(This is a guest post contributed by Stuart Dawson, who recently set out to investigate and tackle an unresolved question in the Ned Kelly commentary. It is posted here to encourage feedback for correction and improvement. It is intended to be part of a future, longer research article on Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.)
Did Ian Jones’ admiration for Kelly lead him to wrongly accept a statement that Kelly’s last stand lasted over twice as long as it actually had? According to Jones, “The Last Stand had lasted for half an hour”, from Constable Arthur’s challenge to Kelly as he advanced in armour from the bush towards the Glenrowan Inn, and the first exchange of fire, to Kelly’s capture (Short Life, 2003: 236, cf. 231-6). Peter FitzSimons followed Jones, as have many others, in accepting a half hour timeframe, while noting that “the timetable … varies wildly in most contemporary accounts, with only broad agreement that from first shot to last it took around thirty minutes” (Ned Kelly,2015: 777 n.2). This is a red flag that the timeline needs review, especially given Daily Telegraph reporter George Allen’s contemporary estimate that “the whole affair” lasted “about a quarter of an hour, I suppose, or 20 minutes” (RC,Q.10774). Clearly the gunfight itself did not last half an hour; but how long was it?
The Age text of 29 June 1880 is partially damaged in Trove, but is reprinted in Hare’s “Last of the Bushrangers”, ch. XII. It says of 28 June, “The morning broke beautiful and clear. The police were disposed all round the hotel, when they were beset by a danger from the rear. … It was nearly eight o’clock when [Kelly’s] tall figure was seen close behind the line of police. … For half an hour this strange contest was carried on”. In a different place it gushed, “About seven o’clock Ned Kelly was seen in the timber, where he fought valiantly for about half an hour” (Age, 29 June 1880, 2). This is the source of the half hour gunfight generalisation beloved of Kelly enthusiasts. But the Age’s first (8am) starting time is an hour out. All sources agree that Kelly rose from the bush at dawn and began his advance toward the Glenrowan Inn and the scattered police line (Q.10043 Carrington; Q.10345 McWhirter). On that day, civil twilight (dawn) at Glenrowan was 6:59am (Geoscience Australia), and Kelly’s appearance and advance began “about 7am or after” (Q.8229 S/C Kelly).
Before the gunfight, one must allow for Kelly walking some 50 yards in armour, from 150 yards out (S/C Kelly, Argus, 29 June 1880, 6; Dowsett, Argus, 1 July 1880, 6) before being challenged about 100 yards out by Arthur, himself some 80 yards from the Inn(Argus, 2 July 1880, 7). [Both Jones p. 231 and FitzSimons p. 548 wrongly placed Arthur 100 yards from the Inn.] Upon that challenge Kelly raised his revolver. Arthur then fired, and Kelly returned fire (Q.11161); although he told the Argus at the time that Kelly fired first. Either way, the gunfight had commenced. Kelly called out, “fire away you b—s, you can’t kill me, I’m in armour”, and called to the outlaws in the Inn, “Come out boys, we’ll lick the lot” (Q.9450 Dwyer). Regardless that Dwyer’s watch was perhaps half an hour out (Q.9490), he noted what are here two key timing points: the time he was at the Inn stockyard just before he went up to the station, from which place he saw Kelly in the bush and heard him call out the above challenge (Q.9448-50), and then the time Kelly was captured (Q.9490), about 8 minutes later. Kelly’s last stand was not an epic half-hour gun battle; it was over in less than 10 minutes.
Kelly was captured before or around 7:15am, in the presence of reporters who had rushed up and witnessed his capture: “The outlaw howled like a wild beast brought to bay, and swore at the police” (Argus, 30 June 1880, 2). A few minutes passed with exchanges of words, Dwyer giving Kelly a kick, and Bracken defending Kelly from other injudicious treatment including possible summary shooting by Steele as his armour was removed (Q.10345 McWhirter). Kelly was then supported (“carried”) and walked some 100 yards to the railway station, including being lifted over a fence, while under fire from the Inn, and placed in the guard’s van (Q.8269-70 S/C Kelly; Q.10355 McWhirter). It was not until shortly after Kelly was lodged at the station that the sun rose (Q.9232 Steele; cf. Q.9234). On 28 June 1880, sunrise at Glenrowan was at 7:27am, so Kelly was in there at latest by 7:25am.
