Stringybark Creek: The Irish Policemen Who Hunted Ned Kelly

00:00:03:01 – 00:00:23:05
Announcer
The Póilíní Podcast, hosted by writer Helen Moorhouse and Doctor John Reynolds. Stories of duty and danger, life and the law, police and perpetrators.

00:00:23:07 – 00:00:56:09
Helen
The 10th convict ship to leave Britain in 1841 was the Prince Regent, a 30-year-old merchant vessel chartered to make the long, monotonous and frightening journey to what is now known as Tasmania. In August, she set sail from Kingstown Harbour in Dublin with 181 male convicts on board. Among them was John “Red” Kelly, 21 years of age, a dirt-poor Tipperary labourer convicted of stealing a pig, after 149 days at sea.

00:00:56:09 – 00:01:22:22
Helen
The ship docked at Hobart on New Year’s Day 1842. It may as well have been the end of the world. By 1848, Kelly would be a free man, able to create a new life. He’d go on to marry and father eight surviving children. One of those children would grow up to be arguably the world’s most iconic outlaw — a folk hero to some, a murderer to others.

00:01:22:24 – 00:01:37:08
Helen
Australia’s most notorious bushranger was the son of an Irish immigrant — none other than the controversial, legendary Edward, better known as Ned Kelly.

00:01:37:10 – 00:02:05:22
Helen
Today we’re travelling a long way from Tipperary. We’re going 17,000km to the state of Victoria in Australia, to places with names like Stringybark Creek and Eleven Mile Creek and Euroa, and creatures like wombats and snakes and spiders. And in the trees, the kookaburra — kookaburras chirping instead of robins singing, and the smell of eucalyptus trees instead of, I don’t know, silage in the air.

00:02:05:24 – 00:02:36:07
Helen
Obviously Ned Kelly is the background of the story, and he’s going to be the main character, but he’s not exactly the reason we’re here today, because this is the Póilíní Podcast — so we’re talking about policemen, and we’re going to talk about four individuals, four Irish policemen, who become a very integral part of the Ned Kelly story. In your time, John, as a serving guard, were you ever posted anywhere as exotic as Australia or Stringybark Creek?

00:02:36:09 – 00:02:46:08
John
Well, the odd laneway in rural Ireland, if there’s a royal visit or a presidential visit from the United States — you’re basically told stay there until relieved.

00:02:46:10 – 00:03:11:21
Helen
So when we’re talking about Australia — just to look, historically, at Ireland and Australia — we’ve got a huge history together that goes right back. 40,000 Irish were transported to the penal colonies. Then voluntary emigration surged from the 1840s onwards. Roughly 2.5 million Australians today claim Irish ancestry. That’s a lot of Irish people making a big journey to a new world.

00:03:12:00 – 00:03:28:07
John
Yes. I suppose one of the more surprising exports from Ireland in the 19th century was actually policemen, on an industrial scale, almost. So when a colonial force was either being set up or looking for reinforcements or new blood, Ireland was looked to, to supply those men.

00:03:28:09 – 00:03:34:15
Helen
And so to these Irish policemen, Australia must have felt like a whole alien planet.

00:03:34:17 – 00:04:00:10
John
In many ways — obviously the climate, and you’ve already mentioned the snakes and the exotic animals over there. But in other ways, when people arrived in Australia, it was a British colony with the same laws, the same language. So a lot of things would have been familiar — and particularly, perhaps, for immigrants like Red Kelly, he would have found a lot of things were similar in a bad way for him, in terms of the structure of policing and the repression of government.

00:04:00:10 – 00:04:20:00
John
So it was kind of a logical transition for someone who had been a policeman in Ireland to go to Australia and become a policeman there, because for most police recruits, it was the only profession or job they’d ever had. And — a remarkable figure here — at the time of what was called the Kelly outbreak, 82% of the Victoria Police were Irishmen.

00:04:20:06 – 00:04:25:18
Helen
Do we have any idea what day-to-day life would have been like? What sort of things would they have done on the job?

00:04:25:20 – 00:04:47:13
John
The main difference in Victoria was that they were mounted — known as mounted constables — because, especially in rural areas, they covered absolutely colossal territory. You can only imagine how big their areas were. The standard of training would have been very poor compared to the training in the RIC, or even the Dublin police. So they were considered, you know, it wasn’t the best.

00:04:47:13 – 00:05:06:07
John
But again, it was only about 20 years old at this stage, and they were dealing with very rough people. I mean, the outback back then — ex-convicts, the vast majority, like Red Kelly. When he was released, he could have come back to Ireland if he wanted, but he didn’t. So it was a pretty rough-and-ready place to be a policeman, or even just an ordinary resident, in Australia at the time.

00:05:06:09 – 00:05:08:11
John
So it was a very difficult and dangerous job.

00:05:08:17 – 00:05:24:12
Helen
So a large portion of the population at the time, being convicts, would possibly have had it in for them in the first place — the policeman was not their natural friend — because, of course, a lot of the crimes people were transported for were relatively minor by today’s standards.

