July 17, 2026

Ned Kelly Walked Out of the Dawn Bush in Ploughshare Armor, and the Police Thought They Were Shooting at the Devil

He dictated an 8,000-word manifesto no newspaper would print, built bulletproof armor from farm ploughs, and was hanged at twenty-five while five thousand people stood outside the gaol and the judge who sentenced him died twelve days later.

At around seven in the morning on June 28, 1880, a figure came out of the bush behind the police line at Glenrowan, in the Warby Ranges of northeast Victoria. He was wearing forty-four kilograms of iron. The metal had been beaten from the mouldboards of farmers' ploughs into a breastplate, a backplate, shoulder plates, an apron, and a helmet that resembled a tin can with a long slit for the eyes. He carried three handguns. He had been shot in the left arm and the right foot hours earlier and had been lying in the bush, losing blood, for most of the night.

Constable Arthur, the first policeman to see him, fired and recalled later that he was "completely astonished, and could not understand what the object he was firing at was." He thought the figure was "a huge blackfellow wrapped in a blanket." A civilian volunteer named Dowsett fired five point-blank shots and cried out that it was the Devil. Constable Kelly, no relation to Ned, replied: "No, it must be the bunyip." Journalists at the scene called the armored figure "a strange apparition" and "a fiend with a charmed life." Sergeant Steele, who would eventually bring Kelly down, described the suit as "human, as to its clothes, but altogether inhuman as to its shape and general appearance."

The armor worked. Bullets struck the helmet five times, the breastplate three times, the backplate nine times, and Kelly later said the impacts felt "like blows from a man's fist." What the armor could not do was let him run. It weighed as much as a sack of cement. Kelly was already crippled by his wounds. After a fifteen-minute gunfight, moving from tree to tree, staggering from blood loss and the sheer mass of iron, Steele brought him down with two shotgun blasts to his unprotected legs and thighs. The police stripped the armor off him and carried him to the railway station. He was found to have twenty-eight wounds. Under the armor, he had been wearing a green silk sash, awarded to him as a boy for saving another child from drowning in a creek. It was stained with his blood. It is still held at the Benalla Museum.

The convict's son and the land that made him

Edward Kelly was born in 1854 or 1855, the third of seven children, in the bush north of Melbourne. His father, John "Red" Kelly, was an Irishman from Tipperary who had been transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1841) for, as the 1881 Royal Commission into the Kelly outbreak put it, "an agrarian outrage, stated to have been shooting at a landlord with intent to murder." Red Kelly served his time, crossed to the mainland, married Ellen Quinn, also Irish, and tried to settle as a farmer. He was convicted of cattle stealing in 1865 and died shortly after his release from prison, leaving Ellen to raise seven children on a selection at Eleven Mile Creek near Greta, in the broken hill country of the northeast.

The Kellys arrived in Victoria's northeast at the hinge of a land war. Through the 1860s, a succession of Land Acts tried to break up the vast pastoral runs held by "squatters," the wealthy graziers who had claimed the best grazing country in the colony's first decades, and open the land to "selectors," small farmers who could lease and eventually buy blocks of up to 320 acres. The 1869 Land Act allowed selection before survey and let rental payments count toward the purchase price. But the blocks were sized for English farms, not Australian bush, and the conditions, fencing, clearing, residence, were enforced by the same Crown Lands officers who worked with the police. A Royal Commission witness testified that Inspector Montfort had proposed using "the provisions of the Land Act as a lever to influence the applicants for land," so that a selector's tenancy depended on staying on good terms with the police.

The definitive biographer, Ian Jones, argued in Ned Kelly: A Short Life that the Kelly outbreak grew from a genuine conflict between impoverished Irish selectors and the squatter-police alliance. The revisionist historian Doug Morrissey, in Ned Kelly: A Lawless Life, dismantled that thesis with demographic data: seventy-nine percent of selectors in the Greta district survived to gain freehold title, half never mortgaged their farms, and the "land war" was largely a fiction that Jones built from Kelly's own grievances. The Kellys were poor Irish, the father a transported convict, the mother running what the Royal Commission called a resort of "lawless and desperate characters." They were also embedded in a community that saw the police as an occupying force, and the police gave them reasons to.

