Mrs Kelly: the astonishing life of Ned Kelly's mother

By Grantlee Kieza

The astonishing life of Ned Kelly's mother

While we know much about the iconic outlaw Ned Kelly, his mother Ellen Kelly has been largely overlooked by Australian writers and historians -- until now, with this vivid and compelling portrait by Grantlee Kieza, one of Australia's most popular biographers.

When Ned Kelly's mother, Ellen, arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. By the time she died aged ninety-one in 1923, having outlived seven of her twelve children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern, sovereign nation.

Like so many pioneering women, Ellen, the wife of a convict, led a life of great hardship. Born in Ireland during a time of entrenched poverty and sectarian violence, she was a mother of seven when her husband died after months in a police lock-up. She lived through famine and drought, watched her babies die, listened through the prison wall while her eldest son was hanged and saw the charred remains of another of her children who'd died in a shoot-out with police. One son became Australia's most infamous (and ultimately most celebrated) outlaw; another became a highly decorated policeman, an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a worldwide star on the rodeo circuit. Through it all, 'the notorious Mrs Kelly', as she was dubbed by Victoria's Assistant Police Commissioner, survived as best she could, like so many pioneering women of the time.

By bestselling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia's most notorious women and her wild family, but it's also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780733338717

Grantlee Kieza

Award-winning journalist Grantlee Kieza OAM held senior editorial positions at The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Courier-Mail for many years and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his writing. He is a Walkley Award finalist and the author of more than twenty acclaimed books, including bestsellers Hudson Fysh, The Kelly Hunters, Lawson, Banks, Macquarie, Banjo, Mrs Kelly, Monash, Sons of the Southern Cross and Bert Hinkler.

Book preview

MAP

DEDICATION

For Kevin and Pat McDonald, my friends.

CONTENTS

Map

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Bibliography

Internet Resources

Endnotes

Index

Photos Section

About the Author

Praise

Also by Grantlee Kieza

Copyright

Prologue

MARCH 1923, ELEVEN MILE CREEK, GLENROWAN WEST, VICTORIA

Mrs Kelly seized an old shovel that was at the fireplace, and rushed at me with it . . . She rushed at me with this shovel and made a blow at me, and smashed my helmet completely in over my eyes; and as I raised my hand to keep off the shovel Ned fired a second shot, and it lodged in my wrist.

CONSTABLE ALEXANDER FITZPATRICK RELATING HIS DISASTROUS CONFRONTATION WITH THE KELLY FAMILY¹

I believe these outrages would never have happened if it had not been for the shooting of Constable Fitzpatrick, and the consequent anger and indignation of the Kellys at their mother having received that severe sentence.

FREDERICK CHARLES STANDISH, VICTORIA’S CHIEF COMMISSIONER OF POLICE, ON THE KELLY OUTBREAK²

THE LITTLE OLD LADY PEERS through the windows of the tumbledown shack as clouds of red dust and a low rumble announce the arrival of an automobile. One of those fancy convertibles.

The smell of eucalyptus wafts down from the grey-blue Warby Ranges in the distance, and a few sheep graze nearby, quietly unconcerned by the mechanical invasion. A couple of sinewy rust-coloured kangaroos bound out in front of the swanky new machine, then, with a few thrusts of their powerful hind legs, they disappear into the scrub.

Ned Kelly’s mother has never ridden in a motor car before, and, staring at the vehicle as it hobbles its way across the uneven ground, she wonders if she might have a try behind the wheel.

A lifetime ago, when Mrs Kelly was a fiery young girl with alabaster skin and a mane of thick black hair so long she could sit on it, she could ride a horse like the wind coming off the snows of Mount Buffalo. No bloomin’ fence in Australia could hold her, and even when she was a middle-aged, widowed grandmother she was charged with hooning through the streets of Benalla on horseback.

Now she wonders how fast this automobile could go, with all the horsepower they say is packed into those smoky engines.

Her small, piercing, grey-blue eyes have dulled after all she’s seen in her 91 years, but Mrs Kelly watches keenly as the car bumps along towards her front door.

Detective Fred Piggott has come up all the way from Melbourne to see her, an odd thing to do given the Kelly family’s long and violent history with authority. Victoria’s most famous lawman is paying a visit to the mother of Australia’s most infamous outlaw, bringing a journalist to interview her, even though police have rarely received a warm welcome here. There has always been a public fascination with the outlaws, but now in 1923, there is renewed interest in the Kellys with Godfrey Cass, son of the Melbourne Gaol’s former governor, starring as Ned in not one, but two recent motion pictures about the gang.³

Ellen will never forget the heavy boots of the police trampling the sounds of silence on a bitterly cold night 45 years ago when ‘the notorious Mrs Kelly’,⁴ as they called her back then, was dragged away from her three-day-old daughter in handcuffs.

The police would break down her door and terrify her young daughters, turning milk tins over and pouring flour onto the floor, demanding to know the whereabouts of her boys Ned and Dan, the cop-killers.

The law hanged Ned while she was housed with him in Melbourne Gaol. She had tried to look after him all his life – worked for him, cleaned for him, sold sly grog for him, probably lied for him more times than she can now recall. But when he needed her most she was helpless and unable to protect him, listening like a frightened mouse for the clanging sound of the gallows trapdoor that spelled the end of his short, violent life.

Her younger son Dan, always trying to prove himself in his hand-me-down clothes, had died surrounded by police as they called on him to surrender. After the police set fire to his refuge all that was left of Ellen’s boy was a charred, smouldering stump on a sheet of bark.

Her boys turned Victoria on its head during a spree of murder and robbery that made them monsters to some, martyrs to others – but as this roofless Model T Ford⁵ comes to a stop outside the house, Ellen reminds herself that those troubles were a long time ago.

All the fight has left the old lady now. Crippled by arthritis and the unyielding weight of time, she struggles to stand upright with the help of a thick stick and the arm of Big Jim Kelly, Ned’s grey-bearded brother.

Jim’s still a big man, and while he was once as ferocious as Ned, in and out of Australia’s hardest prisons from the age of 13, time has smoothed out his rough edges, soothed his hate and blind rage, as it has for old Mrs Kelly. For years Jim has devoted himself to giving his mother some comfort at the end of a long life of almost unbearable sadness and conflict.

Now both watch carefully as Fred Piggott and the journalist Bartlett Adamson⁶ walk cautiously towards the front door of the little house. A creeper sprawls over the front veranda and the place looks like it might tumble in on itself with a sudden rush of wind. Mrs Kelly and Big Jim are a reclusive pair, but they knew Piggott when he was stationed in Glenrowan 20 years earlier, and they welcome their guests into this humble home.