The Age’s “half an hour … contest” is a gross exaggeration of the gunfight timeframe, likely the result of excitement and nerves on the day. If it is to be taken as a marker of anything, it would encompass the entire time from Kelly’s first appearance from the scrub at 7am, through to his lodgement in the guard’s van at the station around 7:25am; but this is much more than the event known as the last stand. That, as the quote from FitzSimons above makes clear, is universally understood to mean the timeframe from first shot to the last at his capture. At most it might include some of his first walk in.
Allen’s estimate of a little more than 15 minutes for “the whole affair” was correct, within which the gunfight occupied less than 10 minutes. Only a few of the 34 police then present at Glenrowan, and railway guard Dowsett, were involved in the gunfight with and capture of Kelly. (The civilian Rawlins also assisted in securing Kelly, but was not involved in the gunfight, Q.11740-7.) The rest of the police stayed at their posts surrounding the Inn to prevent the other outlaws’ escape. Despite Jones’comprehensive reading of the evidence surrounding the last stand (SL, 2003: 405), he wrongly accepted the Age journalist’s exaggerated statement of the gunfight timeframe, over clear evidence that shows that Ned Kelly’s last stand was barely 10 minutes. Truth is duller than fiction.
(Dr. Stuart Dawson is an Adjunct Research Fellow in History at Monash University.)
Re. how long was Ned’s last stand, there were several comments about this on the old Blogger blog which have not been moved to this new blog. To read them go to this URL, https://kellylegend.blogspot.com/2018/11/how-long-was-ned-kellys-last-stand.html
Then come back to this blog if you want to add more. It’s hard to believe that no-one out there had much to say about my demolition of the “half hour last stand” myth, which was barely 10 minutes. Still a gutsy effort, to be sure, but nothing like the often claimed half hour gunfight.
Stuart, the people who claim to be interested in the Kelly story are all bunkered down in their echo-chambers, and aren’t really interested in discussing their mythology with anyone other than like-minded sympathisers. Once they’ve read your articles they realise the game is up, and they can only either retreat into their dogmas and carry on reciting them like a religious creed, or abandon their faith in Ned Kelly all together. They almost never make any attempt to defend their beliefs or challenge what you’ve written – same goes for whatI write. All we’ve had lately is sarcasm.
Apart from a few score sympathisers just about everyone else in Australia already agrees with us. And most of them are not that interested in talking about the shameful advancement of a murderous psychopath as an Australian Icon.
Did you know that next weekend at Stringybark Creek a further step back from the Kelly mythology takes place with the unveiling of new signage which greatly enhances and respects the memory of the good police slain there, and barely mentions their murderers?
We are winning, slowly but surely!
Hi Dee (or David?), I would not be too quick to agree that “just about everyone else in Australia already agrees with us”, by which I think you mean the we share a general scepticism about many Kelly stories and see them as highly embroidered history rather than factual historical narrative. There are quite a few topics where you and I have not agreed about some aspect or other of Kelly history, not because we are not sceptical of many of the same things, but because we are looking at something from quite different angles and reaching conclusions that sometimes disagree widely. The quartered bullets at Stringybark Creek is the .most obvious example of non-alignment while still agreeing that the two long Kelly letter descriptions of events are outright self-serving lies. But on the main point above, I think that when most students, journalists, government employees in tourism, etc, want to know something about Kelly, they typically turn to Ian Jones’ work, and are immediately fed a whole bunch of dated and disproved rubbish about Ned’s “quiet years”, Fitzpatrick, Stringybark Creek, Glenrowan, the Kelly republic fairy-tale, the last stand, and even Kelly’s last words. But because of his “sacred cow” status, the nonsense just gets repeated and repeated again. I am increasingly convinced it will remain like this until someone writes a genuinely true story of Kelly and he Kelly gang, that totally reconstructs and brings up to date the entire story covered in Jones’ “Short Life” book and reveals the actual true story for the first time since Kenneally classically distorted it and sent everyone including Jones off on entirely the wrong foot. You have much of the necessary content on this blog… Hint???