Ned Kelly was first imprisoned at fourteen, sentenced to three months for a fistfight and three months for handing a provocative parcel to a hawker's wife. In his own account, dictated years later, he described the constable who arrested him, Hall, as a man who tried to shoot him with a revolver that misfired and then beat him over the head with it when he was tied up: "nine stitches were put in some of the cuts." Kelly served three years at Beechworth for receiving a stolen horse, a charge he always insisted was unjust. The Jerilderie Letter, his own dictated account of these years, contains the line that best captures his view of the institution: "it is a credit to a policeman to convict an innocent man but any muff can pot a guilty one."

Stringybark Creek and the outlaw's oath

On April 15, 1878, a young constable named Fitzpatrick rode to the Kelly homestead to arrest Ned's brother Dan on a horse-theft warrant. According to the Kellys, Fitzpatrick drew his revolver and threatened Ellen Kelly when she demanded to see the warrant. He was shot in the wrist. Ned was not home at the time, but the police blamed him. Ellen Kelly was convicted of aiding and abetting the shooting and sentenced to three years in prison. The brothers fled into the Wombat Ranges.

Six months later, on October 26, 1878, a party of four policemen from Mansfield, Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constables Thomas Lonigan, Michael Scanlan, and Thomas McIntyre, camped at Stringybark Creek while searching for the Kellys. They set up less than a kilometer from the gang's hut without knowing it. Ned Kelly decided to disarm them. He called out to the two officers at the camp, "Bail up! Throw up your arms." McIntyre surrendered. Lonigan ran and reached for his revolver, and Kelly shot him in the eye.

There was a grim symmetry to it. Tom Lonigan was the only officer in the search party who knew Kelly personally, having arrested him outside a Benalla boot shop a year earlier. Kelly had taken it badly, telling Lonigan: "If I ever shoot a man, Lonigan, you will be the first."

When Kennedy and Scanlan returned from patrol, the gang ambushed them. Scanlan was shot dead. Kennedy ran, fought, was wounded, and eventually killed. McIntyre escaped on Kennedy's horse and raised the alarm. The Victorian government passed the Felons Apprehension Act, which declared the Kelly gang outlaws and gave anyone the right to shoot them on sight. The reward rose from one hundred pounds to eight thousand. The four-man gang, Ned and Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne, and Steve Hart, vanished into the bush for two years.

The letter nobody printed

In February 1879, the gang held up the Bank of New South Wales at Jerilderie, a small town across the Murray River in New South Wales. They locked up the two local policemen, dressed in police uniforms, held up the bank for 2,141 pounds, and rounded up sixty townspeople at the Royal Hotel. Kelly also presented a document for publication in the local paper. He had dictated it, over several months, to Joe Byrne, who wrote it out in longhand. It ran to about eight thousand words, fifty-six pages, and it is the only detailed written justification that any Australian bushranger ever left.

The letter was never published. The editor hid it. It passed through several hands, was loaned to the police for Kelly's trial, and was not publicly known until the late 1940s, when a copy surfaced at the Public Record Office Victoria. The original manuscript was donated to the State Library of Victoria in 2000.

It opens: "I wish to acquaint you with some of the occurrences of the present past and future." What follows is a torrent. Kelly names the policemen who wronged him, describes beatings and false arrests, defends the Stringybark Creek killings as self-defense, and denounces the police as agents of a class system that crushed poor Irish settlers. The most extraordinary passage is his description of the force that hunted him, which he called "a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police who some call honest gentlemen." He closed with a threat and a title: "I am a widows son outlawed and my orders must be obeyed."

The novelist Peter Carey read the letter in the 1970s and was stunned. Writing in The Guardian in 2025, he asked: "Did no one see what I saw, that our famous bushranger was a raging poet?" Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang, published in 2000, was written in the voice of the Jerilderie Letter, with no commas, the same run-on syntax, the same Irish vernacular. It won the Booker Prize. Carey saw what Kelly's contemporaries missed: the letter was not just a defense, it was a performance, a man writing himself into existence against a system that had already decided what he was.