It is hard for the visitors to imagine this tiny, bent-over woman as the same one who, with her 12th baby at her breast, was sent to Melbourne Gaol to do three years’ hard labour for beating a policeman over the head while Ned shot him. But Adamson makes a mental note that in spite of her extreme age, her hollowed cheeks and sunken jaw, there is a tilt almost of defiance about the poise of her head. Her straight nose, the sharp, firm moulding of the chin, and a glance ‘rather eagle-like from under the shadows of her brows’ suggest the inner fire still burns.⁷

She has lived an extraordinary life.

As a child, Ellen watched the convict ships sailing past her home on the coast of Ireland bound for the Great South Land, and she has lived long enough to see motor cars roaring along these old bush roads, and aeroplanes buzzing overhead faster than even her sons could fly on their stolen horses.

She has survived two husbands and more than half of her children, and seen both war and peace in her remote neighbourhood.

Ellen tells the visitors that this is Jim’s house but she has lived around here for 56 years, the first 10 of them in a shanty a mile and a half closer to Greta.

Back then, as a young widow with seven hungry children and no way of supporting them, she took possession of an old abandoned hut and fashioned a home for her brood. She took two young lovers, had more babies and sold grog illegally to keep her children fed. She farmed the hard, harsh land and watched, heartbroken, as her three oldest sons sunk deeper and deeper into crime, fighting a police force determined to break their spirit.

She could only despair as each of them went to jail, but what chance did any of them have – no money, little education and surrounded by a bunch of wild uncles who were either bad, mad or both? Push Ned and he would push back harder.

He was a good lad at heart, she tells the visitors. One of the last things he did for her was build her a better house near their old broken-down one – built it the way his father Red Kelly had taught him, the same way Red had been shown when he was an Irish convict newly arrived in Van Diemen’s Land.

Ellen Kelly shortly before her death in 1923 when visited by journalist Bartlett Adamson. Her oldest surviving son Jim Kelly is at the left. (State Library of Victoria MS 13559.)

Ellen had fallen in love with Red when she was 18. She had never regretted it, even though he drank too much and her life was trouble and strife from their first kiss. Her in-laws own Ellen’s old farm now, but sometimes Jim hitches up his wagon so she can travel down the dusty road to the patch of willow trees where they buried one of her daughters and her infant grandchild long ago.

She and Jim live simply, as they have always done. They have never had money, not even when Ned and Dan were robbing banks.

Jim’s home is a plain and simple little place and the kitchen is decorated only with photographs, even one of the late King Edward VII, as if proof that the bitter war with authority is over.⁸

On the walls are the old lady’s most treasured memories: the photos of her loved ones. There’s one of her tragic daughter Kate, and Kate’s son Fred, Ellen’s beloved grandson, who died on the Western Front.

‘Oh, Fred he were a game lad,’ Ellen says in her soft Irish lilt. ‘He were as brave as his uncle Ned. They looked a lot alike too, ye know.’ Ellen has never lost the accent. Ned spoke with a watered down version and as a boy Jim did, too, but now when he opens his mouth, which is rare, he has the unmistakeable drawl of an Australian bushman.⁹

Ellen is enjoying a rare chance to sing the praises of her family, to tell these men of the boys she loved and lost.

With Jim’s help, Ellen takes a couple of tottering steps towards the large photograph that dominates the room and points to it with her thick walking stick. It is of Ned Kelly on the last day she saw him, the day before he was hanged, the day she is supposed to have told him: ‘Mind you die like a Kelly, son.’ His dark hair and luxuriant beard adorn a face still defiant, even though that day the hangman was checking his noose and a coffin was being readied.

Just up the road from here at Glenrowan, Ned had emerged from the bush like a fearful apparition dressed in a suit of armour, to stage a final gun battle with police, mocking them as their bullets bounced off his layer of iron.

‘Ned would have made a great general in the war,’ she tells Adamson and Piggott. ‘A great general, no matter what side he was on.’ But he had too much fire inside him, Mrs Kelly says. She fixes the reporter and the detective with her old, piercing eyes.

‘The other children took after their da,’ she says. ‘He were a red-head. But Ned, oh poor Ned. He were black like meself.’¹⁰

Chapter 1

1832, THE GIANT’S CAUSEWAY, COUNTY ANTRIM, IRELAND

. . . a flag and nation that has destroyed massacred and murdered their forefathers by the greatest of torture as rolling them downhill in spiked barrels, pulling their toes and fingernails and on the wheel and every torture imaginable. More was transported to Van Diemen’s Land to pine their young lives away in starvation and misery among tyrants worse than the promised hell itself . . .

NED KELLY ON HIS RESENTMENT OF ENGLISH AUTHORITY¹

ELLEN KELLY IS BORN Ellen Quinn on the northern tip of an emerald-green land stained with blood.

Sixty million years ago a wave of unprecedented violence rocked the surrounding hills and valleys as the earth exploded with volcanic fury. Icy fields and valleys were bathed in molten lava as nature’s unbridled power laid waste to everything in its path. Near what is now the town of Bushmills, 40,000 shards of liquefying basalt were stabbed towards the sky. The local people called the startling rock formation of huge interweaving pillars the Giant’s Causeway.

The land Ellen knows has always been one of rumblings and upheavals. St Patrick is said to have gently led the Irish to the Roman Catholic faith in the fifth century while driving all their snakes into the sea.² Later English visitors were not so helpful. There were bloody but futile rebellions against Henry VIII and his attempts to eliminate Catholicism in Ireland. His daughter Elizabeth ravaged Ireland with scorched-earth policies, and 30,000 Irish men, women and children starved to death during a revolt in Munster.³ Elizabeth’s successors began mass confiscation of Irish land. Huge tracts were resettled by Protestant planters from England, Wales and Scotland, and later Oliver Cromwell gave thousands of Irish acres to his soldiers and supporters.

County Antrim and its Giant’s Causeway became heavily populated with Scottish Lowland Presbyterians,⁴ who came to Ireland across the waters of the North Channel, at its narrowest part just 13 miles (21 kilometres) wide.

When Ellen Kelly’s paternal grandfather Patrick Quinn, a flax grower, was born in 1770, it was into a land riven by injustice and misery. Thirty years earlier, in the great famine called the ‘Year of Slaughter’, 400,000 Irish died, and even greater starvation was looming.