00:05:24:12 – 00:05:42:13
John
Yeah, very, very minor crimes. And like Red Kelly — the police said he’d been transported for shooting at a landlord, which actually wasn’t true. Kelly had stolen two pigs and was caught selling them at a market about 50 miles away. But, I mean, this was 1840 — just before the Famine had begun.

00:05:42:15 – 00:05:59:01
John
Land was precious, animals were precious, and I think they were sending out signals that they were going to come down ruthlessly on people who took part in what was considered agrarian or rural crime. The consequences for you: a sentence to Van Diemen’s Land, and you’re never, never seen again.

00:05:59:03 – 00:06:15:15
Helen
And it was end-of-the-world stuff for them — they had to set foot in this whole new world and make a life for themselves, which Red Kelly did. He went on to marry another Irish immigrant, Ellen Quinn, from Ballymena in County Antrim, and they set up home first in a place called Beveridge, just north of Melbourne.

00:06:15:16 – 00:06:22:06
Helen
Yes, the Kellys went on to have eight surviving children. And they didn’t have the best relationship with the police, did they?

00:06:22:07 – 00:06:44:05
John
Well, it’s understandable — Red Kelly had been arrested by the RIC, and because of them catching him, he gets transported. Then he arrives in Australia and he’s dealing with other policemen who are, let’s say, Irishmen as well. Ellen came from Northern Ireland, but I mean, they both came from a really famine-stricken country, because the great famine of 1845 wasn’t the only one.

00:06:44:05 – 00:07:01:08
John
There had been others in the 1820s and 30s, so you could say Ireland was famine-stricken for much of this period. These people were immigrants, and they were almost destitute at times. When Red left prison, he travelled all over the country, and the records say he took up labouring, or was what they’d call a bush carpenter, kind of.

00:07:01:13 – 00:07:24:24
John
And he made enough money to buy a small holding — but bad land — so he didn’t really succeed at that. And then he took to drinking seriously, which badly affected his income and his health. So, in Victoria, you had repressive British colonial legislation, you had very rough-and-ready, robust policing, and then the Kellys would have been, socially, the lowest rung of the ladder in Australia.

00:07:25:01 – 00:07:32:20
Helen
And once he settled in Australia, what did the Kellys do to eke out a living in this town of Beveridge, near Melbourne?

00:07:32:22 – 00:07:56:08
John
Well, Red had made a few pounds from being a kind of outback tradesman — carpenter and so on. But, unfortunately, theft and fraud was part of the Kelly family life, and Ned and his brothers grew up in that environment — stealing animals, maybe fraud, and then moving on to more serious crimes later as they got older.

00:07:56:10 – 00:08:06:14
Helen
And of course it would have been quite violent as well, because you had to defend yourself and people would have been armed. Things were hand-to-hand. It wasn’t polite society — it was wild and rough.

00:08:06:15 – 00:08:41:12
John
Yeah, it was a pretty lawless society, and there were huge areas with no police presence whatsoever. And of course there were emigrants there from all over the world, with different tensions and cultural differences between them. You also had the Indigenous people there, who aren’t often spoken about in this story — there were Indigenous police officers that the Victoria Police had, particularly for tracking, because obviously they had fantastic natural expertise. So you had this whole melting pot of different cultures, and the Irish immigrants brought their grievances with them from Ireland. And of course there were

00:08:41:12 – 00:08:53:14
John
more and more Irish arriving because of the Famine. So you have this situation where people are asking: what are the British doing, that there are millions of people starving, and many people emigrating because of the way the country is being run?

00:08:53:15 – 00:09:00:12
Helen
And of course, the Victoria Police were seen, in Ireland, as representatives of the oppressive British government.

00:09:00:17 – 00:09:14:24
John
Yeah, I mean, obviously the uniform was going to trigger a lot of people, and I’m sure for Red Kelly, hearing an Irish accent and meeting some guy who was in the RIC who’d locked him up 20 years earlier, it must have felt like there was no escape, really.

00:09:15:00 – 00:09:43:24
Helen
That’s going to rub him up the wrong way, for sure. So Red Kelly died in 1866, when Ned was 11, and Ned was then left as head of the household — a big responsibility on very small shoulders. And straight away he started his run-ins with the law, continuing from his teens — he was accused of, but not convicted of, assault, receiving a stolen horse, that sort of thing, which would later be tagged as persecution by the police, really.

00:09:44:02 – 00:10:06:06
Helen
So for about a year, from 1869, he fell in with a character who was a big influence on him — a man called Henry Johnston, better known as Harry Power, another Irish convict. He was from Waterford, and he’d been transported for stealing a pair of shoes — if we’re talking serious crime here. Harry Power was a bushranger, and he taught Ned everything he knew.

00:10:06:08 – 00:10:08:15
Helen
Tell us what a bushranger is.

00:10:08:17 – 00:10:27:01
John
Well, I suppose you could equate it to an outlaw in the American West. A bushranger wasn’t, originally — it started as an escaped convict who went into the bush to get away from the police, or from being captured, and they’d take to the bush and live there, undetected, committing crime.

