1880
Ned Kelly’s armour
The national symbol
Ned Kelly’s suit of armour weighs 44 kg. It has a cylindrical helmet, a long breastplate, shoulder-plates, back-guard, and aprons at the front and back. The inside was padded and Kelly wore a padded cap. The individual parts are made of iron that is 6.35 cm thick. Some have suggested that the armour was made by a professional blacksmith, but it is very roughly shaped and unevenly fired. It’s a collection of bits of ploughs and scrap and leather.
The Kelly Gang needed all the protection it could muster by early 1880. While hiding out in the Wombat Ranges for four or five months, the members of the gang (Ned Kelly, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart) designed and manufactured suits of armour to thwart the police. For some months they worked in their bush forge, heating the iron and beating it over a green stringybark log and then shaping and riveting it.
Ned Kelly was born into struggle in 1854. His father was an Irishman transported from Tipperary to Victoria for stealing pigs; he died when Ned was 12. Ned’s mother, Ellen, was a tough Australian woman with Irish parentage who, after her husband died, entertained men for money and worked a small selection at Greta, east of Benalla. The Kellys – Ellen had eight children in all – were part of the Irish crime underworld that operated throughout Victoria stealing cattle and horses.
Ned was a horseman of great ability. His first offence was the assault of a Chinese man, and police held him as a suspected accomplice of the bushranger Harry Power. At age 15 he assisted a pal to send a pair of calf’s testicles to the wife of a local toff as part of an ongoing squabble, and for this and summary offences he was sent to jail for six months. Shortly after his release he was arrested for stealing horses and did three years. After being paroled he was again arrested, for riding a horse on the footpath.
Clearly, police targeted Kelly and his family. Whether the attention was justified or not is unclear, but they probably were living outside the law. The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was not Kelly’s fault.
In April 1878 Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick arrived at Ellen Kelly’s house with a warrant to arrest Dan Kelly on a charge of horse stealing. Fitzpatrick was drunk and made an improper advance to Dan’s sister Kate. Dan came to her aid, there was a scuffle and Fitzpatrick’s gun went off, injuring him.
The next day, possibly out of shame, Fitzpatrick swore that Ned, who was 640 kilometres away at the time, had attacked him. Dan took to the bush and the police arrested everyone left at the Kelly house. Ellen was given three years’ hard labour and the judge, Redmond Barry, announced that had they caught Ned he would have been sentenced to 21 years.
Their friends Steve Hart and Joe Byrne joined the Kelly brothers on the run from the police in the Wombat Ranges. On 25 October 1878 the Kelly Gang ambushed police camped at Stringybark Creek. Ned killed constables Thomas Lonigan, Michael Scanlan and Sergeant Michael Kennedy. With three policemen’s deaths to his name (the most Australian police ever killed in a single incident), Ned was the nation’s most wanted man. A bounty of £500 was placed on his head, an amount that was to rise to £8000.
On 10 December the gang bailed up a homestead at Faithfull’s Creek and the next day they robbed the local bank, taking £2000 in notes and gold. Two months later they robbed the Jerilderie bank while wearing police uniforms. Again, no one was killed. The bank lost £2141 and Kelly left behind an 8000-word open letter. He saw himself as a revolutionary rising against the squattocracy and the police persecution of Irish settlers, and that manifesto, the ‘Jerilderie letter’, was part of his campaign. Years later it inspired Peter Carey’s acclaimed novel True History of the Kelly Gang.
By mid-1880 the hunted Kelly Gang had their suits of armour ready. They met at Glenrowan at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, 27 June and took over the hotel and with it 60 hostages. They knew a special train full of police was on its way so they disabled the track and returned to the hotel, where they waited in their armour, which was concealed by dust jackets. They made use of the bar and so were somewhat impaired when the police arrived the next morning.
The battle at Glenrowan was bloody. The armoured suits initially surprised the police but the sheer firepower against the Kellys sealed their fate. Ned escaped for a while and then returned to the battle, still in full armour, to be with his friends. The area was shrouded in mist, Kelly otherwordly. The trooper fired at his uncovered legs and he was toppled, wounded and humiliated to be taken alive when his comrades had all died of their wounds or the fire that raged through the pub.
Kelly was tried for the murder of Constable Lonigan and on 11 November he was hanged.
Ned Kelly has become an iconic Australian figure, mostly on the basis of the brilliance of the design of the armour. The primal lines and simplicity of it combined with the sheer audacity of creating a suit of armour added to the romance of the Ned Kelly story.
In the 1940s, Sidney Nolan began painting the Kelly story. Nolan conjured Kelly with angular shapes and placed the caricature in quintessential Australian landscapes. Nolan’s Kelly was a stranger in a strange land, and somehow many Australians saw themselves in his paintings.