For decades Catholics had been excluded from owning land, from holding public office, from the judiciary and teaching professions, from living near a commercial centre, and even from owning a house worth more than £5.⁵ Fields were given over to the cultivation of a new delicacy for the English gentry: the potato, which had arrived in Ireland from the New World across the Atlantic. Irish Catholics who were not shipped off to slave in the fields of the New World – to Virginia or the West Indies – became tenant farmers and labourers paying exorbitant rent on small parcels of poor land good for little more than growing spuds and bitterness. While many of the Irish went hungry, larger tracts of better land were given over to growing grain for export and to fattening sheep and cattle for English butchers.

Patrick Quinn and his Scottish wife Mary McGeer farmed near the Giant’s Causeway. Their son James Quinn was born in 1803. England had just abolished the Irish Parliament⁶ and forced the Irish into a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, but, inspired by the French and American Revolutions, Irish peasants continued to fight for their freedom. There was a series of rebellions in 1798. At Enniscorthy in County Wexford in June, the Irish armed themselves with steel-tipped poles called pikes to face 15,000 British troops in the Battle of Vinegar Hill. The untrained local militiamen were cut down by the well-drilled British Redcoats. Many of the captured rebels were burned alive, their women gang-raped.⁷

BY 1831, AS IRELAND SEETHES with dissent, James Quinn and his wife Mary⁸ are raising four children as best they can amid the food shortages. A prominent agitator named ‘Honest’ Pat Lalor, with his four-year-old son Peter by his side, speaks passionately at a series of rallies against tithes, which Irish Catholics, already burdened by increasing poverty, are being forced to pay in support of the British-backed Protestant Church of Ireland.

Masses turn to crime, knowing that ‘transportation’ – banishment to the British penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land – would at least see them fed even if they arrived in chains on the other side of the world. For the next 80 years following the First Fleet of 1788, the British transport more than 160,000 convicts to the Australian colonies, and, starting with the first shipment out of Kingstown⁹ near Dublin in 1791, almost a quarter of them will be Irish.

This is the world Ellen Quinn enters, wrinkled and screaming, near the town of Ballymena 18 miles (29 kilometres) from the Giant’s Causeway in 1832.¹⁰ She is the fifth child in a Catholic family surviving on the solitary wage of a farm labourer and a diet of oatmeal, potatoes and the luxury of fish that many children further away from the ocean never see. Her family call her ‘Little Nell’ and she grows up free-spirited and bold. An old friend will recall:

Some said there was a wild strain in her. She loved to be free and hated restraint. She was sent to school but was often missing from her class when she would roam over the bogs or in the woods after bird’s nests or wild berries. She would tear her clothes hiding in some hedge when she saw someone she feared would inform on her playing the truant. But, when in school there was one subject that claimed her attention. That was when the old schoolmaster told them stories about Australia. Of the great country where the lawbreakers of the old land were sent. Of the number of people sent to Botany Bay; of the sufferings and cruelty that was imposed on the convicts in Van Diemen’s Land.¹¹

Ellen listens to all the stories of the hungry children like herself, transported for life often just for pinching food to feed their families. She pays rapt attention to the tales of how people work hard and are pardoned, and how through honest industry they become independent; how Australia is the Promised Land for those who want a second chance at life. It is a good land, her schoolmaster says, a good land for free men and women. Ellen learns to read a little but cannot write.¹²

On one summer’s day in July, when Ellen is seven, she and about 15 young friends thread their way through black thorns, interwoven with roses and flowering creepers, and amble across a grassy meadow. They stroll through a field of sweet-smelling shamrock clover to stand at the water’s edge gazing out to the sea.

In the distance is the sound of men, including Ellen’s father, working in the fields. But their work is nearly done and the sun is quickly sinking in the west, bathing the sea in a glow of orange and pink. Long shadows stretch out across the bobbing fishing boats that are still busy in the little harbour, some returning with their catch and others preparing to go out for the night.

While the other children run and play and make the meadows ring with their shouts and peals of laughter, Ellen stands transfixed as a full-rigged, four-mast convict ship goes by, churning through the deep with all her sails spread. The bright rays of the setting sun make the vast canvas sails look like great sheets of silver. Ellen’s blue-grey eyes focus on the soldiers and sailors in uniform walking around the decks, carrying their muskets past a big black cannon. The waves part before the ship and Little Nell marvels at their might and power as she listens to the creaks and squeaks of the vessel’s timbers and ropes.

The wind blows through the long black hair that falls in tresses over the pale white skin of her thin sharp face. The other children do not share her sense of awe.

‘I say, Nell,’ shouts one of the boys, ‘why don’t ye come play instead of standing there like a silly donkey?’

She wheels around and glares fiercely at her playmate. She has always been a fiery one.

‘Will ye never learn sense, boy?’ she exclaims. ‘Don’t ye see that ship?’

The other children are silenced by her anger.

‘Ye can laugh but ye don’t know who be on that boat. It may be that some of yer own be there. They be taking away a powerful lot just now.’

One of the boys pipes up. ‘And is it yeself that would like to be goin’, Nell?’

‘I would,’ she snaps. ‘And I will some day, but not as a prisoner on a convict ship. No, by God. No. On a free ship that only carries free people.’

The children roar with laughter at Ellen’s crazy talk.

‘Begorrah, how big she talks,’ one says, and the others laugh harder.

Furious, Ellen curses them all and runs to her father in disgust.¹³

For the little dark-haired girl with fire in her eyes, her dream of a great sea voyage to a new land is no joke. In their tiny mud hut, she has heard her mother and father talking about a new start for them all – just like the other families journeying for months across the ocean to chance their luck, under a sky that is said to stretch forever, and plains so vast that there is land for everyone.

FROM 1839, OFFICIALS IN the remote Port Phillip District of New South Wales begin working with the British Government’s emigration officers in London on a system of assisted immigration.

Ireland has an overflowing, underfed population of more than eight million. Forty per cent of Irish houses are one-room mud cabins with earth floors, no windows and no chimneys. The largest workforce in the country spends most of its wages on rent.

Across the ocean, though, at Port Phillip Bay, there is an urgent need for brick-makers and fencers. There are jobs begging for bakers, shepherds, grooms, blacksmiths, carpenters and cattlemen. Women are needed as domestic servants, laundresses, seamstresses, cooks and governesses.

The Port Phillip District might be remote, but in Antrim the word is that Ellen Quinn and her family will not go hungry there. The bounty migrant schemes in Australia are being funded by both government and private enterprise, and are supported by philanthropists such as Caroline Chisholm¹⁴ and the stockbroker J.B. Were.¹⁵ The London Emigration Officer is tasked with promoting the scheme, supervising the selection of applicants and arranging for their passage.

