Ned Kelly: Australia’s Most Famous Outlaw

“I am a Widow’s Son, outlawed and my orders must be obeyed.” - Ned Kelly

At dawn on 28th of June 1880, armed police surrounding a small hotel in rural Australia saw something emerging through the mist. At first they could barely understand what they were looking at. The figure appeared enormous, with no visible head, and bullets seemed to bounce from its body. Some witnesses compared it to a ghost or demon, while one railway guard thought the creature looked nine feet tall. The truth was slightly less supernatural but no less extraordinary. Walking towards them was 25 year old outlaw Ned Kelly, wearing approximately 44 kilograms of homemade steel armour and carrying a revolver.

It remains one of the most remarkable last stands in criminal history, but by the time Kelly staggered out of the trees that morning his transformation from poor farmer’s son to Australia’s most notorious outlaw had been underway for years. Edward Kelly was born in Victoria in around 1854 or 1855, the son of Irish immigrants John “Red” Kelly and Ellen Quinn. His father had arrived in Australia under circumstances that seem almost designed to begin an outlaw legend, he had been transported from Ireland in 1841 after being convicted of stealing pigs.

The Kellys belonged to the poorer Irish Catholic population of colonial Victoria, and their relationship with the authorities was rarely comfortable. Wealthy pastoralists known as squatters controlled enormous areas of valuable land, while poorer selectors attempted to establish farms on smaller plots, often on considerably worse ground. Religious prejudice, class resentment and lingering hostility towards the Irish existed alongside genuine criminality within families such as the Kellys and Quinns. Ned would later portray himself as someone driven into rebellion by corrupt police and a system designed to protect the wealthy. The police tended to regard the Kelly family rather differently.

There was another Ned Kelly before the armour and the murders, however. As a boy he reportedly rescued seven-year-old Richard Shelton from drowning in Hughes Creek. Shelton’s family rewarded him with a green silk sash for his bravery. It clearly meant something to Kelly because approximately fifteen years later, when police finally pulled the wounded outlaw from his iron armour at Glenrowan, he was still wearing that same green sash underneath it. The most famous criminal in Australia went into his final battle wearing the childhood reward he had received for saving somebody’s life.

Kelly’s descent into crime began young. He was arrested as a teenager for allegedly assaulting a Chinese man, although the charge was dismissed, and was later suspected of assisting the bushranger Harry Power. By 1871 he was serving a three-year prison sentence for receiving a stolen horse. After his release he worked in timber cutting and other manual jobs, but continued moving within a world where horse theft, cattle theft and violent confrontations with police were common.

The event that pushed the Kelly story towards open warfare occurred in April 1878 and remains disputed. Policeman Alexander Fitzpatrick arrived at the Kelly family home intending to arrest Ned’s younger brother Dan for horse stealing. A violent confrontation followed. Fitzpatrick claimed that Ned Kelly was present and shot him in the wrist. Ned insisted that he was nowhere near the house, and even historians have never completely resolved what happened that evening.

What is certain is that the consequences were severe. Ned’s mother Ellen was arrested along with William Skillion and William Williamson and eventually sentenced to three years in prison. Warrants were issued for Ned and Dan, who disappeared into the Victorian bush. They were joined by two friends, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, creating the four-man group that became known simply as the Kelly Gang. For Ned, the imprisonment of his mother seems to have confirmed something he already believed: that the police were not merely enforcing the law but persecuting his family. Whether this was reality, paranoia or some mixture of both is one of the central arguments surrounding Kelly.

The Kelly family certainly had an extensive criminal history, but the policing of poor Irish settlers in colonial Victoria was hardly free from prejudice, corruption or abuse. This is part of what makes Ned Kelly so difficult to categorise neatly. He was not simply an innocent man crushed by the state, but neither did he emerge from a social vacuum.

The tensions surrounding land, class, religion and ethnicity were very real, and Kelly increasingly interpreted every confrontation with authority through that lens.

