In many accounts of
the siege, some of the facts given are definitely
quite questionable and in other accounts the facts are "embellished with
flowers of rhetoric." Here I present some of the published accounts
of
the siege that may be fantastic, muddled, fractured or florid...school
kids,
please be sure not to use everything you read below in your reports!
The
Australians-A Candid View Down Under by Harry Cox,
Chilton Books, 1966.
page 66
...Whatever Sheritt's (sic) true motives were in the hunt for the
Kellys, the gang believed he was helping the police. That was enough. On
Saturday night, June 26, 1880, Joe Byrne and Dan Kelly rode out to
Sheritt's hut near the town of Beechworth. Inside the hut beside a log
fire sat Sheritt, his new bride, and his mother-in-law. In the next room
four police troopers were huddled.
Joe Byrne and Dan Kelly took with them a close friend of Aaron Sheritt.
They handcuffed him and ordered him to walk towards the door of the hut.
There, with the outlaws' guns behind him, he called upon his friend to
open the door. As Sheritt did so, Joe Byrne fired two shots into his
face, killing him instantly. The four troopers crawled under a bed while
the killers mounted their horses and rode off across the plains to the
small town of Glenrowan, 136 miles north of Melbourne, to meet the other
members of the gang, Ned Kelly and Steve Hart. The gang knew that a
special train was coming up to the Kelly country from Melbourne with
troopers and supplies for an all-out round-up of the outlaws. So the
first thing Ned Kelly and Steve Hart did when they hit Glenrowan was to
gather up, at gunpoint, some railway gangers to cut the line. Then they
took over the stationmaster's house and there awaited Dan Kelly and Joe
Byrne. They arrived, cold and wet from a long ride through a rough
night, but after a few hours' rest they were ready for the next
adventure.
This was in the true Kelly tradition. The four bushrangers rode casually
through a crisp winter's morning to the Glenrowan Inn, a timber shanty
pub about two hundred yards
page
67
from the railway station. In their usual bluff, cheery way,
playfully wagging a gun here and there, they took charge. They used one
hotel room as an armoury where they stacked most of their gear, keeping
only a gun or two to help shepherd the citizens of Glenrowan into the
hotel parlour as they came along the road. Here captors and captives
had a few brittle drinks together. Some of them had a few too many. Joe
Byrne was one. In an amiable state of tiddley, he told the Glenrowan
schoolteacher, a shrewd little man named Curnow, that the gang were in
Glenrowan to wreck a special train full of interfering police, due to
pass through to Beechworth, there to pick up their trail. This was one
of those hapless alcoholic confidences that, in more ornate,
moustache-curling days, could have wrecked an empire. Here it merely
wrecked the Kelly gang. On Sunday afternoon one of the more or less
happy prisoners in the Glenrowan Inn brought out a concertina. Brigands
and prisoners danced together. Curnow danced with Dan Kelly. Some of the
others relaxed in jumping competitions in the back yard. Ned Kelly,
revolver in one hand, took off in the hop-step-and-jump. He jumped
fairly well, but one of the prisoners beat him. He tried three or four
times to do better. At last, though the winter cold was biting into his
flesh, he took off his coat. Still he failed.
"You seem a bit off-colour today, Ned," said Joe Byrne. Ned Kelly,
looking at the revolver he still carried, grumbled, "Ah, I'm a bit
handicapped for this sort of game." But Ned Kelly's handicap was not his
gun. It was a purely psychic handicap, a secret dread of danger coming.
Though he had no knowledge of any threat beyond the trainload of
despised police, he seemed to apprehend,vaguely, that the end was near.
He was nervous, cautious, edgy.
Curnow used the jumping competition to get a little matey with Ned. He
offered Ned some advice about the town, and Ned accepted it, warily but
gratefully. During the afternoon the gang decided to allow about twenty
of the sixty prisoners to go home while they rode down to the police
barracks to arrest Constable Bracken. They always used the word
"arrest"
when they were capturing the police. It seemed to appeal to their sense
of humour.
page 68
It was about ten in the evening when the Kelly gang walked in on
Constable Bracken and told him they were taking him to the hotel.
Bracken nodded affably. No man could argue with the Kellys. When the
gang returned with Bracken,Curnow asked Ned Kelly if he could go home
with his wife. "You have no need to fear me," wheedled Curnow. "I
am
with you heart and soul." Kelly, perhaps in need of such moral support,
replied, "I know you are. I can see it." A little later Curnow
repeated
his request. "All right," said Ned Kelly, "but go home quietly to
bed,
and mind you don't dream too loud."
Most of the townspeople were still at the inn, drinking, singing,
dancing. The proprietress, Mrs. Ann Jones, gave her little son five
cents to sing for the visitors "The Wild Colonial Boy": He took a
pistol
from his belt
And waved it like a toy,
"I'll shoot but not surrender!"
Cried the Wild Colonial Boy.
