The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly

The Apocalyptic Chant
of Edward Kelly
by Alex McDermott

    O n Tuesday 4 February 1879, the four members of the Kelly gang left the safety of their mountain fastness, the inaccessible and remote ranges of north-east Victoria, and rode north. They picked their way through bush during the day and rested at night, while the country sweltered in the grip of one of the worst heatwaves in memory. Waterholes had dried up, livestock were dying and the air was thick with smoke from bushfires.
    The Murray River had dropped so low thatthe gang could ford its waters. They kept riding into New South Wales, and didn’t stop until they approached Jerilderie, a small town that lay between Deniliquin and Wagga Wagga on the flat, scorched plains of the Riverina. It was now early in the evening of Saturday 8 February.
    The outlaws were wanted for the murders of three policemen, in October 1878, at Stringybark Creek, a gully hidden in rugged country near the town of Mansfield in Victoria. So feared were these four riders that a new Act of Parliament had been passed, the Felons Apprehension Act, in order to make their capture easier.
    Ned Kelly was twenty-three at the time of the shootings. His brother Dan was seventeen, old enough to have tangled with the law, yet still young enough to live entirely within his brother’s shadow. Even before these events, the older Kelly had established himself in north-eastern Victoria as a man to be reckoned with. Since his early teens Ned had been fighting grown men, and winning.Three years spent working in road gangs and sleeping in prison hulks had hardened his body and mind still further.
    Shortly after his release in 1874 Ned had gone twenty bare-knuckled rounds with Isaiah ‘Wild’ Wright, establishing himself as the finest fighter in the region. He had already begun to acquire a status and reputation that verged on the mythic. Aaron Sherritt, the man who managed to balance for two years the precarious roles of both police informer and Kelly sympathiser, and a toughnut himself, swore to the fact that Kelly was a type of ‘superhuman’.
    The third member of the gang was Ned’s mate Joe Byrne, twenty-one, slim, handsome, for the most part a quiet sort of bloke. Growing up in close proximity to Chinese gold miners, he had acquired not only a rudimentary fluency in Cantonese but an opium habit to go with it. Lastly there was Steve Hart, almost eighteen, friend of Dan, small as a jockey and prone to fits ofbrooding. He seems from all descriptions to have worn a look of constant surliness on his face. He used to demonstrate his prowess in the saddle every time he jumped his horse over the gates of the railway crossing, when riding in or out of Wangaratta, where his father had a farm.
    The four halted a few kilometres out of Jerilderie at Mrs Davidson’s hotel, the Woolpack Inn. They had a few drinks and a bite to eat, mingling easily with the crowd of drovers, station hands, bush labourers and other members of the rural population who were passing through. While there Ned checked the names of the two policemen in the town—Senior Constable George Devine and Probationary Constable Henry Richards.
    By the time the gang left, a full moon had risen in the night sky, and the men entered the town proper in a light so clear it could have been day. Outside the police station Ned yelled, ‘Mr Devine! There’s a row on at Davidson’s hotel—come quick or there’ll be murder!’ The alarm had the desired effect. Devine and Richards stumbled out onto the verandah, fumbling over their belts and boots, soon to find themselves staring down the barrels of some very serious-looking guns. The Kelly gang had arrived.
    The two policemen were disarmed, handcuffed and marched into the lock-up, which was attached to the residence, much to the undoubted amusement of the drunk already cooling his heels there. Ned wanted to know who else was on the premises, and was told by Devine that, apart from his wife and children, the