Grantlee Kieza - The Kelly Hunters

As the Kelly Gang headed towards Jerilderie their likenesses were being circulated around Victoria as they were wanted dead or alive. State Library of Victoria IAN28/11/78/196

Despite the continued efforts of police search parties camping out for days in rugged, dangerous mountain terrain, the Kelly Gang had continued to evade the clutches of the law.

The four outlaws had followed the police shootings with an audacious robbery of the National Bank in the northern Victorian town of Euroa. Their daring, and Kellys constant protests about police corruption, had won them a degree of sympathy from a fiercely loyal band of supporters, but they had murder on their minds as they headed towards the New South Wales town of Jerilderie, a days hard riding to the north.

With Kelly was his small and surly teenage brother Dan, Together the four wild youngsters had become the most feared criminals in Australia and had sparked the continents biggest ever manhunt.

Now riding in pairs at a distance so as not to excite suspicion, the gang spurred on their horses into the deeper parts of the river up to their saddle flaps.

They had formulated a plan to rob Jerilderies Bank of New South Wales, but Kelly had also talked about killing one of the policemen stationed in the town.

On the same day as the gang crossed the Murray into New South Wales, though, another killing spree was being planned almost 3000 kilometres to the north.

Four other men also well-armed and crack shots crossed the mouth of the Endeavour River planning to retrieve the possessions of Cooktowns Harbour Master, Captain Albert Sykes, and a local merchant, William James Hartley, who would become the police magistrate of Mackay.

Sykes and Hartley had been badly wounded under a shower of Aboriginal spears after they tried to tow back to Cooktown a valuable cedar log that had washed up on a sandy beach under the long range of hills leading out to Cape Bedford.

The two colonists drove their attackers away with revolver fire before fleeing in their small boat.

On 7 February 1879, the day after the attack, two prominent local journalists, Reginald Spencer Browne, later a World War I general, and William Henry Campbell, later a Queensland parliamentarian, along with two other men, set off in a cutter to take back the possessions of their wounded friends. Each member of the posse had Snider-Enfield rifles and plenty of ammunition.

After negotiating heavy surf like that which had battered James Cooks ship Endeavour in the same waters a century before, they found tracks of men and women, and tracing them into the scrub uncovered some of the belongings Sykes and Hartley had left behind in their desperate escape.

Another party of policemen joined the search, 30 kilometres to the north, but they found swampland impenetrable for their horses.

Before long, though, Sub-inspector Stanhope OConnor,

OConnor was known as a terror to evildoers black and white, and he and his men would leave a trail of devastation and death far greater than that caused by the Kelly Gang.

The brutal, ruthless efficiency of OConnor and his trackers would make them the most feared of all the Kelly hunters in the biggest and most expensive police operation Australia had seen.

F ROM A YOUNG AGE, Ned Kelly knew about the brutality of the Native Police and the tracking skills of Aboriginal hunters. He was born at Beveridge, north of Melbourne, in December 1854 at the time of the Eureka Stockade rebellion when soldiers and police attacked a group of protesting miners at Ballarat, resulting in more than two dozen deaths from bullets, bayonets and swords.

Much of the angst among the miners had been caused by the savagery of the Victorian government, which used the Native Police to administer frontier justice against white men as well as black. The Aboriginal troopers were such a dreaded presence during the brutal mining licence hunts on the goldfields that the journalist Alfred Clarke called them a Satanic Battalion of Black Guards for the beatings they doled out to impoverished diggers without money for mining permits.

While early jailers had used Aboriginal men to track escaped convicts, and the vexatious Sydney wool baron John Macarthur had employed uniformed Dharawal and Gandangara men as his personal bodyguard, the Native Police officially came into force in 1837, establishing a camp on what is now the Melbourne Cricket Ground carpark.

By the early 1850s, they were based along Merri Creek, the Irish-born daughter of a free settler. Ellen was 18 and six months pregnant when she became Mrs Kelly on 18 November 1850.

Edward Ned Kelly, their third child and first son, was weaned on horror stories of what he later called Irelands Saxon yoke: tales of merciless British rule and its heavy hand during the potato famine that wiped out a large part of the Irish population. Kellys father told him of Irish convicts who later were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains, but true to the Shamrock and a credit to Paddys land.

The colonial governments in Australia could be just as harsh, and when Kelly was a small boy every colonist knew about the terror caused by the Native Police.

ON 3 FEBRUARY 1860, just outside Queenslands riverside hamlet of Maryborough, Lieutenant John OConnell Bligh led a hunt by the Native Mounted Police for a group of Aboriginal men who had irked local settlers.

Blighs foul-tempered grandfather had sparked the mutiny on the Bounty in the previous century when he was a naval captain, and now the young police lieutenant brought the same callous streak to his command in this newly formed Australian colony. Bligh had been chasing the group of Indigenous men for days after one of them, nicknamed Darkey by the settlers, had escaped from police custody in chains from a steamer on the Mary River. The lieutenant ordered his men to chase their targets out of the bush and onto Maryboroughs dusty streets. Some of the local Aboriginal people had recently been poisoned by gifts of flour laced with arsenic, but Maryboroughs townsfolk still complained of the black menace that made white women afraid in their beds and made bullock drivers travel with the whip in one hand and a gun in the other.