On the night that Ned Kelly arrived in Glenrowan to begin his final showdown
Joe Byrne and Dan Kelly were miles away, preparing to commit murder.
[Intro music plays]
They had come to the house of Joe Byrne's childhood friend,
Once an ally of the Kelly Gang.
He had been passing information to the police,
and however ineffective this had been at actually getting them caught,
it was a betrayal that Joe could not forgive.
They also knew that four policemen had been assigned to guard the house,
But they didn't care.
When the informant answered the door,
Joe Byrne shot him right in front of his pregnant wife and her mother.
The cops, hiding in the bedroom, were too scared to show themselves.
Turning their backs on the corpse, Joe and Dan galloped to rejoin Ned at Glenrowan.
It had been a cold, brutal execution but it was all in service to the plan, carefully calculated.
Ned Kelly was tired of hiding.
He was tired of being chased, and even more tired of running.
He wanted to make his stand against the police.
When word got out that Joe and Dan had shot the informant,
Ned knew that the police would summon their special train and come racing to catch them.
But Ned had set a trap for them along the way.
He had prepared for every possibility.
Over the last few months he had collected the blades from farmer's plows,
and painstakingly reshaped them into heavy armor that could stop a bullet.
Clad in their armor, the four of them looked like Knights:
Heroes from the stories he'd grown up on.
And if it came to a shoot-out, they could stand their ground.
But Ned did not intend for the police to live that long.
To reach the scene of Joe's crime, the special police train would have to
pass through the station at Glenrowan.
Normally the tracks leading up Glenrowan turned, then ran alongside a small cliff.
But Ned had removed the tracks at the turn.
When the police train came along, it would fly straight off of the cliff and crash at full speed.
Then Ned and his gang would come along in their full plate armor,
to shoot any surviving officers where they lay.
Here was the hard steel beneath the charming bush ranger.
Ned felt wronged.
From the day he had left home,
running from Fitzpatrick's accusation of attempted murder,
he had called himself a "Forces Outlaw",
and blamed the police for putting him in this position.
Now that burning sense of injustice had grown to a full firestorm.
And if Ned was troubled by the grim purpose that had brought him here,
he didn't show it.
As with both of his bank robberies,
Ned collected hostages and began to store them in the local inn,
treating them to a night of music and dance
as the hours stretched by, waiting for the special police train.
But the hours kept on ticking,
past night, into morning.
Where was the train?
Ned had underestimated the cowardice of the police.
The four officers who had witnessed the informant's murder
had hid inside that house until noon.
Once they finally reported in, their superiors spent hours deciding what to do,
and who to bring to chase the Kelly Gang again.
Night had fallen on the second day before the police train finally started down the track.
But as they approached Glenrowan and that final, fatal turn,
the train's guard noticed something strange.
A man stood next to the tracks, waving a red scarf in front of a candle to get their attention.
Just a few hours before, this man had been a hostage of the Kelly Gang,
and learned about their plan.
He had pretended to be a sympathizer, and convinced Ned to let him go home,
but instead he ran to the railroad to warn the police about the trap ahead.
Now the police knew everything.
They rushed to catch the Kelly gang at the inn.
The Kelly Gang opened fire,
and the siege of Glenrowan began.
Bullets flew from every side.
Most bounced off of Ned's armor,
but two shots hit his unprotected hand and foot,
crippling him in the first volley.
And many more bullets missed entirely,
tearing through the walls of the inn where the hostages were hiding.
Somebody cried for the police to stop shooting,
there were women and children inside!
And a brief pause fell while hostages trickled out of the inn.
but the police feared that the Kelly Gang might use the hostages as a cover for their own escape,
and fired when they heard a male voice coming from one group.
It was just a family with a teenage boy.
The family fled back inside, and the hostages became too terrified to leave,
for fear that the police would mistake them for the Kellys again.
But Ned had already escaped.
In the dark, bleeding heavily and limping from his wounds,
He had found a gap in the police lines and crept past them to the trees.
But he couldn't leave his friends.
He resolved to go back and lead them out through the path he had found.
Joe Byrne had been holding down the fort while Ned was gone,
trying desperately to keep the hostages from falling into despair.
When he saw Ned come through the door,
he tried to lift their spirits with a loud toast to the Kelly Gang.
The police heard the sound, and fired at it.
A bullet hit Joe's leg, and struck a major artery.
Within seconds, Joe was dead.
Watching his best friend die from across the room,
Ned descended into a fury.
He rushed in and out of the house, roaring at the police to fight him.
But they wouldn't.
He looked for Dan and Steve, but couldn't find them.
They must have abandoned him.
He crept back through the police lines, retracing his secret escape path,
but still saw no sign of his friends.
He started to go back one more time to look for them,
Before finally collapsing from blood loss.
When Ned wakes back up, morning has dawned.
A heavy fog rolls across the countryside, obscuring everything.
He could run. He could make it to the horses and escape through the mist.
But...No.
He came to Glenrowan to make his stand against the police,
and stand he will.
He's bleeding, limping, he can barely aim his own gun,
but this ends today.
He limps around the police lines and surprises them from the rear.
To the tired officers Ned Kelly seems like a demon;
he's inhumanly tall, shrouded by mist, with his face hidden behind a metal mask.
They fire at him, but their shots bounce off harmlessly.
He strides into the thick of the group, firing back.
Dan and Steve emerge from their hiding places in the inn and join the shooting.
Still Ned marches forward.
He taunts the police: they can't hit him.
And the more they try, the more he laughs.
For half an hour, Ned trudges through the hail of police bullets.
But as the morning mist rolls away,
One officer finally realizes that the armor doesn't cover Ned's legs.
His next shot blows through Ned's kneecap.
And at long last, the iron outlaw falls to the ground.
Ned surrenders.
The officer takes aim again.
He swore that he would be the man to kill Ned Kelly,
and now he has his chance.
but before he can pull the trigger, another policeman steps in the way and declares
"I will shoot any bloody man that dares touch him!"
Ned recognizes that voice.
It's constable Bracken, the officer Ned had taken hostage here in Glenrowan just the night before.
Bracken had escaped when the siege began,
and now found himself defending the same man who had dragged him out of his sickbed,
put a gun in his face, and threatened to kill him.
But no matter what Ned had done, Bracken insisted he deserved a fair trial.
Dan and Steve would not be so lucky.
They allowed the last of the hostages to go, but refused to let themselves be captured.
After trading a few more volleys with the police,
the two of them took their own lives.
The police, not realizing that the two were already dead,
decided to end the siege by burning down the building.
Ned Kelly got his trial, but it did little to help him.
His sister tried desperately to organize a legal defense,
but she couldn't afford a good lawyer.
The money from Ned's bank robberies was long gone.
The jury returned a guilty verdict,
and the judge sentenced him to death.
Nearly ten-thousand people marches in protest,
And a petition to stop his execution gathered sixty-thousand signatures.
But the government refused to change the court's sentence.
Ned Kelly would hang.
On November 11th, 1880,
Ned Kelly walked into the gallows.
From then on, Australians would look to him as either a sign of rebellion and freedom,
or of lawlessness and crime.
Of the fight against tyranny, or the very thing they needed authority to protect them against.
But Ned? He just looked at that noose that had been prepared for him, sighed, and said
"Such is life."