James Quinn, who has now fathered eight children, puts his hand up at the first opportunity, saying later that he did so for the sake of his family – Patrick, Helen, Jack, Mary junior, Ellen, Catherine, Jane and the newborn Jimmy – ‘to improve their position’.¹⁶ He and Mary sell almost everything they own, which isn’t much, and gather their children to farewell their family and friends.

For so many of the Irish, departure to foreign fields is like a death, in which life’s torment ends with resurrection in a heaven on the other side of the world. The prospect of a return from Australia is so remote that the emigration ceremony becomes a wake for the living. During the week before leaving, the emigrants make calls throughout their parish, giving friends and neighbours the news of their departure and receiving their blessings in return. On the night before their departure, the emigrants listen to their eulogies just as if they were at their own funerals. Along with the reminiscence, there is singing, dancing, pipes of tobacco passed around and some homemade poteen moonshine to toast them as they prepare to be born again in another place.

Neighbours who can afford it bring provisions: a few hard-boiled eggs, some oatmeal biscuits, and frog bread, made by mixing the powdered flesh from a roasted frog with oatmeal dough – a combination that is supposed to ward off fever.¹⁷ In Ireland, where fairies, banshees and leprechauns have a special place in folklore, a caul – the foetal membrane that sometimes covers the head of an infant at birth – is given to seafarers as a protection against drowning.

The Quinns have a journey of 16,000 miles (25,700 kilometres) ahead of them that begins with their first time on a ship, taking them across the Irish Sea to Liverpool. There, on 4 April 1841,¹⁸ they set sail for the small port of Melbourne on the 939-ton England, under Captain John Thompson. On board are 367 bounty migrants, including 104 Irish Catholics¹⁹ and a handful of ‘first class’ cabin passengers.²⁰

For small children, and even for the largely unlearned adults on board, the start of the adventure is mind-boggling, bewildering, terrifying.

The England sails out of the Mersey and down the west coast of Wales, but Ireland is still a vivid memory when the first death occurs on board. Before the voyage is over, 16 children and two young women will die from whooping cough, consumption or dysentery, which spreads like wildfire below deck.²¹

The stench coming from all the passengers in close quarters for such a long time is at times overwhelming, but during the 104 days at sea Little Nell makes the most of her new surrounds and becomes a favourite with all on board, telling jokes and tales to crewmen John Keith, Allan McKenzie and Daniel Reid Grover,²² and singing them Irish songs.²³

Under full sail the England cuts through the eastern waters of the Atlantic Ocean, past Spain and Morocco and Guinea to the tropical heat of the Equator, crossing near the Saint Peter and Paul Rocks. She presses on past the barren archipelago of Trindade and Martim Vaz then drifts through the windless doldrums. Near the group of remote volcanic islands called Tristan da Cunha, the England veers south-east into the driving winds of the Roaring Forties and rockets towards the Cape of Good Hope. From there she carries on through the icy waters of the Great Southern Ocean, past Cape Leeuwin on the west coast of Australia, in an arc towards Port Phillip Bay.

The England sails down the Yarra River and arrives at Sandridge²⁴ on 17 July 1841. The Port Phillip District pays the immigration agents £19 each as a bounty for James and Mary Quinn, £15 for the eldest boy Patrick, £10 each for most of the other children including Ellen and £5 for four-year-old Jane. Baby Jimmy doesn’t attract a farthing,²⁵ and he proves to be a worthless millstone in the Quinn household for the rest of his life.

In the depths of winter, the newly gazetted town²⁶ hardly provides a warm welcome. It has been named after the British Prime Minister, William Lamb, the second Viscount Melbourne, whose wife Caroline has caused him no amount of embarrassment in a very public affair with the poet Lord Byron, a man she found ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.²⁷

The town of Melbourne was only scouted out six years ago, and the mostly unmade roads are still little more than bush tracks that become like porridge in the wet as horses and bullock teams chop up the muddy earth. There is an assortment of single-storey wooden buildings fashioned from the surrounding gum trees and a few more substantial and ambitious brick constructions hinting at a future grandeur. There are British soldiers everywhere in their red coats, just as there were in Ireland, guarding convict work parties. Building is about to begin on a Catholic church that will be called St Francis’.²⁸

THREE WEEKS AFTER ELLEN and her family arrive in Melbourne, a Tipperary convict named John ‘Red’ Kelly leaves Dublin on the Prince Regent II.²⁹ The date is 7 August 1841 and the ship is bound for the penal settlements around Hobart. Cape Town will be the only stop.

Red leaves his home in chains, but even below deck on a reeking convict transport he is glad to get out of Ireland alive. On the list of most loathed creatures in Irish society, ‘police informant’ lurks even below English landlords and British Redcoats.

Red’s name is an anglicised version of the Gaelic Sean O’Ceallaigh. He was baptised on 20 February 1820 in the Catholic Church in Moyglass,³⁰ in County Tipperary, the first child of Thomas Kelly and Mary Cody from the village of Clonbrogan, about a mile (1.6 kilometres) west of Moyglass and a few miles from the ancient walled market town of Fethard. Red Kelly’s parents were married in the Catholic church at Moyglass in 1819, just as his grandparents, John Kelly and Ellen Head, had been in 1799.

In the early 21st century the lush, low, green plains of County Tipperary are home to one of the world’s great nurseries for thoroughbred horseracing, Coolmore Stud,³¹ but in the first half of the 19th century they were in the iron grip of British rule and being choked by desperate times. Around the time of Red’s birth, County Tipperary was a hotbed of Irish republicanism, with the Rockites and the Whiteboys forming peasant gangs to agitate violently for tenancy protection and better wages.

The Rockites waged a campaign of murder, arson and rape in which more than 1000 people were killed, mutilated or badly beaten between 1821 and 1824.³² For a time, the intimidation of witnesses and informers virtually gave them legal immunity. It would become a common tactic in Irish guerrilla fighting.

By 1840, 20-year-old Red Kelly is the oldest of seven children – five boys and two girls³³ – scratching out an existence on three-eighths of an acre (.15 hectare)³⁴ at Moyglass that looks across at the picturesque Slievenamon mountain and the low hill of Carraigmoclear, the scene of another failed campaign in the 1798 Irish rebellion.³⁵

The Kellys, like most Irish families, live on a small piece of dirt that is not even worth £1 a year in rent. In fact they pay just 6 shillings a year for their land to Jeremiah Scully Esquire, and 7 shillings for their one-room mud hut.³⁶ They are poorer than all but three of the neighbouring families, with just a small garden for potatoes, but they still manage to sub-let another tiny cottage on the land to the even poorer Margaret Dunphy for 3 shillings a year.³⁷

There are large properties in the area, including the Killurney estate near Kilsheelan belonging to John Butler,³⁸ the 2nd Marquess of Ormonde, but gamekeepers and woodsmen are warned not to take game for themselves.

