The Complete Inner History of the KellyGang and their Pursuers (81)

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CHAPTER XXI

continued

A wake was held, and relatives and friends and sympathisers attended from far and near and gave vent to the intensity of their feelings at the conduct of the police at Glenrowan. The police authorities realised the danger of driving another party of civilians to the bush as bushrangers, and not desiring to prolong the disgrace into which the Victorian Police Force had fallen in the failure to come in contact with the Kelly Gang for over two years, it was decided to abandon the attempt to take the bodies of Dan Kelly and Steve Hart from their relatives, and the sixteen mounted policemen returned to Benalla much relieved and well pleased with the discretion thus manifested by the authorities. They did not want another fight.

A very large number of people attended the funeral of these two youths, who were buried in the Greta Cemetery. The evidence of the Very Rev Dean Gibney put aside for ever the absurd concoctions which claim that Dan Kelly escaped from Glenrowan, and which formed the subject of a despicable book under his name.

Ned Kelly was removed from Glenrowan by train to Benalla. He was attended by Dr John Nicholson, who found that he had been wounded in the instep, and also in the right hand and legs, and was very weak from loss of blood. On the following day (Tuesday) the captured bushranger was taken by train to Melbourne. Great secrecy was observed by the police in the arrangements made to remove Ned Kelly from the train to the Melbourne Gaol. A great crowd collected at Spencer street railway station, but the police, fearing trouble, arranged to have him removed secretly from the train at North Melbourne. He was taken from the train to the Melbourne Gaol, while a great crowd of people were anxiously waiting the arrival of the train at Spencer street.

Ned Kelly was placed in the gaol hospital, and on account of the seriousness of his wounds he was unable to appear in court. When his wounds had healed he was taken in chains under a very strong escort to Beechworth, where he was charged before Mr Foster, PM, with the murder, on October 26, 1878, of Constable Lonigan at Stringy Bark Creek. Ned Kelly was still suffering from the effect of his wounds, but to such an extent had official callousness developed that his sister, Mrs Skillion, was not permitted to see him. She had been informed that Ned was in need of a change of underclothing; she promptly purchased what was required, but the Beechworth Gaol authorities would not allow the clothes to be given to Ned Kelly. Mrs Skillion then offered to go with one of the gaol officers and make similar purchases again, and suggested that the officials should take the clothes from the shop, and that she would not do so much as touch the articles purchased. Even this offer was refused, and Ned Kelly, on trial for his life and suffering from the effects of his wounds, was denied a change of underclothing by the gaol authorities.

Mr David Gauson, who defended Ned Kelly at his trial, was permitted to have an interview with him in the Beechworth Gaol, in the presence of gaol officials. In the interview Ned Kelly said: “I can depend my life on my sister, Mrs Skillion. I have been kept here like a wild beast. If they were afraid to let anyone come near me, they might have kept at a distance and watched; but it seems to me to be unjust, when I am on trial for my life, to refuse to allow those I put confidence in to come with in cooee of me. Why, they won’t so much as let me have a change of clothes brought in!

“When I came into the gaol here they made me strip of all my clothes, except my pants, and I would not do that. All I want is a full and fair trial, and a chance to make my side heard. Until now the police have had all the say, and have had it all their own way. If I get a full and fair trial, I don’t care how it goes, but I know this—the public will see that I was hunted and hounded from step to step; they (the public) will see that I am not the monster I have been made out. What I have done was under strong provocation.”

During the trial of Ned Kelly at Beechworth (at the conclusion of Constable McIntyre’s evidence) Mr D Gaunson again made application to Mr Foster, PM, that Ned Kelly’s sister, Mrs Skillion, be permitted to see him.

Mr Foster afterwards told Mr Gauson that under no circumstances could the application be entertained. And yet the people of Victoria have been frequently told that in every court of British Justice the prisoner is always assumed to be innocent of the charge for which he is being tried until he has been fairly and justly tried and convicted by an unpacked jury of his peers.

This is the same Mr Foster, PM, who illegally and unlawfully kept a number of Kelly Sympathisers in the Beechworth Gaol from January 2, 1879, to April 22 of the same year, without any charge or complaint being laid against any of them, or any evidence heard to justify Foster’s action.

The attitude of Mr Foster on this occasion was a further demonstration of the fact that, in the socalled judicial mind, Ned Kelly had already been convicted, and his alleged trial was but a very formal affair.

Mr Foster did not in any way comment on the very serious disparity between the evidence now given by Constable McIntyre at Beechworth and that given by him at Mansfield at the inquest on the bodies of Constables Scanlan and Lonigan on Monday, October 28, 1878. Mr Foster committed Ned Kelly to stand his trial at Beechworth for the murder of Constable Lonigan.

The treatment meted out to Ned Kelly at Beechworth by the gaol and judicial authorities aroused a great deal of sympathy for him in the public mind, and the Government of the day, fearing that a Beechworth jury would not convict him, changed the venue of his trial from Beechworth to Melbourne.

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