Hi Stuart
I bet if you asked 100 people in a shopping centre somewhere in Australia outside the northeast of Victoria if they knew who Alexander Fitzpatrick was, almost no-one would be able to tell you, but if you asked if they knew who Ned Kelly was, most would have heard of him. Their knowledge of the detail is scant. My point is that hardly anyone in Australia knows or cares about the detail of the Kelly story, and most would respond with some version of ‘cop killer’ and a very small number would express some sort of admiration. But neither admirers nor detractors would be able to back up their views with much in the way of accurate information.
The thing is nowadays when people want to know something they turn to the Internet, and what they increasingly find when they do Google searches on Kelly related topics, are links to my Blog and your writings. Its not all Ian Jones mythology any more. There are great new books as well. The Facebook Kelly warriors don’t appear on those searches because Facebook cant be searched so all their ranting and raving and their attacks on me just disappear after a few days and nobody can ever be bothered trawling back to look for anything. I know youre not on Facebook but let me tell you all the Kelly FB sites are shrivelling up, the sympathisers are bunkering down inside their echo chambers and refusing to come out to defend anything, they’ve given up even abusing me and trying to make me go away. There becoming a kind of secretive cult.
I hear what you’re saying about the rubbish thats still out there but its very clear : the pendulum is swinging back from mythology towards historical truth.
Hi again, yes, I think that Ian MacFarlane’s “Kelly Gang Unmasked” book was the first big turning point, but I keep coming across relatively recent material that is totally under the sway of various disproved romanticisations by the big 3 Kelly authors, Jones, Molony and McQuilton. All three believed the Republic myth; all three endlessly and incorrectly claimed Fitzpatrick was drunk when he went to arrest Dan Kelly; and all three trotted out the factually incorrect persecution myth. Many of the recent Kelly authors typically haven’t done much PROV, TROVE, or other serious documentary research. They content themselves with framing their story as told by one of the big three, but mostly Jones, and quoting bits from the Royal Commission report. Having got the wrong end of the stick, they add further “evidence” that fits into their already-established perspective, and think that they have produced something new. Unfortunately all most of them have done is write yet another a poorly researched “poor man’s Jones”. So I’m not really convinced the pendulum is swinging from mythology to historical truth. I just think people are writing more of the same old ignorant guff and managing to sell it to a market of historically uncritical Kelly fans. Such is life…
“Kelly’s last stand was not an epic half-hour gun battle; it was over in less than 10 minutes.” To be fair, it’s the madness of Kelly’s daring, and the surrealism of the armour (“This must be the devil!”, etc), that makes it epic. Even 30 seconds would have been epic. The 2003 film, very pro-Kelly, cuts it down to around 15 seconds. Yet, as you have shown, the gun battle lasted for almost ten minutes. Set a timer to get a feel for it.
As Mrs Byrne said, they were going to do something that would astonish the whole world; and they did. No-one is disputing that.
The point is that the claim of a half hour gun battle is reproduced widely in the literature; whereas timeline analysis from the RC showed it was under 10 minutes.
The other widespread claim is that bullets flew by the millions (or a lot, anyway). Sharon Holingsworth did an analysis of how many biullets were fired at Glenrowan, in her Eleven Mile Creek blog. Worth a read!
Hi Azza ! I’m a heretic on the “thirty minutes” thing, and the “ten minutes” thing too.