As a young man Red Kelly found labouring work around Kilcash in the Gambonfield parish, but he has already been involved in stealing livestock from the area and is known to Sub-inspector Cox of the Newpark village police as ‘a notorious character’.³⁹ On the evening of 17 November 1840, he is busy rustling what police later describe as ‘seven fat cows’ from James Ryall in Moyglass.⁴⁰

Helping him is another young villain named Pat Regan and an unnamed accomplice. The police are well aware of what the local scoundrels are doing, and Constable Perry and two other officers from the Mobarnan Police lie in wait. They know that these men are more dangerous than petty thieves and are likely to be armed.

Regan is walking ahead of the cows being driven by Kelly and the third man when police pounce. Kelly makes a run for it. Constable Perry tackles Regan, but the young criminal draws a flintlock pistol, puts it against Perry’s chest and pulls the trigger. It misfires. Regan breaks free and runs, using the cows as cover, but Perry and another officer open fire and hit him in the side and hand. Regan stumbles and staggers but manages to get away badly wounded. He is arrested the next day.⁴¹

Just two and a half weeks later, with South Tipperary deep into winter and covered in a veil of snow, Red tiptoes through the white groundcover at 4 o’clock one Saturday morning to steal two pigs worth £6: about four months’ wages for an Irish farm labourer earning no more than a shilling a day. The pigs belong to James Cooney, a peasant sharecropper in Ballysheehan, who is struggling as hard as the Kellys, if not harder.⁴²

A few hours later, having discovered the alarming loss, Cooney’s distressed wife Mary walks through the snow to the Newpark Police Station to report the theft of the Cooney family’s most valuable assets. By that time Red has driven the pigs through the freezing night and breaking dawn to sell at the Cahir market 12 miles (19 kilometres) away. A manhunt begins and police arrest Red that night in a Cashel boarding house.⁴³ The pigs are retrieved from a buyer at Carrick-on-Suir and returned to the Cooneys.

Red goes on trial with Pat Regan, in the shadow of the great grey Rock of Cashel, the 900-year-old fortress that looms over the town. On 6 January 1841, Regan, growing weaker by the day from the bullet wound in his side, is sentenced to 10 years’ transportation. Red is sentenced to seven years’ transportation for the theft of the pigs, with the Clonmel Herald stating he received a lighter sentence because ‘it was he that gave information respecting Regan’.⁴⁴

Six weeks later, Regan dies in Clonmel Gaol. Red Kelly becomes widely known throughout the county as a police stooge.

A convict ship to Van Diemen’s Land might not be the most comfortable way of travelling, but it offers Red a safe haven from Regan’s friends and family.⁴⁵

Many of the Irish convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land are political rebels, but most are simply the victims of poverty, guilty of property crimes rather than the terrorism known then as ‘agrarian outrages’.⁴⁶

Red is first shackled in Clonmel Gaol and then sent to the brutal Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, where 4000 Irishmen are housed before transportation. Men, women and children are imprisoned together, up to five in each cell, often with only a single candle per prisoner for light and heat. Most of their time is spent in the cold and the dark, as each candle has to last the prisoner for two weeks.⁴⁷

After six months of privations, Red is marched in chains along with 180 other wretches onto the barque Prince Regent II, berthed in Dublin’s Kingstown Harbour. The ship is a relatively small vessel of 394 tons (357 tonnes) owned by Londoner Joseph Somes, who is making a fortune as a contractor for convict shipment and for naval timber.⁴⁸ Many convicts have never seen the ocean before and are deathly afraid. Peter Cunningham,⁴⁹ surgeon superintendent on a number of convict vessels, later remembers the prisoners’ sleeping quarters as being in two rows, ‘one above the other . . . each berth being six feet square, and calculated to hold four convicts, everyone thus possessing 18 inches [46 centimetres] of space to sleep in’.⁵⁰

Despite the chains, the armed guards and the threat of floggings, conditions are no worse than Red knew in Moyglass. Many of the convicts are happy to be leaving their troubles for a new start. Each man is allowed a pair of shoes, three shirts, two pairs of trousers and other warm clothing, besides a bed, pillow and blanket, while for those so inclined, Bibles, testaments and prayer books are distributed. Cunningham writes that before boarding the convict ships prisoners are dressed in new, ironed clothes, ‘and it is curious to observe with what nonchalance some of these fellows will turn the jingling of their chains into music whereto they dance and sing’.⁵¹

The food is far better than anything Red has eaten before:

The rations are both good and abundant, three-quarters of a pound of biscuit being the daily allowance of bread, while each day the convict sits down to dinner of either beef, pork, or plum-pudding, having pea soup four times a week, and a pot of gruel every morning, with sugar and butter in it. Vinegar is issued to the messes weekly; and as soon as the ship has been three weeks at sea, each man is served with one ounce of lime juice and the same of sugar daily, to guard against scurvy.⁵²

The voyage takes nearly four months, but while there is a constant, sickening stench of animal and human excrement and foul water in the bottom of the ship, the ship’s surgeon superintendent, Philip Toms, reports just three deaths before the prisoners sail up Hobart Town’s Derwent River on 2 January 1842.⁵³

IN MELBOURNE, 7800 bounty migrants have arrived in the last 12 months, almost doubling the population of a town whose four banks are trying to cope with widespread debt because of falling wool prices in England.

There are three vigorous newspapers, and one of them, John Pascoe Fawkner’s Port Phillip Patriot, reports that the problem with such a great and sudden wave of immigrants, mostly from ‘the labouring classes’, is ‘very considerable reduction in wages’.⁵⁴

The Melbourne of 1842 has 14 hotels, two breweries, a wooden post office, a police court and lock-up, a skittle alley, a gunsmith’s and a carpenter’s shop. More businesses are opening every day, but the new superintendent of the Port Phillip District, Charles La Trobe, has little administrative experience, and when it comes to allocating money for public works, he has trouble extracting a brass farthing from Governor George Gipps in Sydney.

