Dead of night,
Glenrowan, Australia,
constable Hugh Bracken lies tossing in bed.
Fever runs through him.
He begins to drift off,
when a sudden banging jars him awake.
Somebody's at the door.
He can barely think straight, but he stumbles slowly to unlock it.
The second he does,
the door slams open.
A giant man in metal armor pushes through,
and puts a gun to the police officer's head.
A voice echoes from inside the tall helmet:
"I'm Ned Kelly.
Bail up, or you're a dead man."
♪
"I am Ned Kelly."
For years, those words struck fear
into the hearts of everybody living in the Australian colony of Victoria.
Fear, and a little excitement.
Newspapers filled up with shocking details about his crimes,
eager gossip from those who met him,
and abject scorn for the police force
which failed to catch so much as a glimpse of him over a multi-year manhunt,
that cost the government's thousands of pounds and manpower and equipment.
Rogue or hero,
murderer or angel of vengeance,
He was then, and still is today, a divisive figure in the Australian landscape.
To some, he was a brave warrior,
standing up to a corrupt police force that served only to protect a rigged financial system.
To others, he was no more than a murderer,
who endangered the lives of innocence in his reckless quest for revenge.
As for Ned Kelly,
he wanted people to listen to his story, and judge for themselves.
He said:
"I do not pretend to have led a blameless life,
or that one fault justifies another,
but the public in judging a case like mine should remember,
that the darkest life
may have a bright side."
So, let's hear his story.
May of 1865,
six children huddled next to their mother,
and watched the police constable clap handcuffs on to their father, John Kelly
before leading him away.
The biting winds that swept across their barren farm
soon forced the family to retreat inside for warmth.
All except the eldest boy,
Ned.
He stayed and watched until the policeman led his father out of sight.
Ned loved his father,
he was proud of him as only a child can be.
He saw the good John Kelly,
whom everybody called "Red",
for obvious reasons.
Red had stolen pigs to feed his brothers and sisters back in Ireland,
and for his crime, he'd been transported to Australia.
He had served his time in an Australian labor camp,
married a vivacious Irish girl named Ellen,
and did his best to scratch out a living for his ever-growing young family.
But Red's best was never good enough.
His business ventures fell through, his farmland proved rocky and untenable,
and the city that he'd staked his hopes on became a ghost town
as the Australian Gold Rush left it behind.
Faced with the same pressure that had driven him to steal food for his family back in Ireland,
Red did it again, and was caught again.
That was the day Ned watched his father walk away in handcuffs.
A few days later, Red was sentenced to six months hard labor.
And so, at 11 years old, Ned suddenly became the man of the house.
He dropped out of school, and took on the role with vigor,
determined to make his father proud.
He looked after his pregnant mother, he tended the farm and the house as best he could.
One day, on his way to town to pick up a few things, disaster nearly strikes.
A seven-year-old boy, daydreaming on his way to school,
drops his hat into the recently flooded river.
When he reaches down to retrieve it, he falls.
The river sweeps him away, and the only other person in sight, is Ned Kelly.
Ned doesn't lose a second, he races down to the river and jumps in.
He barely knows how to swim, but he's big for his age, made strong by his work on the farm,
and he throws himself into the current.
Through sheer determination, Ned catches the boy.
He pulls him back to shore, then he leads him, soaked and shivering, back home.
The boy's parents shower Ned with gratitude.
They even arrange a small ceremony
where they present him with a broad green silk sash
with shining gold tassels, the colors of Ireland.
It is the finest piece of cloth Ned has ever touched.
And when they drape it over his shoulders and call him a hero, he nearly bursts with pride.
Ned would wear his trophy for weeks,
inviting everybody he knew to touch it, and hear the story of how brave he'd been.
And best of all, wouldn't his father be proud?
Red Kelly was proud.
Proud, but no longer the man he had once been.
The spark of determination had faded from his eyes.
When he finally returned from his sentence of hard labor,
he was a broken man, who could only get through his days by drinking.
Over the next year, Ned watched his father rot away.
And finally died from a failing liver in 1866,
living just long enough to spend one final Christmas with his family,
only to die before the new year.
It was then that Ellen Kelly, Ned's mother, took matters into her own hands.
Now a widow with seven children,
she had no family nearby, except for a quarrelsome sister-in-law.
But to the northeast, she had two sisters of her own,
that also needed someone to lean on.
Both of their husbands still lived, but had been imprisoned for cattle stealing.
So Ellen joined forces with them in the small town of Greta.
Bit by bit, she saved up enough to rent her family a new house.
It went cheap, because nobody else wanted it,
but to the dirt-poor Kelly family, anything would do.
Ned threw all of his energy into making a real farm out of it,
but all he got for his trouble was blistered and tired.
The only money he could squeeze out of it was chopping up trees for firewood and selling them in town,
...and not for very much.
His family depended on him, and didn't know what he could do.
Enter Harry Power.
Harry Power was a bushranger,
the last of a dying breed of Australian outlaws and highwayman,
whose adventures always seemed so grand and romantic,
up until the moment they got caught.
Power had escaped from the same prison where Ned's uncles, the cattle thieves, had been locked up,
and it was on their recommendation that he made his way to Greta,
and met Ned Kelly.
What stories he told! He'd swept his way northeast on a whirlwind of robberies,
rolling up as much as 87 pounds in a single day.
Ned had never seen that much money in his life.
He shook hands with Power, and agreed to become his apprentice.
Unfortunately, Power's grand criminal stories were a wee-bit exaggerated.
Oh he had robbed his way through the north, sure enough,
but he neglected to mention that he was actually pretty new at this bushranging thing himself.
The prison sentence that he'd escaped had been for horse thieving,
not for robbing real live people.
And once he'd made his escape, a few months before they would have let him out anyway,
Harry Power had looked around and thought:
"Welp, I'm hanged if they catch me now,
might as well go bushrager I guess."
Thus began Harry Power's story career.
He proceeded to rob people by shouting loudly and waving his gun around,
but he never actually shot anyone.
In fact, two of his would-be victims had actually captured him,
but Power convinced them to let him go.
Not exactly a master criminal.
So it's not much surprised that his first scheme,
stealing fresh horses from one of the richest and the most powerful men in the area,
doesn't go quite as planned.
Or maybe it's more like the planning itself doesn't go well.
Power leads his new apprentice to a rocky bluff that overlooks the rich man's paddock,
and they survey the land in preparation for a raid.
One tiny problem: they're in plain sight,
and they get seen.
While they lie there, planning to steal them some horses,
the owner saddles one of the horses they aren't watching,
sneaks up around them, and fires a warning shot at Ned.
The bullet drives into the ground inches in front of Ned's nose,
sending a spray of gravel into the boy's face.
He screams, flattening himself like a pancake, and starts gibbering about a surrender.
Ned is not exactly a master criminal either at this point.
But Harry Power refuses to leave him behind.
If he lets anything happen to that boy, Ellen Kelly will straight-up murder him.
Cursing and hitting, he hauls Ned back on his feet,
and pulls him away before their pursuer can load and fire again.
They run back to the horses they brought with them,
not as good as the horses they were planning to steal, but,
good enough if you're desperate, and willing to ride at breakneck speed...
which they are.
They gallop across rough and rocky territory
that would've killed any lesser horseman.
But whatever their shortcomings, neither of them is a lesser horseman.
Ned races all the way home, leaps off his horse,
and vows never to go bushranging again.
Join us next time as Ned goes bushranging again.