Longarms in 1880 were already as accurate as they are now, due to a recent galloping revolution following on from centuries of relatively stale progress. Even lying down in the open was ASKING to cop a bullet by 1880. That’s what makes the Kelly Gang’s venture with the armour so quixotic, so pathetic, so quaint and delusional – the fact that they were DOOMED to get shot to pieces, since their foes just weren’t straitjacketed with smoothbores any more. In broad daylight, across open clearings in the vegetation, Ned would be killed within half a minute if he stood still. That’s plenty of time to zero in your Martini-Henry on the eye slit in his helmet ! He simply had to keep moving, which rules out reloading, especially the two pistols that required percussion caps. I do not accept that such a firefight could last ten minutes in daylight, let alone the “all over in just thirty minutes!” thing that some writers have repeated.
On that note, there has been some discussion, both in the early 1880s and in the modern era, of whether he was very visible at all in the half-light and mist. Well, I went to Glenrowan in July, woke up bright and early and took frequent snapshots and video clips – facing both the direction of Ned (East of the police) and the direction Ned faced (westwards), from 0640 to 0715, and I found that Ned was in quite sufficient daylight to read and write, let alone count every policemen on the field or spot Ned’s eye slit. The difference between first light on 28th June and first light on 14th July (when I did this) is about 5 minutes, so I confidently state that the police and the outlaw got a perfectly sufficient look at one another, the journos on the railway platform got a good look at Ned and the outlaws in the pub did too.
Ned did reload during his last stand, but even so, even a ten minute battle would have him firing only about once every half a minute (while still retaining a bullet with Sgt Steele’s name on it..). In real world conditions, one trap or another at almost any moment would be assuming Ned had run out of ammo, and probably trying to crash tackle him to the ground.
I reckon two to three minutes is a realistic timeframe for the Last Stand.
I love this!
My problem is I know nothing at all about guns and all that. But as you would know, by looking at the various accounts from the time, Stuart Dawson worked out the last stand was less than 15 minutes…so your practical knowledge of guns and their accuracy, reloading times and so on confirms Stuarts conclusion that it was nowhere near the great heroic struggle the Kelly cult imagines it was.
I really do like the way youve stopped taking Ned Kelly seriously…we have all been encouraged to imagine him as a serious determined arch- criminal but all your analyses understand him as a blundering fool to be ridiculed for the bogan quality of the entire escapade …I mean, trick horse Riding as they left Faithfulls Creek station…burning mortgages as if that was ever going to change anything…laboriously creating armour that was worse than useless in the field…Yes the whole thing was a joke except for the tragedy of innocent lives lost…
Yep, I’m right with you on the bogan quality thing !! I actually found myself in Glenrowan telling a Kelly admirer, who was fondly telling the story of the mortgages burning, that (a) it’s amazing how Ned did actually know some things about banking procedures (a throwaway line to placate him), BUTT also (b) pity he didn’t know that those mortgages existed in copies well removed in, like, SYDNEY ! He was obviously struggling not to look too crestfallen….
THAT is precisely the anvil on which my own Kelly-worship was broken up, back ten years ago — pondering the mortgages thing a little deeper, and realising that creditors are real people too, and have rights too, in this case, rights to the ongoing transaction into which they embarked in good faith as a capital gamble, with another party who realised it was all legitimate. It then struck me what posturing cowboys they would have to be to do this stunt…! And it began unravelling from there !
A good few years ago, I was at the shooting range blazing away with an unfeasibly large matchlock musket, 6 ‘ 1″ long with a 41 inch bullet travel, driving up the beer sales of their piss-shack by coccooning all the other shooters in clouds of white sulphur-laden smoke (“black powder,” just what EVERYONE used at Glenrowan, because the French only invented modern “smokeless” powder the next year, forcing everyone [except themselves] to kiss goodbye to beautiful uniforms forever), when the arrogant Swede with a Martini-Henry – who would never allow anyone else even to point at it – finally buckled and agreed to swap weapons with me. I then fired two shots, the most accurate shooting I have ever done in my life!! Both hit a tiny fluttering pennant at 50 yards. I am confident I could get Ned’s eye slit at 20 yards with just three shots to gauge the task, and you can reload in about three seconds. So I believe that His Boganic Majesty Ned HAD TO keep plodding his agonising way around, only stopping behind a big log to reload a pistol.