The Port Phillip Gazette reports:

. . . an agricultural and pastoral society has been formed; the town has its public balls, public dinners, annual races, amateur boat-clubs, cricket-clubs, freemasons lodge, and to measure it by the highest standard, its hot pie-men, and its pewter pots . . . The government is the only thing that is indelibly stamped as disgraceful and oppressive. It has at the head an intelligent, an active, and an affable man, but his hands are tied: some of his officers, however, have made themselves notorious, not only for their want of ability, but their want of principle . . . Melbourne has very inefficient police.⁵⁵

Robert Hoddle, in charge of surveying Port Phillip, has drawn up a grid for allotments and public reserves in Melbourne, specifying extra-wide streets. One hundred half-acre (2000-square-metre) blocks beside the Yarra River were sold for an average price of £38 in 1837, with the most expensive, on the corner of William and Collins Streets, going for £95. By the time the Quinns arrive in Melbourne, the same blocks have risen 200 times in value and accommodation is scarce.⁵⁶ James Quinn goes looking for lodgings and a job to feed his hungry brood. He knows that even in this land of opportunity, he has a hard road in front of him.

Not all Irishmen are struggling here, though.

Redmond Barry, a tall, dashing and ambitious young lawyer from Ballyclough, County Cork, will cross paths with Ellen and her family on many occasions. They share Ireland as a birthplace but that’s where all similarities end.

Barry is the 28-year-old son of a major-general in the British Army and the graduate of an English military school. He sees great things for Melbourne and immerses himself in public works. He represents Indigenous Australians in court without a fee and battles to defend two gun-toting Tasmanian Aborigines captured after a six-week war on white settlers in the Dandenongs and Mornington Peninsula, which saw houses burned and two sealers killed at Cape Paterson.

Barry argues that British law should not be applied to Australia’s first people, but the two men – Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner – are hanged in the shadow of the new Melbourne Gaol before a cheering white crowd of 5000.⁵⁷ ‘Owing to some fault in the construction or management of the gallows,’ the Geelong Advertiser reports, ‘the unfortunate wretches were subjected to considerable torture before they died.’⁵⁸

Barry is unconventional for his times in other ways too. His pursuit of women – in all shapes and sizes, single, married or selling sex for money – was so all-consuming in England and Ireland that friends were astounded that he had time to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dublin’s Trinity College.

He kept a detailed diary of his escapades. Entries for 1838 include: ‘French woman 6d [sixpence] home 2’ and ‘caught by Mrs Wertz, Charlotte on my knee’. Sailing to Australia aboard the barque Calcutta⁵⁹ in 1839, Barry began an affair with a Mrs Scott, which he very much enjoyed, though it was more than annoying to Mr Scott, a New South Wales Government official travelling on the same ship. Scott complained about Barry’s behaviour to the captain, who, unsuccessfully, demanded the young lawyer remain in his cabin. Barry placed an asterisk in his diary every time he and Mrs Scott had sex, and before long he was running out of ink. He kept meticulous score: ‘31 July Mrs S twice’; ‘4 August Mrs S four times’; ‘8 August Visit from Mrs S – 3 times’.⁶⁰ When the Calcutta finally berthed in Botany Bay, the scandal made Barry a social pariah, so he headed south to Melbourne. But before he left: ‘25 September Mrs S 3 times . . . 8 October Mrs S 10 times’.⁶¹

In Melbourne he impresses the ladies with his haughty air and bass voice, delighting his lady friends with his rendition of ‘Love’s Witchcraft’.⁶² He makes enemies too. After offending another member of the exclusive Melbourne Club, Peter Snodgrass, Barry gladly accepts his challenge to a duel. Pistols at 10 paces at dawn on the beach at Sandridge. A year ago, Snodgrass shot himself in the big toe when a duel with another young squatter, William Ryrie, went wrong.⁶³

Barry arrives for the shootout dressed immaculately in a swallowtail coat, white vest, white gloves, cravat and top hat. He and Snodgrass level their guns at each other and, with his hands trembling, Snodgrass fires prematurely and misses. Barry keeps his pistol levelled at Snodgrass’s heart and pauses for a while to savour the delicious moment: a man’s life is at his mercy. Then, with Snodgrass on the verge of collapse, Barry fires into the air,⁶⁴ a humiliation worse than death.

JAMES QUINN finds work as a porter and runs some dairy cows and bullocks on the few acres he can afford to rent at Moonee Ponds Creek, near the village of Brunswick. The children all help on the small farm but there is little time or money for schooling. James sells firewood and carts goods behind his bullock team. His family grows with the addition of three more children – William, Margaret and Grace – and he saves every penny he can.

Ellen becomes a striking teenager with a thin face and sharp tongue. Her mane of thick black hair flies like a cape whenever she is on horseback. She becomes an expert horsewoman and finds a job helping at McNaughton’s saddlery for a couple of years along an often-slushy thoroughfare known as Elizabeth Street.⁶⁵

Redmond Barry’s legal career gathers momentum too. He takes up a new role presiding over the Court of Request, a tribunal handling cases involving small debts in a makeshift court in the disused billiard room of the Lamb Inn, a weatherboard hotel on Collins Street.⁶⁶

RED KELLY, Prisoner No. 3428, is listed as being of medium height with a ‘fresh’ complexion, large head, long visage, blue eyes, large nose, and a scar on his chin. He can read but not write.⁶⁷

A long way from Tipperary, Hobart is a strange new world, with its grand sandstone buildings erected on the bloodied backs of convict sweat, the imposing Mount Wellington on one side and the wide expanse of the cold grey Derwent on the other. Forests and water are everywhere. It is a world where the British still rule with the whip, the gun and the noose, and where strange creatures the size of deer hop about on their hind legs. Even as a captive, though, it is impossible for Red not to be impressed by the magnificence and possibilities of his new surrounds.

The wild, untamed landscape, the trees, the flowers and the wildlife are all so different from anything back in Ireland, but the old English brutality remains. Many Irish convicts are flogged by their jailers until their flesh is like jelly as a punishment for speaking in their native tongue, regarded now as the language of conspiracy. Others are confined for long periods in total darkness in solitary confinement, with madness often the final outcome.⁶⁸ More fortunate and docile prisoners are put to work in large gangs.

Red is sent to Brown’s River, now the Hobart suburb of Kingston. His hatred for British authority festers but he does as he is told, keeping his hands dirty and his nose clean as he breaks rocks and clears forests, building a road between Brown’s River and Hobart.

