Night has fallen on the Australian Outback.
Police search parties roam wide in search of the Kelly Gang,
the cop killers who fled the scene of their crime one week prior.
The rain falls heavy, and the river threatens to flood,
but a group of officers searches the shore anyway.
They spot something, tracks perhaps?
They paced the riverbank looking for more, but find nothing.
At last, they continue on their way.
Once the police have gone from sight, four men emerge from a nearby clump of reeds,
up to their noses in water.
Soaking and shivering, their guns waterlogged and useless,
the Kelly Gang drags themselves back to shore.
Just a few more steps to the left, and the police would have found them utterly defenseless.
This is the closest anyone will ever get to catching them.
♪
With three officers dead by his hand,
Ned Kelly became a fugitive.
The government declared the Kelly Gang to be outlaws,
offering thousands for their capture, and authorizing every citizen
to shoot them dead on sight.
But no one seemed eager to claim the reward.
Sympathizers across the countryside took the gang in,
hid them in barns, misdirected any police search parties that came snooping.
And any police who did manage to find the Kelly's trail,
would immediately sprint in the opposite direction, fearing for their life.
Several leading officers were censured for their cowardice,
after blatantly abandoning chance after chance to catch the Kelly Gang.
But the police faced an uphill battle,
Ned was slowly winning the rest of the country to his side.
Ned was determined to be a better kind of bushranger,
one who never robbed ordinary people.
In fact, if the gang ever had to stay the night at somebody's place or eat their food,
Ned would pay them back for it.
Ned's beef was with the rich squatters and their pet police force,
and he was determined that they would be his only victims.
At first, the only member of the gang who really understood this,
was Ned's best friend. Joe Byrne.
Everybody had always loved Joe.
He was well-dressed, well-spoken, charismatic,
and most importantly, smart.
In Joe, Ned found a reliable right-hand man
who not only understood Ned's intentions,
but could help him plan it.
And Ned had big plans.
The way he saw it, the best way to get back at the squatters
and undermine their stranglehold on the region's economy,
was to hit them where it really hurt: Their wallets.
And he knew just the place to do it.
A sleepy little town with a sleepy little bank called Euroa.
He and Joe put their heads together, and sketched out a plan.
First they would seize a way station by the railroad stop,
so that they could easily monitor traffic coming in and out of the area.
Then they would destroy the telegraph station,
to make sure that even if the plan went sour,
no one would be able to summon the police in time to stop them.
Finally, once they had completely secured the area,
then they would rob the bank.
On a Monday, December 9th of 1878,
Ned rode up to the way station outside Euroa,
and asked the groom to take his horse.
On a whim, he asked: "Do you know who I am?"
The old groom glanced up at this rumbled young man, and joked:
"Heh, perhaps you're Ned Kelly."
Ned drew his gun.
"You're a damn fine guesser."
Ned and his crew rounded up every worker and traveler that passed through the station that day,
and packed them all into a small locked shed.
All except for the women and children of course,
they were put in the more comfortable station house.
It was the decent thing to do.
The gang executed Ned's plan slowly and methodically.
They kept their hostages overnight, and even sat down among them to talk and answer questions.
Ned was eager to dispel some of the worst myths that had been circulated about him.
No, of course he hadn't sawed off dead police officers ears and fingers for trophies.
He'd only fired on those three officers in self-defense after they tried to shoot him.
By now, the hostages greatly outnumbered the Kelly Gang,
but they didn't dare to turn on them.
For one thing, they suspected, and they would have been correct,
that Ned had invited a few local sympathizers to come by and pretend to be hostages,
so that they could alert him of anyone who might be thinking of trying something stupid.
For another, many of the actual hostages
found this opportunity to interview a bushranger about his crimes fascinating.
And Ned was nothing if not a charming and gracious host ...age taker. (Hostage taker)
Come the next morning, Ned executed the rest of his plan.
Destroying the telegraph office, and robbing the bank.
It went off without a hitch.
No one had expected them, and they met no real resistance.
Ned walked away with well over £2,000 in cash.
And just for good measure, he burned every record of debt the bank had,
hoping to get a few poor farmers off the hook.
