Hanging Ned Kelly by Michael Adams

Author:Michael Adams [Adams, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Published by Affirm Press in 2022
Published: 2022-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

An execution was no place for a child. Neither was a courtroom, especially if you were watching a relative stand trial on a capital charge.

It’s believed that Ned Kelly got his first look at Redmond Barry in April 1868. As the ‘man’ of the house, he would have been expected to be present in the Wangaratta Court to support his mother in a case that pitted Kelly against Kelly.

In January 1868, Jim Kelly, Red’s drunkard cattle-thieving brother, came to the former hotel in Greta where Ellen was stopping with her two sisters and the thirteen children they had between them. Jim made an advance on his dead brother’s widow, and for his shameful behaviour got a gin bottle cracked over his head, before Ellen chased him off with a stick. He took his revenge by setting fire to the building. Thanks to a neighbour who came to their aid with water, the women got all the children clear before the building burned to the ground. If not for their quick action, it could have been a massacre of innocents.

Jim went to trial at Wangaratta before Judge Barry. Having heard from Ellen and her sisters, along with other witnesses, the jury found him guilty. The judge pronounced sentence. For a moment, young Ned might have thought his uncle was going to hang. But Redmond Barry was merely recording death. People didn’t swing for arson, and amid some critical newspaper commentary, the Executive Council commuted Jim’s sentence to ten years on the roads.

So William Bamford wouldn’t add this Kelly to his tally. But how he kept score became part of his lore. As The Argus would later report, around this time he’d said, after hanging a victim, ‘The best job in the country – that makes 47.’

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