggle, Ned is coshed around the head and dragged off to the police station. 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. Pentridge Prison was the main prison in Melbourne. That's away from Beechworth, away in the city. And of course, three years in that kind of environment at the age of 14, 15 or so.

15:57Didn't do him a great deal of good. 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. 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 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

16:56But 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 laborer, and colleagues from the time describe him as quiet and diligent, if somewhat impulsive. 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.

17:50Everything is going smoothly until April 1878, when a warrant is issued for Dan Kelly's arrest. The law has caught up with them.

18:03It 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. The quiet is disturbed by an aggressive hammering at the door. 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.

18:49Shrugging, 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. 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. Soon after, Dan arrives home. Ellen watches his shoulders droop as he sees who is sitting at the table. Suddenly, seeming very young, he asks if he can have just one last home-cooked dinner before they go down to the station.

19:36Ellen doesn't wait for Fitzpatrick to answer, and quickly ladles stew into a tin bowl for him. 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. 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. Snatching up the coal shovel from the fireplace, Ellen swings it at Fitzpatrick, landing a ringing blow on his helmet.

20:22As 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 is only just registered that he's got a gun when he lifts his arm and aims. But as he fires two warning shots over Fitzpatrick's shoulder The constable jerks back and throws up his hands to protect his face 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.

21:16This August, on the Noiser Podcast Network, Jane Austen Stories returns. This time, Dame Julie Andrews will be reading another beloved classic, Emma. Step into the village of Highbury, home to the handsome and clever Emma Woodhouse. Witness the delicate art of matchmaking, where appearances can deceive, and true affections are not always easily guessed. On Short History Off, we're herring around the world with the groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly and grappling with the surreal with Salvador Dali. On Real Survival Stories, we're in the shark-filled waters off the coast of Florida and trundling down the Birdsville track deep in the Australian bush.

21:55And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, Holmes investigates the disappearance of a missing star rugby player in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser+. 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. 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. Constable Fitzpatrick said he went out to arrest someone, and according to him, he was then shot by Ned Kelly.

22:41He 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 Kelly 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. 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.

23:18But they are devastatingly wrong. 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. 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

23:58Ned is wracked 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 And so, two weeks after the Fitzpatrick shooting with Ned and Dan still at large, a 100-pound 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. Ned, their leader, is 23 years old. He is tall, with dark brown hair and a reddish beard and mustache.

24:40Dan is 5 '5 and with his beardless face and overlarge 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, 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.

25:29The 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. 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.

26:11They 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 Phelan's Apprehension Act, which was in New South Wales, 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. So they were outlawed under that legislation and pretty well anyone could have a go at them. A bounty of£200 is also placed on each gang member's head, soon raised to the phenomenal sum of£500.