In the midst of the revelry the gang went into the armoury and emerged,
to a burst of cheering, in suits of armour-fashioned from the stolen
plowshares. The suits came in a two-piece style only-one piece, a
breastplate coming up almost to the neck, the other a cylindrical
headpiece coming down to the shoulders with an oblong slit before the
eyes.
As the gang paraded around, someone sang the Ned Kelly song: They placed
a price upon my head,
My hands are stained with gore,
And I must roam the forest wild
Within the Australian shore.
The armoured fashion parade over, Ned Kelly and his mates joined in the
frolics. It was a nice bush party-noisy, boozy, but not rough. Only one
or two of the women lifted the hems of their skirts a little above the
ankle, and one of the more flagrantly demure took to leaning forward a
little to emphasize her breastline. But, all told, it was what Glenrowan
people were to describe later as "a bloody good respectable party."
Page
69
At two in the morning, when most of the prisoners, with Ned Kelly's
permission, were leaving to go home to bed, Ned again decided to make a
speech. He told them the wildest story ever told-that he robbed the bank
at Jerilderie by accident. What he was really doing at the time was
chasing some New Zealand criminal named Sullivan. This Sullivan had
turned Queen's evidence against his mates. In the hunt Kelly and his
gang came to Jerilderie. "It struck us," explained Ned Kelly, as
ingenuous as a child filling out a daydream, "to stick up the bank."
Ned
Kelly's speech was suddenly interrupted by the whistle of a train. It was
still a little way down the line, but the whistle was sharp and clear on
the winter air. It froze the party. Nobody spoke or moved. Only the
stifled whimper of a scared woman edged into the silence. All were
listening for the crash of the train as it reached the ripped-up track.
The crash didn't come. The cunning schoolmaster, Curnow, once free, had
run all the way home, snatched up a candle and a red scarf, and then run
to the broken track to warn the train. His lighted candle, held behind
the scarf, was a good danger signal. The train stopped safely, the
troopers were unloaded and ordered to go ahead on foot and surround the
Glenrowan Inn.
Inside the inn the Kelly gang waited silently for their leader to do or
say something. After several minutes of suspense, Ned Kelly suddenly
dashed from the inn, stood outside listening, and then came back, his
face flushed, his eyes fiery.
"That bloody Curnow's betrayed us!" he shouted. "He's stopped the
train!"
The revellers scattered. Some fluffed out of the inn like chickens from a
coop. Others crawled into hiding in small rooms or under tables. In the
hubbub Bracken got away as the Kelly gang ran to their armoury, fastened
on their breastplates and cylindrical visors, and returned, guns at the
ready, to the door. Outside, the no-man's land of one hundred yards or
so between the inn and the railway station.
Ned Kelly flung open the door. He and his three mates lum-
page
70
bered out, looking, in their awesome armour, like aggressors from outer
space.
The head of the police, Superintendent Hare, called out from the moonlit
mist, "Surrender, there! Surrender!"
"Surrender be buggered!" cried Ned Kelly, rapping the muzzle of his
revolver against his breastplate.
"Surrender be buggered!" echoed the rest of the gang, also rattling
their guns against their armour.
Police and bushranger guns broke out almost together. Bullets whined
both ways. Some sputtered through the weatherboards of the old inn.
Inside, the Glenrowan citizens who had not yet escaped lay flat on the
floor. Here and there a child screamed.
These first volleys wounded Ned Kelly, Joe Byrne, and Superintendent
Hare. As the smoke was clearing, a policeman who had ventured further
than was safe toward the inn overheard these words: "Is that you,
Ned?"
"Yes, is that you, Joe? Come here." "Come here be buggered! I'm
cooked!"
"So am I."
But their wounds were slight. After a while, the battle broke again. In
the midst of it, Ned Kelly rode his grey mare quietly through the smoke
and mist to a mound outside the police line, while the rest of the gang
returned to the hotel to fight it out from shelter. Joe Byrne put his
gun through a window to reply to police bullets, then stepped back into
the parlour for a drink. He was just about to pick up his glass when a
volley of bullets crashed through the thin walls, and he fell to the
floor. He was dead in a minute. Another police bullet killed the little
boy who had so earnestly sung "The Wild Colonial Boy." Mrs. Jones,
drying, nursed him as he died. The battle of Glenrowan-or, rather, the
siege of the Glenrowan Inn-flared and faded all through the hours of
darkness. then at seven in the morning, Ned Kelly started back on foot
from his open grass mound to attack the police in the rear and
page
71
break through to his mates in the hotel. He still wore his armour, but
had flung an old grey overcoat over his headpiece. He carried a mustard
tin of ammunition as he limped through the morning mist. The sun was a
faint ball of fuzz.
What was the hapless Constable Arthur to believe as, crouching down to
light his pipe about eighty yards from the hotel, he saw this improbable
apparition creeping towards him out of the fog? The pipe fell from his
mouth.
