The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly Page A

police station was empty. While making sure the two officers were secured Ned explained the reason for his visit: to have printed a statement he had written, and to rob the Bank of New South Wales.
    Devine’s pregnant wife was kept up that night by Ned, who insisted that she cook the gang a late supper. During their stay he also insisted that she listen to extended passages that he read aloud fromhis statement, a fixty-six-page epistle he had spent the last two months composing. We don’t know what she made of the performance—she was too much beside herself with fear and worry for the safety of her children to take much in—but the astonishing tirade she was subjected to was about to be enshrined in our history as the Jerilderie Letter.
    The gang slept at the police station, and next day, Sunday, life in Jerilderie seemed to go on as it had before. While the others remained in the police station Dan helped Mrs Devine prepare the courthouse opposite for the visiting priest to celebrate mass. If any of the town’s inhabitants wondered who the new faces were they had their answer after lunch, when Constable Richards led Joe Byrne and Steve Hart round town. Both outlaws were wearing police uniforms. Richards introduced them to locals as reinforcements en route to Victoria, where they would help the hapless southerners run the Kelly gang to ground.At our own comfortable historical distance the irony of this charade is delicious—bushrangers parading as the forces of law and order sent to apprehend them—yet for Richards and the Devines it must have been a terrifying experience.
    Just prior to noon on Monday, Ned Kelly took charge of the Royal Mail Hotel, which stood next door to the Bank of New South Wales. Using the bar as a depot for their prisoners, Kelly and Byrne robbed the bank, netting more than £2000. It wasn’t the nine or ten thousand Ned had hoped for, but would at least form some sort of compensation for the assortment of friends, family and associates who had supported the gang in their months on the run.
    Any ordinary bushranger would have been well pleased with events. Kelly, however, was no ordinary bushranger, and he was furious. Having deposited the bank manager, John Tarleton, the accountant, Edwin Living, and junior clerk James Mackie in the Royal Mail Hotel with the otherhostages he was interrupted by three men walking into the bank. He gave chase, yelling at them to bail up, but they kept running, through the premises and out the back door. Two of these men were local JPs. One of them, the 140-kilogram James Rankin, made the mistake of running into the pub where he was immediately caught by Dan in the hallway. The second, Harkin, escaped to his shop next door, only to be captured later.
    The third man, however, did escape. This was Samuel Gill, editor of the Jerilderie and Urana Gazette , the town’s newspaper. He was the man who, perhaps more than anyone else, Kelly had come to Jerilderie to see.
    Imprisoning police, robbing banks and taking a whole town captive must have begun to seem easy when compared to forcing the world at large to listen to the things Kelly had to say. For whenever he tried to get himself into print everything conspired against him. And if asked to name only one truth in the world at that moment, Kellywould have needed no pause for doubt before telling it to whoever may have been standing nearby, whether a mate, a trooper, or even the arch-enemy of the Kelly clan Judge Redmond Barry himself. It was one of the common themes that ran through all his public declarations, written or spoken—‘Fitzpatrick is to blame’.

    On 15 April 1878—six months before the events at Stringybark Creek and nearly ten months before the raid on Jerilderie—Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick rode to the Kelly property outside Greta, a village near Glenrowan, to arrest Dan for horse stealing. Charges had already been laid against the Baumgarten brothers, William and Gustave, two wealthy Germans