Then came Stringybark Creek. In October 1878, four policemen entered the Wombat Ranges searching for the Kelly brothers. The gang discovered their camp and attempted to hold them up. What followed turned Ned Kelly permanently from fugitive into killer. Policeman Thomas Lonigan was shot dead when he reached for his weapon. Later, when Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Policeman Michael Scanlan returned to the camp, another gunfight began. Scanlan was killed and Kennedy was wounded before Kelly later shot him dead.

Three policemen were dead, and whatever sympathy could be given to Kelly’s grievances against the authorities became considerably more difficult from this point onwards. Kelly would insist that he had acted because the officers intended to kill him and that the confrontation was essentially them or him. Nevertheless, Stringybark Creek is the part of the Kelly legend that cannot comfortably be transformed into Robin Hood. Lonigan, Scanlan and Kennedy were real men who died violently, and Kelly personally killed them.

The Victorian government responded by declaring Kelly, Dan, Byrne and Hart outlaws. This had a very literal meaning. They could be captured or killed without the normal protections afforded to other citizens, and enormous rewards were eventually offered for them. Police flooded north-eastern Victoria, informers were recruited and Aboriginal trackers were brought from Queensland to assist the search. Despite all of this, for almost two years four young men managed to embarrass the colonial government.

The gang survived because they relied upon an extraordinary network of relatives, friends and sympathisers who provided information, food and shelter. Some genuinely admired them, others feared them, and many poor settlers regarded the Kellys as symbols of resistance against police harassment and the wealthy landholding establishment. Their ability to disappear into the countryside became part of the legend, and each successful escape made the authorities look increasingly ineffective.

The gang also began robbing banks. At Euroa in December 1878, they took hostages at a nearby sheep station before robbing the National Bank of approximately £2,000. Two months later they rode across the border into New South Wales and took control of the small town of Jerilderie. The sheer audacity of the operation is remarkable. They captured the local policemen, locked them up, wore police uniforms around town and eventually robbed the Bank of New South Wales.

Kelly had another reason for visiting Jerilderie. He wanted to be heard. During this period he dictated an extraordinary document of more than 8,000 words to Joe Byrne. Today it is known as the Jerilderie Letter. It is part autobiography, part political manifesto, part justification and part furious rant. Kelly describes his conflicts with the police, defends the killings at Stringybark Creek, attacks wealthy landowners and repeatedly portrays himself and his family as victims of persecution.

The letter is messy, angry and sometimes threatening, but it gives Kelly something few famous criminals possess: his own voice. He was not merely being described by policemen, judges or newspaper editors. Ned Kelly was explaining Ned Kelly. He saw himself as a man fighting injustice, while the authorities saw an armed murderer. Both versions have survived, and much of the fascination surrounding him comes from the fact that neither has completely erased the other.

By 1880, however, the gang realised that hiding indefinitely was impossible. Their response was one of the strangest plans ever attempted by a group of outlaws. They began secretly constructing suits of armour from thick pieces of agricultural machinery, particularly steel plough mouldboards. Each suit consisted of a helmet, breastplate, backplate and shoulder protection. Ned’s surviving armour weighs around 44 kilograms, and when assembled it looks more like something belonging to a medieval battlefield than the Australian bush.

The armour was crude, heavy and uncomfortable, but it was also surprisingly effective. The gang’s final plan centred on Glenrowan. Joe Byrne first murdered Aaron Sherritt, a former friend who had become a police informer. Kelly correctly predicted that police reinforcements would then travel towards the area by special train. The gang seized the Glenrowan Inn, detained dozens of people and forced railway workers to remove part of the track.

The intention was to derail the police train. Had it succeeded, the result might have been catastrophic. A train carrying police would have struck the damaged track at speed, after which the armoured gang intended to confront the survivors. Whatever Kelly’s later reputation as an underdog, this was not a harmless act of rebellion. Men aboard the train could easily have been killed in large numbers.

The plan failed because Kelly released the wrong hostage. Local schoolmaster Thomas Curnow persuaded Kelly to let him leave the hotel with his family. Once free, Curnow stood beside the railway line holding a red scarf and a candle behind it. The approaching train saw the warning and stopped before reaching the damaged track. The police now knew exactly where the Kelly Gang was.