00:10:27:02 – 00:10:45:10
John
By the 1820s, the term had evolved to mean those who actually carried arms and carried out robberies, using the bush as their base. So a bushranger was basically an armed convict. And that’s what Kelly really did his apprenticeship in, with Harry Power, before becoming probably the most famous bushranger ever.

00:10:45:12 – 00:10:52:24
Helen
Is there any reason why Henry Johnston might have used the alias Harry Power? Why would he have used that name — do you know?

00:10:53:01 – 00:11:19:02
John
I don’t know — probably when he was released, he just wanted to take a new name because he was involved in crime. The Irish police had what was called the Hue and Cry — a weekly, twice-weekly bulletin for the police, sent to every police station in Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, with names, information, descriptions and eventually photographs of prisoners who were wanted or had escaped.

00:11:19:06 – 00:11:40:01
John
The Australian police brought in a Police Gazette in 1853 — almost as soon as they were founded, they said, “that’s a great idea, we’re going to do that too.” So even though, as you say, there were huge areas, a switched-on policeman would read those and take a lot of interest in it.

00:11:40:01 – 00:12:02:06
John
“Who’s living on my patch?” And he’d say, “he’s got this tattoo, he could be somebody else.” So there was that effort on the part of the police to professionalise and share intelligence with each other. Then when photographs arrived, that was a game-changer — for the first time, the police had a photograph of their suspect, and everybody arrested would have been photographed from then on.

00:12:02:06 – 00:12:25:07
John
I went into the Hue and Cry archive — it’s a fabulous read — and looked at what people were charged with. I’ll say Australia pioneered that kind of thing too: the New South Wales Police Museum’s most important and most-visited attraction is their mugshot collection. They’ve published books of them, and they have a fabulous website with the mugshots, where they actually photographed people with mirrors,

00:12:25:09 – 00:12:31:16
John
so you can see them at 360 degrees. And, sad to say, the vast majority of the people photographed were

00:12:31:18 – 00:12:39:22
Helen
Irish. And Ned had brothers as well, and he joined in with a mob called the Greta mob, wasn’t it?

00:12:39:23 – 00:12:40:07
John
Yes.

00:12:40:08 – 00:12:41:03
Helen
They were a gang of —

00:12:41:03 – 00:12:46:05
John
— from the town called Greta. Yeah, other kinds of young bushrangers.

00:12:46:09 – 00:12:50:14
Helen
And so they’d be stealing cattle, horses, that sort of thing.

00:12:50:15 – 00:13:07:17
John
Yeah, exactly — and maybe buying things and not paying for them, and stuff like that. They evolved later into more serious crime. People thought the outback was a lawless place, so they might be reluctant to move to these new towns that were springing up, which needed respectable people to move in.

00:13:07:19 – 00:13:25:01
John
“Well, I’m not going there, it’s strange territory, it’s the bush.” So how do you encourage people to go there — law enforcement. So they started building police barracks in towns like that, to try and get some control of the place and put manners on these bushrangers and larrikins.

00:13:25:03 – 00:13:55:10
Daryl
On the 15th of April, 1878, Mounted Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick of the Victoria Police made his way to visit the Kelly homestead at Eleven Mile Creek. As his name suggests, Fitzpatrick was of Irish descent, and he had been shaped by the same broad world of Irish migration as the Kellys. However, he represented a younger, Australian-born generation of colonial authority, rather than an immigrant policeman imposing British rule.

00:13:55:12 – 00:14:20:15
Daryl
Fitzpatrick’s visit was not a social call. He had a warrant for the arrest of 18-year-old Dan Kelly, for livestock theft. Fitzpatrick was well aware of the long history of clashes between the Kellys and the Victoria Police. He believed, however, that the main perpetrator, Ned, was in the neighbouring state of New South Wales, on the run for the same charge as his brother.

00:14:20:17 – 00:14:41:11
Daryl
On that fateful evening, Fitzpatrick rode across parched grass and dusty tracks toward the isolated slab hut, with its dirt floor and shingle roof, to arrest Dan Kelly. Little did he know that he was about to become a footnote in one of the most notorious chapters of Australian history.

00:14:41:13 – 00:14:43:14
Helen
John, tell us about the Fitzpatrick incident.

00:14:43:17 – 00:15:01:15
John
Well, Mounted Constable Fitzpatrick decided to go to the Kelly homestead and arrest Dan Kelly, because he was aware there was a warrant for him. Fitzpatrick had been in a little bit of trouble, work-wise — he was considered maybe a little bit immature, and not the best policeman.

00:15:01:15 – 00:15:19:24
John
So I think he saw this as an opportunity to go out there and come back with, let’s say, a good arrest. The place had a reputation, and for any policeman going on their own to make an arrest — you never know how someone’s going to react. I’ve had that myself numerous times, where the nicest person can suddenly turn when they realise the handcuffs are going on to them.

00:15:20:04 – 00:15:44:15
John
Now the police believed Ned was on the run, in New South Wales — so they didn’t think he’d be at the homestead, which is probably why Fitzpatrick decided to go to Ellen’s house to secretly pick up Dan. When he arrived there, the house was full — there were a lot of kids there — so Fitzpatrick’s attitude seems to have been to try and play it soft, [unclear].

