Captains of adventure

by Roger Pocock

In February, 1879, they surprised the police station at Jerilderie, locked two policemen in the cells, disguised themselves as constables, captured the town, imprisoning a crowd of people in the hotel, then sacked the bank, and rode away shouting and singing with their plunder.

By this time the rewards offered for their capture amounted to eight thousand pounds, and the whole strength of the Victoria police was engaged, with native trackers, in hunting them. Had these wicked robbers ever showed rudeness to a woman, or plundered a poor man, or behaved meanly with their stolen wealth, they would have been betrayed at once to the police, but the Australians are sportsmen, and there is a gallantry in robbery under arms that appeals to misguided hearts.

The four bad men were so polite to all women, so kindly to unarmed citizens, so humorous in their methods, so generous with their gold, so daring in making war against a powerful British state, that they were esteemed as heroes. Even bad heroes are better than none at all, and they were not betrayed even by poor folk to whom the rewards would have been a fortune. For two years they outwitted the whole force of police, scouts and trackers at a cost to the state of one hundred fifteen thousand pounds.

But with all this the best of Australian manhood was engaged in the hunt, and the real heroes of this adventure were the police, who made no moan through months of outrageous labor and suffering in the mountains.

Superintendent Hare, in charge of the hunt, made friends with a kinsman of the outlaws, a young horse-thief, named Aaron Sherritt. This lad knew all the secrets of the outlaws, was like a brother to them, and yet, so worshiped Mr. Hare that he served with the police as a spy. In treachery to his kinsmen, he was at least faithful to his master, knowing that he went to his own death.

He expected the outlaws to come by night to the house of Joe Byrne’s mother, and led Mr. Hare’s patrol, which lay for the next month in hiding upon a hill overlooking the homestead. Aaron was engaged to Byrne’s sister, was daily at the house and slowly a dim suspicion dawned on the outlaw’s mother. Then the old woman, uneasily searching the hills, stumbled into the police bivouac, and saw Aaron Sherritt, the spy, asleep in that company. His dress betrayed him to her, a white shirt, breeches and long boots, impossible to mistake. And when he knew what had happened, the lad turned white. “Now,” he muttered, “I am a dead man.”

Mrs. Byrne sent the news of Aaron’s treachery to her outlawed son in the hills. On June twenty-sixth, the spy was called out of his mother’s cabin by some one who cried that he had lost his way. Aaron opened the door, and Joe Byrne shot him through the heart.

So the outlaws had broken cover after months of hiding, and at once Superintendent Hare brought police and trackers by a special train that they might take up the trail of their retreat back to the mountains. The outlaws, foreseeing this movement, tore up the railway track, so that the train, with its load of police, might be thrown into a gully, and all who survived the wreck were to be shot down without mercy.

This snare which they set for their enemies was badly planned. Instead of tearing up the tracks themselves, they brought men for the job from Glenrowan station close by; and then, to prevent their presence from being reported, they had to hold the village instead of mounting guard upon the trap. They cut the wires, secured the station and herded all the villagers into the Glenrowan hotel some two hundred yards from the railway. Then they had to wait for the train from three o’clock on Monday morning all through the long day, and the dreary night, guarding sixty prisoners and watching for the police. They amused the prisoners, men, women and children with an impromptu dance in which they shared by turns, then with raids upon outlying houses, and with athletic feats, but always on the alert lest any man escape to give the alarm, or the police arrive unobserved. The strain was beyond human endurance. So Byrne, fresh from the murder of his chum Aaron Sherritt, relieved his mind by getting drunk, Ned Kelly kept up his courage by bragging of the death prepared for his enemies, and, worst of all, the local schoolmaster was allowed to take his sick wife home.

The schoolmaster had been most sympathetic all day long, helping the outlaws until he won their confidence; but now, escaped to his house, he made haste to prepare a lantern covered with a red shawl with which to signal the train. He stood upon the track waving the red light, when in the pitchy darkness before dawn, the train-load of police came blindly straight for the death-trap. The train slowed, stopped and was saved.