He returns to the way station,
gave the hostages a small share of the loot to apologize for the trouble,
and then rode off with his gang.
Ned's legend was growing.
As eager newspapers spread the story of Euroa,
people began to praise the Kelly Gang.
One paper even suggested that the Australian police force
should be rebuilt with men like them.
Hardy, self-made Australian natives,
who treated civilians with courtesy,
and weren't afraid to dive into the thick of danger to confront problems.
The Kelly Gang made fools of the police,
whose disorganized search parties never managed to even catch sight of the gang,
and had even once shot at each other in confusion.
Disgraced and humiliated,
the police began cracking down on suspected Kelly sympathizers,
throwing them in jail.
But they had no real evidence against anybody.
They barely even knew who their suspects were,
and they arrested the wrong people several times.
The site of police parading these innocent, everyday people through the streets in handcuffs,
did nothing to scare Kelly's sympathizers.
If anything, it only further convinced them that Ned Kelly was right.
The police were crooked and incompetent,
and willing to throw anybody in jail to protect their rich squatter friends.
More and more citizens began to take Ned Kelly's side,
and support for him became so widespread,
that the entire area became known as Kelly country.
As the months dragged on,
the spectacle of arrested sympathizers only grew worse.
Time after time, the sympathizers would go to court and demand a trial,
only to be denied as the court found every excuse to delay.
The police knew that at least some of these people were helping the Kelly Gang,
but a trial with no evidence would only set them free to do it again.
When the official prosecutor voiced concerns about this,
he was promptly fired.
But then, a few days later, he returned to the case,
now defending Kelly's sympathizers.
Ned had hired him with the money he stole from Euroa,
and thus, scored another popular victory for his cause.
The last of the sympathizers would finally be released without charges
after 107 days in prison.
Not all the common folk were Kelly fans though.
A journalist in the town of Jerilderie,
remained steadfast in his opposition to the gang.
He wrote an article scolding the police
for not taking bank security more seriously.
His own town had only two policemen defending it.
How could they be expected to defend the local bank
from four infamous bushrangers?
One month after its publication,
four young police officers showed up to reinforce Jerilderie.
It would seem that his article had hit home.
Turns out, it had,
...just not with the people he had intended.
In his effort to whip the police into action,
he had given Ned perfect scouting information on Jerilderie's vulnerability.
Seizing on this easy target, Ned had snuck into town,
caught the two local police officers by surprise,
and locked them up in their own jail cell.
Then, he and his gang had borrowed uniforms,
and spent a day casually strolling about the town, chasing the area.
Their plan was the same as last time:
Destroy the telegraph station,
set up a secure staging area with hostages,
and then take the bank.
Ned had picked a nearby hotel,
and left Joe Byrne and his brother Dan in charge of guarding it,
making hostages of any passers-by to keep them from entering the bank.
With that settled, Ned and the last gang member Steve Hart, entered the bank.
To the surprise of everyone involved,
they find the bank manager in a back room,
tucked inside a small metal tub, taking his afternoon bath.
At gunpoint, the manager agrees to give them the key to the safe...
after he finishes his bath.
Listen, he really wants this bath
Ned, amused by this, assigned Steve to supervise
while he goes back out front.
Steve has never quite understood Ned's strange insistence
on being well-behaved bushrangers.
And resentful over having to watch this guy take a stupid bath,
he steals the managers watch in retribution.
Once the bath is concluded, the bank heist goes well.
Another £2,000 are collected,
the debt records are destroyed,
and the gang returns to the hotel to buy their hostages a round of drinks
before letting them go.
As Ned is about to leave, however, a friend of the bank manager stops him,
and accuses Steve of stealing the watch.
Ned is outraged.
He reclaims the watch and starts to return it, but...
no, he hands it back to Steve and orders him:
"Give it back to him yourself, like a man."
Steve obeys.
With his gang's honor restored, Ned jumps on his horse,
waves his hat and farewell,
and rides off to the cheers of his own former hostages.
It would be 17 whole months before the public saw Ned Kelly again.
But during that time,
he began formulating his most ambitious and deadly plan yet.
One that he hoped would sow the seeds of an all-out war against the police.
It would prove to be his final showdown.