00:15:44:15 – 00:15:58:05
John
“Look, I have a warrant for you, we’ll have to go and get it sorted out.” That’s the approach he seems to have taken. So he actually agreed, even though Dan was now under arrest, that Dan could have something to eat before they went, because it was going to be a long trip to the police station —

00:15:58:06 – 00:16:24:08
John
about 15km away. So Fitzpatrick said yes, okay — again, probably trying to keep the situation under control. I’m sure it was hostile in the house, with Ellen and the others there. But then, without any warning, Ned Kelly comes in the front door, which nobody was expecting, and fires a shot at Fitzpatrick. Then Ellen Kelly comes over and wallops the constable on the head with a shovel — if it weren’t for the fact he was wearing a helmet,

00:16:24:10 – 00:16:43:07
John
she probably would have killed him, and that’s what saved him from serious injury. But then Ned fired another shot, and Fitzpatrick put his hand up when he saw the gun — the bullet went into his wrist and lodged there. He passed out from the pain, and he said later, in his statement, that when he woke up he heard the family discussing what they were going to do with him — whether they were going to kill him.

00:16:43:07 – 00:17:08:15
John
They let him go. It was obviously a nervous time for him — initially Ned asked Fitzpatrick, “if I release you, will you promise me you won’t tell anyone what happened?” When Fitzpatrick agreed to that, the family had another discussion and decided they’d let him go, because the consequences of killing him would have meant, potentially, everybody in the house could have been executed for the murder of a constable.

00:17:08:17 – 00:17:38:24
John
So maybe Ned was trying to show a little bit of compassion for Fitzpatrick, to see could they come to some sort of resolution. So, based on the statement Fitzpatrick made when he was let go, Ned and Dan Kelly, along with Ellen Kelly, a man called Brickey Williamson, and a man called Bill Skillion, who had all been at the Kelly house, were charged with the attempted murder of the constable — everybody in the house, not just the one who fired the shots, was charged with attempted murder.

00:17:39:01 – 00:18:01:11
John
The police went the next day, in big numbers, back to the house to try and find Ned and Dan — and, surprise surprise, they’d disappeared into the bush. But the other three were arrested. Ellen Kelly, who’d hit Fitzpatrick with the shovel, was sentenced to three years’ hard labour in Melbourne Jail, and Williamson and Skillion were given six years’ hard labour each, even though they hadn’t done anything to Fitzpatrick at all.

00:18:01:12 – 00:18:19:17
John
So now you have a situation where Ned is 23 and Dan is 17, on the run in the bush, with a reward of 100 pounds on each of their heads — a lot of money at the time. The brothers were angry about this, and when they found out their mother had gone to jail, they decided they were going to take revenge, one way or another.

00:18:19:17 – 00:18:24:14
John
And you could say this is when what was termed afterwards by the press “the Kelly outbreak” began.

00:18:24:16 – 00:18:32:21
Helen
One detail that struck me is that they made him dig the bullet out of his own arm — is that correct? Ellen bandaged him up, but only after he’d taken the bullet out himself.

00:18:32:22 – 00:18:46:06
John
Well, Ned saw the bullet in his wrist and offered to take it out with his penknife. But when Fitzpatrick saw the rusty penknife, he said, “no, I’ll do it myself” — and he did.

00:18:46:08 – 00:19:00:12
Helen
A lot of what’s happened with the Kelly myth — and we’ll talk about this more later — is this polarisation: the Kellys were wrong, they were hard done by, versus the police persecuted them. Where does this land?

00:19:00:14 – 00:19:21:21
John
Well, people will take sides, because he’s a very divisive figure even today. Some people have a view that he was a kind of Robin Hood character — there’s no evidence of that. He stole a lot of money, and where it went, nobody really knows. Some went to his family, all right, but he certainly wasn’t going around the community doling out money from the bank robberies he got involved in later on.

00:19:22:01 – 00:19:43:22
John
And there’s absolutely no doubt — he’s a convicted murderer, convicted of horse and cattle theft, convicted bank robber. And afterwards he wrote letters, and he wrote to newspapers giving his side of the story, as he felt it. Of course, people who didn’t like the government and didn’t like the police would think Kelly’s a good guy — why wouldn’t he stand up?

00:19:44:01 – 00:20:06:07
Helen
So Dan and Ned have taken to the bush, and the bush isn’t somewhere you’d go for a pleasant walk, or a drive through for the afternoon. The bush is immense — Victoria itself is three times the size of Ireland — and the bush is just a huge expanse of scrub and dried-up rivers. There was no means of communication.

00:20:06:10 – 00:20:25:11
Helen
You were on foot or on horseback. You could literally disappear, stay hidden. Ned Kelly comes across as a very intelligent strategist, really — thinking ahead, planning his move into the bush, and of course he’d have the knowledge he’d learned from Harry Power and his years of bushranging.