His conduct is good enough⁶⁹ for him soon to be moved to a workstation at Morven (now Evandale), about 12 miles (19 kilometres) south of Launceston, and then to a station on the South Esk River near Perth, where he gets busy with saw, hammer and axe. He never feels the lash on his back, nor does he suffer the fate of so many informers whose ears and noses are bitten off and spat back in their faces. Reports of his behaviour list it as ‘quite good’ and ‘orderly’ and describe him as a ‘worker’.

The only serious blemish on Red’s prison record comes when he leaves his workstation once without permission and is found in a ‘potatoe field’ belonging to a Mr O’Connor. He receives two months’ hard labour in leg irons.⁷⁰ Perhaps the potatoes remind him of Tipperary, where half of the population, including his parents and six siblings, now depend on them. Growing potatoes has become the only way many farmers can exist on their tiny rented plots. Conditions are ripe for a bumper crop this year.

On 11 July 1845 Red is finally given a ticket of leave, allowing him to move freely around Van Diemen’s Land and earn wages.

Then in September, while he is stretching his legs with his increasing freedom, one potato farmer back in Ireland reports that ‘a queer mist came over the Irish Sea’ and that ‘the potato stalks turned black as soot’. Next day the fields all around are ‘a wide waste of putrefaction giving off an offensive odour that could be smelled for miles’.⁷¹ The potatoes are blackened and withered by potato blight, an airborne fungus that has originated in Mexico and travelled across the Atlantic in the holds of ships.

The Great Famine devastates Ireland as nothing before. Families who survive only do so by clawing to life, scavenging anything they can – fox soup, blood from the landlords’ cows, boiled nettles and grass, seagulls and an occasional stolen sheep or pig. Some eat dogs and rats that have been feeding off corpses.

The news quickly spreads to the colonies, and exacerbates the old enmities between Irish Catholics and Protestants. In Melbourne, the Irish immigrants’ new surrounds do little to placate their resentment at the plight of their loved ones back home. On the afternoon of 13 July 1846, a group of Catholics – which the fledgling Argus newspaper describes as ‘an armed rabble of the lowest description of the Irish papists’ – attacks a gathering of 13 Protestants (Orangemen) at the Pastoral Hotel near the corner of Queen and Little Bourke Streets.

Melbourne’s Catholics arm themselves with muskets and shotguns, or sticks and clubs. They march to the hotel and demand that the Protestants take down their orange banners. When rudely rebuffed, the Catholics shoot out a hotel window and try to force their way inside, only to be met by gunfire.

The battle in the middle of Melbourne lasts half an hour, and two of the Catholics, including ‘the notorious Martin McGlyn’,⁷² the principal agitator, are badly wounded. Eventually the military arrive, four men are arrested, the mob disperses and the hotel is temporarily shut down.⁷³

There is more trouble the next morning as 100 Catholics, brandishing their weapons for all to see, rush across Melbourne’s dusty roads to gather in Lonsdale Street at the newly built St Francis’ Church. Police close every pub in Melbourne and another gun battle is averted only after many hours of mediation.

In Ireland, an estimated 800,000 peasants unable to pay their rent are evicted from their homes, often by force, as landowners, backed by constables, burn their cottages. There are reports of starving masses all over the country, ‘famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead’.⁷⁴

Red Kelly is faring much better in Van Diemen’s Land and, celebrating his imminent departure for the mainland, is fined 5 shillings for being drunk and disorderly on 2 August 1847.⁷⁵ His fondness for whisky will cause him a lot more grief in the years ahead but he is granted his Certificate of Freedom five months later on 11 January 1848 and even has his success mentioned in the Hobart papers.⁷⁶

JAMES QUINN MOVES HIS brood to a rented property of 1280 acres (520 hectares)⁷⁷ at Broadmeadows, 15 miles (24 kilometres) north of Melbourne. His eldest sons Patrick and Jack are now big enough to manage the bullock teams, giving James time to manage his farm and increase his stock. In 1849, he moves the family again, a few miles north once more, to a 640-acre (260-hectare) farm called Arrowsmith⁷⁸ at Wallan, at the head of Merri Creek. He rents the land from James Cameron. Ellen and the other children help with the mountains of work needed to build a farm; large tracts of land to be cleared, wood-chopping, ploughing, mustering, milking, fencing and the building of pens and stables. It’s a tough life with the heat and the flies, but it’s a better life than the Quinns ever imagined they could have in Ireland. At night they sit around the fire, eating well. They tell stories about the brutal English landlords back home and they sing folksongs about men and women who stood up to authority.

Ellen’s family are now enjoying a prosperity they never experienced in Ireland as the dairying operation becomes one of cream and clover. Ellen’s father is selling so much milk and meat that soon he is able to buy 710 acres (287 hectares) adjoining his holding around where a railway station will one day stand.⁷⁹ Altogether he is farming 1350 acres (546 hectares).

James plans out a substantial low-set home, made from sawn timber rather than the slab walls common on neighbouring properties. His design resembles an Irish cottage but will be much bigger. His new home will have six rooms, three of them bedrooms, with a shingle roof and walls lined with palings. At one end there will be a wide fireplace for heating and cooking, and beside it an iron oven in which Mary Quinn and the girls can bake their daily bread.⁸⁰ Mary will become known as a local Good Samaritan, extending ‘unwearying and profuse’⁸¹ Irish hospitality far and wide, and welcoming ‘every tired, indigent and benighted wayfaring stranger who might call at her door’. The Quinn family build a reputation for ‘honesty, industry and kindness’.⁸²

It won’t last.

Approaching her 18th birthday, Ellen’s wild streak is given free rein on horseback as she races across the cow paddocks, feeling the sensual pleasure of a young girl with an appetite for excitement and danger. But once, when trying to jump a high fence, her horse clips the top wire and both crash to the ground. Ellen rises from the dirt with blood all over her face. She will carry the scars on her forehead and left cheek for the rest of her life.⁸³

SHE HAS BEEN IN Australia nine years, half her life, when her father meets Red Kelly in 1850. By now Red is a solidly built 30-year-old with a thick shock of fiery red hair, bushy whiskers⁸⁴ and the hardiness of a man who has worked in the Australian bush for nearly a decade.

With the labour market around Hobart and Launceston choked with ex-convicts and new immigrants, Red has journeyed across Bass Strait to split logs and build fences in the settlements to the north of Port Phillip Bay. He has not been swinging his axe there for long when he strikes up a conversation with James Quinn at a pub in Donnybrook⁸⁵ on the Sydney Road. He’s a little too fond of his grog for James’s liking, but there is a rough charm about him and the drinks flow freely. Before long the stranger has James – a man without cause to otherwise trouble the police – agreeing to help him set up a still to make illegal poteen moonshine from potatoes.