"Go back, you bloody fool!" he shouted. "you'll get shot!"
At that
instant he believed Ned Kelly was a lunatic acting on an impulse to
storm the hotel with a nail can on his head. the next instant he
wondered if it was a human being at all. But still he called out,
"You'll get shot!"
"I could shoot you, sonny," replied Ned Kelly in a calm, clammy,
unnerving voice, as he continued to advance. Constable Arthur brought up
his Martini up and fired. Ned Kelly staggered slightly, but walked
steadily on. Constable Arthur fired again. He heard the bullet ping
against the breastplate and then sheer off.
Other police crowded around. "Look out, boys!" cried Senior Constable
Kelly, "it's the Bunyip! He's bullet proof!" Ned Kelly kept advancing.
As he got closer to the hotel, he kept rapping his breastplate with the
butt of his revolver as he called out in a deep hollow voice behind the
visor, "Come out, boys, we'll whip the lot of them!"
The voice gave him away. The police closed in. As they did, Ned Kelly
turned on them, throwing shots in a wide arc. But he couldn't keep them
all covered. One of them, Sergeant Steele, suddenly ran up behind him
and poured one barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun into his unprotected
hips and legs. Ned Kelly slumped back, his deep voice booming under the
helmet, "I'm done! I'm done!"
What Ned Kelly didn't know when he made that perilous dash to the hotel
was that his mates were no more. Joe Byrne lay dead in the parlour,
killed as he reached for a drink. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart also lay
dead, side by side, in a back room. Did they prefer suicide to capture?
Nobody could ever be
page
72
sure, for, although their bodies were seen by a priest, they were
incinerated later that fateful morning when the police, to make sure
none of the gang would escape, burned the inn to the ground....
TRUE WEST MAGAZINE October 1973 excerpts
(pertaining to
Glenrowan) from an article entitled "The Wild Young Man in Australia's
Past" by M.H. Zimmerman....
[it starts off the article with this...]
Young Ned Kelly ran through the streets as
the bullets swirled around him. The safety of Ned's gang overshadowed his
concern about the gaping bullet wound in his arm. He felt dizzy but forced
himself to continue toward their hideout. Ned thought about his goal-to reach a
suit of armor which would soon render him invincible!......
[then it goes all into his life story,and we pick it
up again here...]
.......The constables were unrelenting in their attempts to trace the Kelly
gang. Finally they enlisted the aid of an aboriginal tracker whose skill had
been proven in other searches. This native's observant eyes
would spot the slightest clues of someone's presence, even days after. The Kelly
gang managed to keep ahead of the native by barely taking time to rest as he
discovered one hideout after another. They had hardened themselves toward the
world outside the bush country, and their first priority was staying alive at
any cost.
Ned Kelly eventually grew bored by
their continued isolation and persuaded his companions to hole up in a nearby
town for a few days. Ned had learned that a former friend of Joe Byrne had
turned informer so he actually had a two-fold purpose on his mind.
Knowing the informer's death would
bring a trainload of police, Ned and his gang tore up the tracks hoping to
prevent or delay their arrival.
When the Kelly gang arrived at
Glenrowan most of the people ran from the streets and hid, but Ned placed a
number of the able-bodied men in jail to insure his gang's safety. Then Ned and
Dan sat in the pub enjoying a part of life that they had missed for so long.
Meanwhile, a schoolmaster had escaped
to warn the constables and avert the train's derailment. When the constables
stole silently into town and surrounded the hotel, they were disappointed to
find Joe Byrne and Steve Hart instead of the Kelly brothers; but the fighting
began anyway and Ned, seeing his friends in trouble, broke one of the pub's
windows and started firing.
When a bullet hit Ned's arm he
decided to get his armor from their camp just a few miles away. During his
absence the constables set the hotel on fire, forcing Byrne and Hart to make a
run for their lives. The two boys came out shooting and were in turn shot down.
Dan Kelly had been doing his best to stand up to the constables but he was
outnumbered.
Ned Kelly might have escaped but his
loyalty drew him back to fight beside his brother and his friends. The armor
served as a protective shield to Ned's young body but its weight slowed him
down. When the
constables' bullets hit the metal it vibrated, making Ned unsteady.
Constable Fitzpatrick shot Ned in his
unprotected leg and as the boy fell down and the constable ran toward him, Ned
painfully lifted his bleeding arm and shot Fitzpatrick in the heart. The
constable screamed as he pitched forward into the dirt.
When Ned Kelly ran out of bullets he
stood facing the police as they moved closer. He was outnumbered and surrounded,
but he acted like a man. Ned Kelly was the only survivor of his gang. After
being taken to a hospital for treatment of his wounds, he spent the remaining
time in jail until his trial. On November 11, 1880 Ned was hanged in Melbourne.
At twenty-five years of age, this
young man had created a sensation which was never to be duplicated in Australia.
To this day, the Australians use the expression-"as game as Ned
Kelly"-for their highest
praise.