00:20:25:13 – 00:20:36:23
Helen
What does that mean for a police force trying to track somebody down, when they go into a situation like this — what sort of search has to be put in place for them?

00:20:37:00 – 00:20:54:15
John
Well, the first thing you’d do is say, right, where might they go — and for that, you’d be hoping an informant will tell you they have a hideout in such a place, or that they always go to this particular creek, because you’re thinking, well, they’re going to need a source of water, and for feeding horses, or whatever.

00:20:54:17 – 00:21:25:08
John
So your best hope is that an informant will tell you, because there was a reward of 100 pounds on each of their heads, which was a hell of a lot of money. In the absence of that, it’s an absolutely immense task, and you can only go on likelihoods — people tend to go back to the same places. Another thing, and perhaps a mistake the police made at the time: I mentioned they had Aboriginal trackers in the police, called native trackers, but they weren’t deployed at this stage, because at this stage the crimes weren’t considered serious enough

00:21:25:08 – 00:21:42:20
John
to warrant bringing the native trackers up from Melbourne to try and find these men. So that was maybe a mistake the police made at the time. In my own Garda career, I was involved in searches of the Dublin mountains for missing people — if we recovered, unfortunately, a murder victim, we’d be searching the area for evidence, or whatever.

00:21:42:20 – 00:21:51:22
John
And even the infamous Beit paintings — we were searching for up there, and in that situation we were looking for the paintings but found a body instead that we weren’t looking for.

00:21:51:23 – 00:21:56:12
Helen
Let’s put the Kellys on hold for a second — tell us about the Beit paintings, and finding a body.

00:21:56:14 – 00:22:17:19
John
Yeah, the Beit paintings had been stolen by Cahill’s gang from Russborough House, and Interpol received intelligence that the paintings were there — there was an effort to try and sell them. So an Interpol agent pretended to be an art dealer, and the deal was that we’d meet somebody up in the mountains

00:22:17:19 – 00:22:36:20
John
and he’d show us the paintings. And, I should say, this was 1986, ’87 — the technology was very rudimentary. There was supposed to be a signal: when the Interpol agent pressed a torch, it would send up a beam, and there was an Air Corps aircraft above, because the Gardaí didn’t have aircraft at the time.

00:22:36:22 – 00:22:56:02
John
So the idea was that we’d see the signal from the mountains, and we were down below in the foothills area, waiting to go up and swarm the place. But the technology, the radios, didn’t work — and Cahill got suspicious of the Interpol agent, and basically the whole thing fell apart.

00:22:56:03 – 00:23:14:24
John
So we went up afterwards to try and find the paintings in the general area — we didn’t know whether they’d been left there, or had been taken away again by Cahill’s gang. We didn’t find them at that stage. But in the course of that, a member I was working with saw something in a puddle,

00:23:14:24 – 00:23:18:21
John
and it turned out to be the body of someone who had been reported missing years earlier.

00:23:18:22 – 00:23:20:23
Helen
Oh dear — and that was in the Wicklow Mountains?

00:23:20:24 – 00:23:34:09
John
Yeah, the Dublin-Wicklow mountains — [unclear: terrain description] — heading in towards the Blessington direction. So that often happens — you’ll sometimes find things you’re not looking for.

00:23:34:12 – 00:23:40:03
Helen
That’s fascinating. So back to the Kellys out in the bush — what are they up to for two years?

00:23:40:05 – 00:23:41:16
John
Well, they’re busy.

00:23:41:17 – 00:24:00:13
John
They pulled off a couple of bank robberies where they got a substantial amount of money. And there’s no doubt that they were probably, I’d say, looked after by sympathetic people. It’s a bit like here in the ’20s, when the IRA were on the run — there was always a sympathetic household that would feed them, shelter them, and not talk to the police.

00:24:00:14 – 00:24:19:22
Helen
And as well as the safe houses, there would have been camping out, covering their tracks — years of hot summers and bitter nights, wild animals, snakes, spiders. It has to have been a pretty desperate time. But these guys were hard —

00:24:19:22 – 00:24:41:14
Helen
they were made for it. We’re going to talk about four individuals — four Irish policemen who become a very integral part of the Ned Kelly story. The Kellys are on the run, and we find ourselves on the 25th of October, 1878, when the police get a tip-off that they’re nearby and send out a search party.

00:24:41:19 – 00:24:45:00
Helen
Give us a little background on these four men.

00:24:45:02 – 00:25:11:01
John
Yeah, I suppose the most important figure is probably Sergeant Michael Kennedy. Kennedy was only 26 at the time of these events, and a father of five. He came from a small village near Castlepollard, in County Westmeath. Kennedy joined the Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1861, at just 19, resigned from the DMP and emigrated to Australia, and joined the Victoria Police in 1864. He was promoted to sergeant fairly quickly.

00:25:11:01 – 00:25:34:22
John
The Victoria Police needed men like him — experienced policemen from the DMP, already on track for promotion back in Ireland, who could just step straight in and get on with policing. So Kennedy had been transferred to the town of Mansfield, and he took a young constable called Michael Scanlan under his wing, as another Irishman.