During the early hours of 28th of June 1880, dozens of armed officers surrounded the Glenrowan Inn and gunfire erupted in both directions. Superintendent Francis Hare was wounded, while Ned Kelly was also hit several times before disappearing into the surrounding bush. Inside the hotel, Joe Byrne was shot in the leg while reportedly standing near the bar and bled to death.

Ned could have continued into the bush and perhaps escaped, but instead he came back. Shortly before dawn, the police noticed the enormous figure walking towards them through the mist and opened fire. Bullets struck Kelly’s helmet and breastplate but failed to penetrate the thick steel. Contemporary witnesses described the surreal sight of rounds apparently having little effect. One report said Kelly looked like a man possessing a “charmed life”. After months of rumours and fear surrounding the gang, policemen were suddenly confronted by a huge iron figure emerging from the darkness while rifle rounds bounced from his body.

The armour, however, had one extremely obvious design flaw: it did not protect his legs. Police quickly realised this and began firing beneath the armour. Kelly was hit repeatedly in the legs and eventually collapsed. Officers rushed forward, removed his weapons and stripped away the steel plates. He had been shot numerous times but was alive.

The rest of the gang would not be so fortunate. Byrne was already dead. The hotel was eventually set on fire, and the bodies of Dan Kelly and Steve Hart were discovered inside. Two hostages also died from police gunfire during the siege. The Kelly Gang had ceased to exist.

Ned Kelly was taken to Melbourne and tried for the murder of a policeman named Lonigan. The judge was Sir Redmond Barry, the same judge who had sentenced Kelly’s mother to prison following the Fitzpatrick incident. After being found guilty, Kelly was sentenced to death. According to popular legend, he responded to his approaching execution with the immortal words, “Such is life.”

There is just one problem with that famous quotation: he probably never said it. Contemporary accounts more reliably record his final words as something closer to, “Ah well, I suppose it has come to this.” The phrase “Such is life” became attached to Kelly afterwards and fitted the legend so perfectly that eventually it became more famous than the evidence. It is perhaps appropriate that even his final words became part of the mythology.

Efforts to save him were substantial. Thousands signed petitions requesting that his sentence be commuted, demonstrating just how divisive Kelly had already become. To some people he was a murderer receiving the punishment prescribed by law. To others he was the product of a deeply unequal colonial society and a symbol of resistance to police power. It made no difference. On 11th of November 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged inside Melbourne Gaol at roughly 25 years of age.

That should have been the end of him, but instead it was the beginning. Kelly became something considerably larger than the criminal who had actually lived. To some Australians he represented resistance to authority, class oppression and British colonial power. To others he remained exactly what the courts said he was: a violent thief and murderer responsible for the deaths of policemen who were simply doing their jobs.

The argument survives because neither version is entirely comfortable. Kelly was capable of courage. As a child he risked his life to save another boy from drowning. At Glenrowan he returned to an almost hopeless gunfight when escape may still have been possible. He could also be charismatic and surprisingly considerate towards some of the hostages taken during the gang’s bank robberies. Yet he was also a killer whose final scheme could have caused the deaths of many more people.

Romanticising him into an Australian Robin Hood requires forgetting Stringybark Creek and the planned train derailment. Reducing him to nothing more than a mindless criminal requires ignoring the very real class, religious and ethnic tensions of colonial Victoria and the extraordinary level of support the gang received from ordinary settlers. Perhaps that contradiction explains why Ned Kelly has never disappeared.

There have been thousands of Australian criminals, but only one built himself a suit of armour, wrote an 8,000-word manifesto explaining why society had driven him to rebellion, fought the police like a medieval knight and then walked into Australian mythology wearing beneath all that iron a green silk sash he had been given as a boy for saving someone else’s life.

That small piece of cloth may tell us more about Ned Kelly than the armour ever could. He was a hero once, long before he became an outlaw. Whether he remained one is an argument Australia has been having ever since.