The ploughshare and the train

Kelly's other great invention was the armor. In 1879, the gang spent four or five months in a crude bush forge, beating plough mouldboards into four suits of plate iron, each about six millimeters thick. Some mouldboards were donated by sympathetic farmers, others stolen. The idea was Kelly's. Writing from his condemned cell on November 10, 1880, the day before he was hanged, he explained the logic: "without armour I could never have possibly robbed a guarded bank and disarmed Police without taking life, but with armour I had not occasion for taking life." The armor was a tool for robbery without killing. It also made its wearer into something that was not quite a man.

The Glenrowan plan was to murder Aaron Sherritt, a former sympathizer turned police informer, knowing the news would send a special police train from Melbourne. They would derail it at a sharp curve where it would reach sixty miles an hour, shoot any survivors, then ride to Benalla, the police base, and bomb the railway bridge to isolate the town. They would rob the banks, free the prisoners, and, in Ian Jones's reading, declare a republic of northeast Victoria. Stuart Dawson, of Monash University, called the republic "a widely promulgated fiction, built on tall tales, wishful thinking and flawed historical analysis." Whatever the ambition, the plan collapsed when a schoolteacher named Thomas Curnow, whom Kelly had released, flagged down the train with a lantern and warned the driver. The police arrived at Glenrowan intact, at three in the morning, and surrounded the inn where the gang held their hostages.

Kelly was captured. Joe Byrne was shot through a gap in his armor and bled to death. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart died inside the burning inn, either by police fire or by their own hands. Hart had thrown down his axe and said to a workmate) months earlier, "A short life and a merry one," before riding off to join the gang. It was a short life. He was about twenty.

The judge, the speech, and the disputed last words

Kelly was tried in Melbourne on October 28, 1880, before Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who had also sentenced his mother. The charge was the murder of Constable Lonigan at Stringybark Creek. Barry allowed the prosecution to introduce evidence unrelated to the charge and refused to let Kelly question the prosecution's witnesses. The jury convicted him.

At sentencing, Kelly spoke. The words were recorded by reporters in the courtroom and published in the next day's papers: "It is not that I fear death; I fear it as little as to drink a cup of tea." He said he regretted not examining the witnesses himself: "if I had examined the witnesses I would have shown matters in a different light, because no man understands the case as I do myself." He told the court his mind was "as easy as the mind of any man in this world." Barry pronounced the customary sentence and concluded, "May the Lord have mercy on your soul." Kelly replied: "I will go a little further than that and say I will see you where I go." He had earlier told Barry that "a day will come at a bigger court than this when we shall see which is right and which is wrong." Barry died twelve days after the execution. The exchange entered folklore as a prophecy.

From his condemned cell, Kelly wrote to the Governor of Victoria asking for his mother's release and for his body to be buried in consecrated ground. "the day will come," he wrote, "when all men will be judged by their mercy and deeds." He repeated his claim that he had never intended to kill: "I can solemnly swear now before God and man that it never was my intention to take life." Five thousand people gathered outside the Melbourne Gaol on the morning of November 11, 1880. Nearly fifty thousand signatures had been attached to a petition for mercy. The government refused it.

His last words are disputed. The widely reported version, the one on bumper stickers and tattoos across Australia, is "Such is life." But Dr. Stuart Dawson of Monash University published a study arguing that "the attribution of the phrase 'Such is life' to Kelly is pure fiction," a journalist's compression of something quieter. Other accounts say Kelly muttered something inaudible as the cap was drawn, or that he said, "Ah, well, I suppose it has come to this." The Peter Carey novel gives him "Such is life." The myth and the man diverge at the scaffold.

Ian Jones, who spent decades researching the Kelly story and interviewing the descendants of everyone involved, described his subject as "a man who was seen, even in his own lifetime, as what he represented rather than what he was, and whose enemies, even more than his allies, helped to make him a legend." The armor made him an image. The letter gave him a voice. The voice is what survived.

Read the full life: Ned Kelly: A Short Life, by Ian Jones (Lothian, 1995; Hachette, multiple editions). For the revisionist case, Doug Morrissey's Ned Kelly: A Lawless Life (Connor Court, 2015). The Jerilderie Letter manuscript is at the State Library of Victoria.