00:25:34:22 – 00:25:55:04
John
Scanlan was born in Fossa, near Killarney, in 1843, and emigrated to Australia with his brother, joining the Victoria Police in 1865. He was regarded as a very good policeman with a promising career, so when Kennedy had to put together a search party to go into the bush after the Kellys, Scanlan was an obvious choice.

00:25:55:06 – 00:26:14:20
John
Kennedy also chose a man called Thomas Lonigan from Sligo for the search party. He was born in 1841, so a bit older than the rest, and married with one child. He arrived in Australia in 1870 with nothing, and hadn’t been a policeman in Ireland — he had nowhere to stay, no job. He tried smallholding, farming, but it didn’t work out.

00:26:14:24 – 00:26:38:14
John
So he joined the Victoria Police, looking for the steady wages of being a policeman, since he had a child to support. One important thing about Lonigan is that he knew the Kellys by sight, because he’d once arrested Ned Kelly himself. So Lonigan was again a very obvious choice for Kennedy to bring on the party. The last man, another Irishman, was Thomas Newman McIntyre, from Belfast.

00:26:38:16 – 00:27:00:09
John
His father had been a head constable in the RIC — head constable is an unusual rank, above sergeant, kind of the highest rank of NCO in the force, because at that time Catholics could not get promoted to officer rank in the RIC; that was more or less out of the question until well into the 20th century.

00:27:00:13 – 00:27:22:00
John
So for an ambitious man in the police, head constable was about as far as you were going to get, but it was considered a very good, respectable job. And because McIntyre’s father had been a head constable, McIntyre was allowed to join the RIC at the age of 17 — sons of serving policemen got preference for recruitment, and, funny enough, didn’t have to meet the same height requirements.

00:27:22:02 – 00:27:42:15
John
So if you were what was called “a pop,” meaning the son of a serving policeman, you got some advantages when joining. McIntyre had a pretty good reputation — he’d been a teacher in New South Wales, but then, for some reason, joined the Victoria Police. Maybe it was in his blood. So the four men headed into the bush to search for the Kellys.

00:27:42:16 – 00:27:58:03
John
Four Irishmen — RIC, DMP — but all Irishmen, going off to hunt down the sons of another Irishman. That’s the kind of amazing thing about this particular search.

00:27:58:06 – 00:27:59:04
Helen
So that’s quite profound.

00:27:59:06 – 00:28:00:04
John
Yeah.

00:28:00:06 – 00:28:16:17
Helen
So the police had been tipped off that the Kellys were hiding near a place called Stringybark Creek, where the gang had set up camp. The police make their way out to see what they can see — take us through the events that followed. This is an extraordinary story.

00:28:16:19 – 00:28:38:10
John
Yeah. The police got information that, as I mentioned, the Kellys often went to this particular place, so the logical spot for the police to go was Stringybark Creek. When the four policemen arrived there, they patrolled the area and Kennedy made the decision that he and Scanlan would go off to scout, while

00:28:38:10 – 00:28:54:11
John
McIntyre and Lonigan would remain behind and set up camp, since they figured they’d be out there for a long time. The plan was: we’ll make camp here as a base, two of us will go on patrol, you two stay with the camp, and then we’ll come back and decide what to do next.

00:28:54:11 – 00:29:10:13
John
Kennedy, as sergeant, was in charge. But what they didn’t realise was that the Kellys were actually camped out less than a kilometre away, and heard the police arriving. This was pure coincidence — it was a place the Kellys had used before, but the police didn’t realise that.

00:29:10:15 – 00:29:29:07
John
At about 5pm, the Kelly gang decided to raid the camp, possibly to try to capture the policemen and take their guns, their horses and their food. There are differing accounts of what went on, but the story goes that Lonigan raised his hands, then attempted to run and reached for his gun, and Ned Kelly shot him in the eye.

00:29:29:09 – 00:29:51:10
John
Kelly said afterwards that he didn’t begrudge his death, calling him “the meanest man I had any account against,” because of a previous encounter between Lonigan and Ned Kelly. So there was definitely animosity — whether Kelly deliberately killed Lonigan because he knew him, or only realised afterwards who he’d killed, he seemed to revel in the fact that he’d killed him.

00:29:51:12 – 00:30:12:08
John
McIntyre was taken prisoner. So now you have one dead policeman in the camp, and McIntyre a prisoner of the Kellys. Kennedy and Scanlan then arrived back, having no idea what had happened in their absence. The gang called on them to surrender; they refused. McIntyre told Kelly that they were Irish Catholics too,

00:30:12:14 – 00:30:38:24
John
appealing to the Irishness of the group, but Ned emphasised his Australian birth, saying, “I’ll let them see what one native can do.” There was a shootout — again, differing accounts of who started it — but basically Scanlan went to draw his rifle and was shot dead. Kennedy immediately jumped off his horse, firing at the Kellys, and ran into the bush, but Ned and Dan chased after him, shot him twice, and chased him for over 800 yards.