Have you seen my video “Glenrowan Tactical Breakdown Pt 4, The Kelly Gang Go Forth Into Battle” ? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh3uOO89wao ). That most bilious of the Kelly-trolls that we all know so well declared bogan-jihad on me for mocking Saint Ned in this video…! The practicalities of gunnery vs armour at Glenrowan are explored here, without too much hardcore ballistics. Cheers!
Hi Tomas, thanks for the link to your Glenrowanvideo, fantastic stuff. Your corrected Glenrowan sketch (screenshot below) is fascinating. The fence has been mentioned before somewhere and is seen in at least one other photo of Glenrowan but I can’t find it just now. Reorganising the sketch based on photographic evidence gives a whole new perspective on how things went down.
The best line that had me falling about laughing about the police advance is “Suddenly Ned does the exact thing that got him into trouble in the first place: he shoots a policemand in the wrist.” Just sidesplittingly true. Everyone needs to watch this video!
Hi Stuart – and what a wonderfully kind thing to say – “Everyone needs to watch this video!” Can you imagine how annoyed I was to upload it, view it , and realise I had left out the word “left,” as in “he shoots a policeman in the LEFT wrist,” for that it was, with both Fitzpatrick and Hare !!
By the way, the photo you were attaching didn’t attach – David, moderator, if that was an intellectual property issue, then I DO approve of any pics from my work being run here, no problem.
Here’s some pics to answer your question about the fence – note that it is almost certainly 4 strand barbed wire.
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Hi Tomas, the fence is confirmed in journalist Thomas Carrington’s account of the siege in the Australasian Sketcher. He wrote of Kelly’s capture, “He was lying against a tree and one of the police kicked him. Then they began cutting the straps of the armour…. And two or three of them got him by the shoulders and helped him to walk to the station; got him over the fence…”
Hi Tomas, here is the attachment JPJ of your redrawn Glenrown map again, hopefully attached this time…
Also, in your reply you mentions “some pics” of teh fence; but theer is only one image attached. This website for some reason only lets peope upload one attachement per message, and if you start by attaching one, and then try to attach another, it just replaces the first one with the second one and loses the first one completely.
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Stuart – here’s the photo where I reckon we can see barbs in the wire. Presumably the Railways had access to such a hot new ticket item as barbed wire if anyone did….
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Ive watched your video about the Siege too and it was marvellous, as well as being informative and entertaining. You have a great way with words, so I would like you to write it up so it can go up as a Blog post….is that possible? (And it would link back to You Tube)
More people need to see this…
BTW regarding attachments, I am an effective illiterate when it comes to figuring out how things work on the internet…so if only one image can be attached that must be the way it is….post twice to out two up!
Many thanks David !! Yes, it won’t be too difficult to write that up, since about half of it was reading from on-screen voice prompts which are preserved, although obviously I’d change the more off-colour words and expletives to something decent, for a blog post. I’ve been hard at work on part 5, working title “The Siege Tightens,” about the night battle and the struggle to reinforce success, and of course the death of Joe Byrne, which also afforded insights into the tac value of the armour.
I’ll have another go at uploading pics, cheers!
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Oh great!When its ready send it to me at studybox98@gmail.com
Thanks so much…and anything else you want me to put up, send that too!
Well David, not having any idea what is a legit blog post subject matter or not, two questions I’d like to ask the forum are (a) did anyone ever record what the contents of Ned’s Keen’s Mustard tin (that he was wearing when captured) were, and (b) does anyone know the dimensions of the Ann Jones Inn ? [ I read the archaeological literature, but rung up a zero 🙁 ] And you DID say to send “ANYTHING else you want me to put up”, so you’ve got yourself to blame for my sending a French magazine reporting on the Glenrowan siege (if you study it really really hard, you can detect one or two things that may not be entirely accurate…) Thanks David !