‘To be sure,’ the stranger tells James, ‘I am fully and practically acquainted with the art and mystery of distillation.’⁸⁶

While James shows some interest in the project, the novelty of the idea doesn’t take hold, and the next day he tells the man from Tipperary he’s no longer interested.

But the handsome stranger starts hanging around the Quinn home and intrigues the fiery Ellen. As soon as her sharp eyes latch on to him, she is besotted with his colourful, mysterious past. He is strangely evasive about how he came to leave the green of Erin, and James suspects it was not as a free man.

This red-haired charmer is only 5 feet 8½ (174 centimetres),⁸⁷ but to a love-struck teenager he seems much taller. Seventy years later Ellen will remember him as ‘six feet [183 centimetres] in his stockings, broad shouldered, strong and active . . . in every way a fine type of an athlete’, though she will concede that ‘at times’ he ‘got a drop too much’ whisky.⁸⁸

As much as James tries to keep his daughter away from a man who suggests trouble, Ellen has her own mind and can’t be discouraged. Despite his ruggedness, Red is a gentleman to her and a gentle man with others. In fact, some say he is ‘a rather timid man, averse to quarrelling’ and forever acting as peacemaker when he sees others in altercations.⁸⁹

Ellen is the forceful one in their budding relationship; she has a commanding presence, ‘comely’ with her high broad cheekbones, deep-set eyes and thick hair ‘black as a raven’s wing’.⁹⁰

Ellen will be in love with this man for the rest of her life – in sickness and in health, for poor and poorer. James forbids them to marry but he might as well threaten the wind.

In the middle of 1850 the teenage girl, embarrassed but still defiant, informs her startled parents that she is pregnant. The father is the man she calls Red Ned.⁹¹

Chapter 2

18 NOVEMBER 1850, ST FRANCIS’ CATHOLIC CHURCH, MELBOURNE

The police in Victoria [are] very inefficient, both in the towns and on the roads. Fifteen persons were stopped during the same afternoon whilst travelling between Melbourne and St Kilda. They were robbed and tied to trees within sight of each other – this too in broad daylight. On the roads to the diggings it is still worse; and no one intending to turn digger should leave England without a good supply of firearms.

ENGLISHWOMAN ELLEN CLACY ON THE LAWLESSNESS OF THE NEW COLONY¹

JAMES QUINN HAS ENJOYED a prosperous run since leaving Ireland nine years ago, but 1850 marks a tragic detour. Not only is he losing his free-spirited daughter to a man with a questionable background, but in addition the whole Quinn family have to cope with the loss of the eldest son and their father’s right-hand man, Patrick, who drowns aged 25 in an accident at Echuca on the Murray River.

If Red Kelly ever entertains plans of avoiding his obligations to the pregnant Ellen there is still a large and vigorous Quinn brood to make sure he does the right thing. Patrick’s death delays the couple’s marriage plans, but when Ellen is six months into her term they finally decide to legitimise their union and the child.

Melbourne is already celebrating new life, and Ellen and Red are caught up in the excitement of an astonishing two-week festival.

The British Parliament has passed the Australian Constitutions Act on 1 August 1850, but it has taken three and a half months for the ship Lysander to reach Melbourne with the ‘glorious intelligence’² that the new colony of Victoria will officially separate from New South Wales and have its own government in 1851. Two weeks of public carnivals mark Melbourne’s first great celebration, with fireworks, rockets and tar barrels blazing in the streets.³ Giant hot-air balloons, 10 feet (3 metres) across, carry the word ‘Separation’; there are artillery displays, and a huge blaze roars on Flagstaff Hill, signalling the lighting of beacon fires around the town. It appears ‘as if Elizabeth and Collins Streets were rushed by a turbulent madding multitude, who tore along up and down, yelling, cheering and shouting’.⁴ Revellers march across a newly opened bluestone and granite bridge spanning the Yarra River, and there is a seemingly endless street parade featuring such groups as the Teetotallers, the German Union, the Butchers, the Printers, the Oddfellows, the Freemasons, the St Patrick’s Society, and about 30 members – mounted, equipped and in uniform – of the feared Aboriginal troopers known as the Native Police.⁵

On Saturday, 16 November 1850, a huge celebratory sports carnival takes place at Emerald Hill on the southern bank of the Yarra, with foot races, a greasy pole, a pig hunt, sack races, wrestling and football.

The marriage of John Kelly and Ellen Quinn on 18 November 1850 at St Francis’ Church – scene of the Catholic war council just four years earlier – is not a public ceremony, nor does it have any of the boisterousness of the surrounding Separation festivities. But for Ellen it is the most important day of her life. She is heavily pregnant and, at 18, thrilled with marriage and impending motherhood.

She and Red both give their address as Merry (sic) Creek, and while Red has now learned to write and signs ‘John Kelly’ with an elaborate flourish, Ellen makes her mark with a cross. The union is witnessed by Patrick Kennedy and Ellen Ryan, parishioners willing to step in and act as witnesses, and the brief ceremony is presided over by Father Gerald Ward,⁶ who is about to open an orphanage in South Melbourne for the Australian branch of a charitable London organisation, the Society of St Vincent de Paul.

Ellen and Red return to Wallan soon afterwards. The party is over, for them and for Melbourne.

They start their married life as ‘virtual housekeepers’ for Ellen’s parents.⁷ Red has become a handy carpenter and James Quinn allows him to erect a ‘snug little hut’⁸ on the Quinn property near Merri Creek.

Back in the hard grind of life, Ellen prepares for hard labour, and the birth of the first of her 12 children.

AT 10 a.m. ON THURSDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 1851, just two weeks before Ellen’s baby arrives, the sky above Wallan appears bluish red as a hot north wind blows thick clouds of suffocating dust over the Quinn farm. Two hours later, the blistering sun ignites the tinder-dry grass in the parched paddocks around the nearby coaching stop of Kilmore, sending tongues of flame and balls of burning grass careening through the town. Temperatures reach 116 degrees Fahrenheit.⁹

After months of painful drought, Melbourne is ringed by fire.¹⁰ Before long, a quarter of what will soon be declared the Colony of Victoria is engulfed by flame, and in Gippsland there is so much black smoke that day is turned into night. Across Bass Strait the sky becomes blood-red as fierce winds drive monstrous clouds of smoke to Van Diemen’s Land. Hysterical women fall to their knees and beg God to save them.¹¹ Many locals believe the end of the world is upon them.

For many it is – at least, the end of the world they know.

But not because of the fire.

Six