00:30:39:03 – 00:30:59:05
John
Kennedy ended up lying on the ground, very badly wounded, and Kelly shot him in the heart, claiming afterwards it was an act of mercy because he was going to die anyway. Whether that’s true or not, we might never know. But in the confusion, McIntyre, their prisoner, managed to jump on a loose horse and escape the scene while bullets were whizzing all around him.

00:30:59:08 – 00:31:29:03
John
He managed to hide out and eventually make his way to a road, flag someone down, and get back to civilisation to raise the alarm about what had happened at Stringybark Creek. And obviously then the entire resources of the Victoria Police were thrown into finding these men, because it had gone from a serious crime into the murder of three Victoria policemen.

00:31:29:05 – 00:31:42:10
Helen
So three policemen are dead. What, briefly, happened to the Kellys after that? This was the big turning point that led to the legendary ending we’re all pretty familiar with.

00:31:42:12 – 00:32:05:11
John
Well, eventually, because of good police intelligence, the Kellys were tracked down to a place called Glenrowan. They knew there were huge reinforcements coming from Melbourne, from Victoria Police headquarters, and a special train had been commissioned to bring the press, as well as the police, out from Melbourne.

00:32:05:13 – 00:32:25:24
John
Kelly was still writing to the press, criticising his enemies and the government and threatening consequences. When he found out about the train, the gang decided to derail it — which could have caused hundreds of deaths. It all came to a head at Glenrowan, where the gang took over a hotel and held dozens of hostages.

00:32:26:00 – 00:32:45:22
John
This is when the Kelly gang appeared wearing the iconic homemade armour, made from old ploughs that had been cut up and welded together. There was a 12-hour shootout. Ned was the only gang member to survive — he was severely wounded by police fire, but captured, and brought to Melbourne Jail, where he was kept in the hospital wing for over four weeks.

00:32:45:24 – 00:33:18:03
John
Kelly was charged and put on trial for the murder of Lonigan and Scanlan at Stringybark Creek, but he pleaded not guilty, his defence being that police persecution had driven him to bushranging, that it was morally justified, and that Stringybark was self-defence by his gang against the police. On the 3rd of November it was announced he’d be hanged on the 11th, at Melbourne Jail. In response, protests broke out in Melbourne, and petitions were signed demanding a reprieve — a petition for clemency attracted 22,000 signatures.

00:33:18:07 – 00:33:38:03
John
It got so bad that the police had to reinforce the jail, afraid it might be stormed by a mob, because Kelly had achieved such notoriety and sympathy over the two-year Kelly outbreak that there was a serious risk something might happen before they could hang him. The day before his execution, Kelly had his photograph taken.

00:33:38:03 – 00:34:02:12
John
It’s a famous photograph now, seen on numerous websites — a keepsake for his family, because, I suppose, he was a celebrity by this stage. He was granted a meeting with his relatives, and folklore has it that his mother’s last words to him were, “mind you die like a Kelly, son.” The execution took place at 10am on the 11th of November, 1880, and one newspaper commented on the crowd that turned up.

00:34:02:12 – 00:34:28:17
John
Here’s a quote: “there was a heterogeneous mob of men, women and children, mainly of the lowest classes.” So here you have — the people sympathising with the Kellys were of that lower class, according to the papers. So you have the same class divisions that existed in Ireland, transported over to Australia with the prisoners, and still there: the idea that only people like him — criminals, convicts, the lowest dregs of society — support Kelly.

00:34:28:19 – 00:34:43:23
Helen
And was that a deliberate attempt at spin, do you think, or was it that the people who supported Kelly saw something of themselves in him — that this guy was finally standing up to the oppression they felt, and that’s why he achieved such mythical status?

00:34:44:00 – 00:35:00:15
John
Yeah. I think there’s no doubt that for people who had been through unfairness in Ireland themselves, and had seen what was going on when they got to Australia — and also the prolonged nature of the whole affair, which had gone on for two years, and then the newspapers publishing Kelly’s letters —

00:35:00:17 – 00:35:18:15
John
that gave him an audience, like a kind of equivalent of social media — he’s got an audience, people who are going to be fans of his and support him and agree with what he says. And of course, once he was executed, he assumed an iconic status for a lot of other people too, by the very fact that he’d been executed.

00:35:18:17 – 00:35:27:10
Helen
So everything that happened with the Kelly Gang, and the shooting of the three Irish policemen — this led to huge changes in Victorian policing, didn’t it?

00:35:27:12 – 00:35:47:12
John
Somebody had to be hung out to dry for this, because it was considered a complete fiasco — the government in London was furious about it, and Kelly had been turned into a folk hero by some. So where was the blame going to lie? With the Victoria Police. So in 1881 they set up a Royal Commission into the conduct of the police.

00:35:47:15 – 00:36:15:02
John
They found that the police had acted properly in relation to the criminality itself, but it did expose other issues, like corruption and incompetence, and it recommended major, lasting change. It said that many officers were inefficient and ineffective, that they lacked leadership or strategy, and the Commission emphasised — looking ahead — the need for better training, discipline and coordination within the force.

