The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly Page B

who farmed eighty kilometres away in southern New South Wales. The Baumgarten’s close proximity to the Murray River and the stock theft routes had allowed them to prosper. It was their case which, as historianDoug Morrissey describes, eventually exposed in systematic fashion ‘the shady world of horse and cattle thieves’.
    The police net was closing, until that April day when Fitzpatrick, while drunk, attempted to arrest Dan, and in the resulting fracas received a wound to the wrist. He claimed it was a bullet wound inflicted by Ned. For his part, Ned claimed that he was in New South Wales at the time. On 16 April, Ellen Kelly, mother of Dan and Ned, was arrested along with two neighbours, William ‘Brickey’ Williamson and Bill Skillion, for the ‘attempted murder’ of Fitzpatrick. Ellen was nursing her three-day-old baby.
    Dan and Ned fled to the nearby Wombat Ranges, where they spent their time panning for gold, practising their marksmanship with both rifle and revolver, and constructing a wooden cabin that was strong enough to withstand a siege.
    They lived like this for six months. Despite the increased numbers of police combing thedistrict, the Kelly brothers, soon joined by their mates Joe and Steve, were not troubled by them. As one contemporary described it, ‘Every object was familiar; anywhere and everywhere they were perfectly safe, quite at home…they could for years resist with impunity all efforts to effect their capture.’
    This ‘wild and trackless region’, then, was a place where the young men had grown up, and knew well. The cattle duffing and horse theft that Kelly and his larrikin mates—referred to collectively as ‘the Greta mob’—had pursued in the years preceding his outlawry, were predicated on knowing the land and its unbeaten paths better than the authorities did. Once stolen, the animals were driven along remote stock routes to holding paddocks—generally on the large properties of squatters, such as the Baumgartens, who were in collusion with the thieves. After a decent interval, when the brands had been altered in a suitably artful fashion, the beasts were turned loose. Thiswas so the local authorities would impound them, and the thieves could then ‘redeem’ them at public auction, at a price well below the actual value of the stock, and sell them later at a legitimate price.
    This business, which Kelly would refer to as ‘a highly successful trade’, operated from regions as far apart as Gippsland and the Western District in Victoria to Dubbo and Tamworth in New South Wales, with Victoria’s north-east region—Kelly Country—often serving as a thoroughfare for the traffic. The Fitzpatrick incident was perhaps the immediate cause of the Kelly outbreak, but his visit was itself occasioned by the Greta mob’s spectacular success at stock theft. They were consummate bushmen, following the tracks first made in the 1850s by the notorious stock thief Bogong Jack, and were able to elude the police with ease.
    It was into this territory that the Kellys retreated after Fitzpatrick’s visit, and it was here, in the stretch of country that lay between Greta andMansfield, at Stringybark Creek, that one of the police parties searching for the Kelly brothers made camp on the evening of 25 October 1878. Even visiting the place today one is still struck by the solitude of the shallow gully, its remoteness from the world, and the eerie wildness that characterises this bushland. Kelly and his mates were panning for gold near here, and the following day Ned came across the tracks of the police.
    Towards five o’clock on 26 October Ned, Dan, Joe and Steve bailed up the police camp. By dusk Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlon were dead.
    Only one man got away, Constable Thomas McIntyre, the youngest of the party, who had acted as cook and general assistant. He jumped on the horse Kennedy had just swung off in the midst of the gunfire and bolted.