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Sorry cant answer either of those but I know Stuart has the answer to the second question : he went to the Replica Kelly home at Glenrowan and measured it all out for his Fitzpatrick paper…
Thanks David – I went to that replica Kelly Homestead too, damn that was one good idea ! I suggested to Doug that he should try a public reenactment of the Fitzpatrick Incident in this lovely facility… although you’d have to take extra special care with the gunfire and with the volume of the Isaac Hayes soundtrack to Fitz working his romantic magic on Kate. The idea could have been better received, all things considered. But it’s actually the Ann Jones Inn I’m looking to reproduce in model form – and my sliding a one metre folding table along taking measurements and snapshots (30 metres frontage) incurred the alarmed and urgent concern of a Chinese family who apparently doubted my sanity….
Here’s one of the biggest Kelly-related giggles on the net – enjoy, people ! https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Glenrowan_Affair
I think you meant Barry White..!
Hi Tomas, I’m away this week, but I’ll see what I can find next weekend. I’m sure other people will have the answer to the mustard tin contents.
Hi Tomas, I only looked into te reproduction Kelly house that you saw the replica of, “Kate’s cottage” at Glenrowan. I don’t know anything about the original Jones’ Inn. There is a page on Bill’s site about it here, https://ironicon.com.au/glenrowaninnsite.htm
Hi Tomas, the “less than 10 minutes” is based on Constable Dwyer’s two key timing points: the time he was at the Inn stockyard just before he went up to the station, from which place he saw Kelly in the bush and heard the challenge called out (Q.9448-50), and then the time Kelly was captured (Q.9490), about 8 minutes later.
The term ‘gunfight’ is the best I could do at the time of the above article to distinguish the shooting part from the ‘before any shooting’ part and the after-capture part. I don’t mean to imply it was non-stop action. The impression is more that it was somewhat sporadic. Anyway, all I can do is give the timing points from Dwyer’s evidence and show that the maximum time from first shot to capture was 8 minutes.
Sorry Stuart, I had the coffee-stares and didn’t notice your message was NEW ! Yes, Constable Dwyer sheds a valuable and much overlooked (yes, that means I missed it myself) insight into the timeframe of the Last Stand. I like Azza’s point on this thread that “set a timer and get a feel for it,” although I would caution that even one minute in a fully-fledged two-way shooting gallery is going to feel like a century, still it’s great that someone made an effort at the time to mark the parameters of the gathering crisis he was getting drawn into. It was also light enough to look at watches by then. It must have been torrential gunfire once they realised they were under lethal attack from the rear, stuck in a tactical doughnut, even allowing for them NOT yet comprehending that it was in fact a self-propelled calico sack with “2000 pounds” printed on it. They must have had some fear of potential armed sympathisers, after a long night of hearing hoofbeats and so on, not long after the nerve-wracking experience of realising that the Gang had tried to murder them – TWICE, once by derailment and once by gunfire. They famously thought it was every option except Ned Kelly, not even ruling out supernatural ones, but of course, Sgt Steele worked out, on the hoof, that it was metal armour, and switched to looking for chinks in it. Dwyer does give a compelling reason to think that my 2-3 minutes assessment (of Ned being still a free man) is overly conservative.
G’day punters, today is the day that a bunch of clowns assemble at the old Melbourne Gaol to commemorate the hanging of triple police murderer, armed robbery gang leader, career stock thief, and general idiot Ned Kelly. Roast lamb and peas will be served in the dining hall with a bottle of claret. Enjoy!
Hi Old Bushranger – I sincerely hope that these furtive characters interrupt their circle-jerk one hour into it to observe a minute’s silence for Remembrance Day…?! Still, I wonder if you can sneak in the turnstyle from the wrong end, grab a bit of that roast lamb and just skedaddle…?