00:36:15:04 – 00:36:35:02
John
They also found the force had made critical errors trying to capture the Kelly gang — for example, not bringing in the native trackers at the earliest stage, when they should have. The weapons the police had weren’t as good as the weapons the Kelly gang had. And I think the main finding — a police force getting this finding today would obviously be upset as well —

00:36:35:06 – 00:36:45:22
John
was that the public had lost confidence in the police, and part of the Commission’s mandate was to restore that trust by holding officers accountable and improving the overall functioning of the force.

00:36:45:24 – 00:37:03:19
Helen
The story of Ned Kelly — the ripples have echoed through the century, between his iconic cultural status and the changes made to policing. But forgotten in all of this are our four Irish policemen. What was the outcome of their sad deaths at that rural creek in Australia that day?

00:37:03:21 – 00:37:24:03
John
Well, it’s really, really sad — and it gets sadder, because there’s a memorial in the town of Mansfield, where Kennedy was stationed. It’s about 180km north-east of Melbourne. In the centre of the town stands the Mansfield Police Memorial, which commemorates the three policemen shot dead by the Kelly Gang at Stringybark Creek, which is over 150km away.

00:37:24:06 – 00:37:51:01
John
Sadly, the memorial has been vandalised numerous times over the years since it was put up in the 1920s. As for the men who died — Bridget Kennedy, the widow of Michael Kennedy, had been pregnant at the time of her husband’s death, but lost the baby, so she was left a widow with five small children. The inscription on her husband’s headstone is interesting — it says he was “a terror to evildoers,” which is quite a good epitaph for any policeman to have.

00:37:51:03 – 00:38:12:02
John
When Kennedy chose men for the ill-fated trip to Stringybark, Michael Scanlan reportedly had a premonition — the newspapers said he’d told people he was very uncertain about this patrol, for no particular reason, because at that stage the Kellys hadn’t killed anybody. But he had a premonition, and he left his beloved dog with a friend, saying, “if I never come back,

00:38:12:02 – 00:38:35:07
John
you can keep my dog.” He was only 25 when he died, and single. Following Lonigan’s murder, Charlotte Lonigan, the wife of Constable Thomas Lonigan, also lost the baby she was carrying, and never recovered from her husband’s death — she died at the age of 45, in 1891. The only surviving member of the party that went into the bush, Constable Thomas McIntyre,

00:38:35:09 – 00:38:52:04
John
really spent the rest of his life coming to terms with what he’d witnessed — these days you’d say the man most likely had PTSD, but that wasn’t recognised at the time; he was expected to just get on with it. He retired from the police at the age of 25, due to ill health, no doubt caused by what had happened.

00:38:52:06 – 00:38:57:03
John
He did later write a memoir, which you could say was the first history of the Kelly Gang.

00:38:57:06 – 00:39:31:10
Helen
So when we think of Ned Kelly, we think of Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger — rakish, handsome young men having adventures, being just slightly on the wrong side of the law, making their homemade armour, making a brave stand, or whatever. And it comes across as a ripping yarn from history, but there’s such a sad background to it — these were real people who had left Ireland, lived under terrible circumstances, and then these policemen on the other side of the law, who had also left Ireland for a chance at

00:39:31:10 – 00:39:36:20
Helen
a new life. And there’s just carnage and murder at each other’s hands.

00:39:36:22 – 00:39:55:13
John
Yeah, it’s a desperate, sad story, you know — the three policemen who died now lie buried beside each other in Mansfield, colleagues in death as they’d been colleagues in life. And they had something else in common: they were all born in Ireland, but met their deaths 17,000km away, at the hands of the sons of other Irish immigrants.

00:39:55:13 – 00:40:13:12
John
And that’s the really tragic part of this story. And I suppose a final twist, to bring it full circle — the man who led the Kelly investigation was a man called Superintendent John Sadleir. He actually came from Tipperary town, so he was a neighbour of John “Red” Kelly, and he was only seven years old when Kelly was transported.

00:40:13:12 – 00:40:27:06
John
But I think it’s amazing — the story starts in Tipperary and, with Sadleir, kind of ends there too, in South Tipperary. The connections are incredible — that these men all went to the other side of the world and ended up killing each other. For what?

00:40:27:08 – 00:40:28:15
Helen
Small world, after all.

00:40:28:16 – 00:40:29:15
John
Yeah.

00:40:29:17 – 00:40:53:13
Helen
So that’s it from another episode of the Póilíní Podcast. Thank you, John, and thank you for listening. Remember to check out our newsletter for additional background information — all our contact information, our socials, our email, our Substack, etc. — it’s all in the podcast description. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve got any additional information, insights, or stories you’d like to see covered on the Póilíní Podcast in future — drop us a line.

00:40:53:15 – 00:41:02:18
Helen
Give us a like, follow us, leave us a nice comment. Thank you very much for listening — we appreciate your support, and we’ll see you next week.

00:41:02:20 – 00:41:18:21
Announcer
The Póilíní Podcast, hosted by writer Helen Moorhouse and Doctor John Reynolds. Stories of duty and danger, life and the law, police and perpetrators.