Fallout from Ned Kelly's last stand haunted families for generations

Australia Broadcast Center

27-06-2025

When dawn broke at Glenrowan near Wangaratta in Victoria's north-east on June 28, 1880, four people laid dead.
And after a two-year manhunt, Australia's most infamous bushranger had been captured.
It's a story that became Aussie folklore, but for the descendants of those involved, the ripple effects of that frosty night 145 years ago would be felt for generations.
Indigenous readers are advised this story contains images of people who have died.
Glenrowan's schoolmaster Thomas Curnow was headed to Greta Swamp with his family on June 27, 1880 when the Kelly gang arrived.
Along with his wife and child, his sister, and his brother-in-law, Mr Curnow was marched at gunpoint to Ann Jones's inn.
As night fell, dozens of Glenrowan residents had become the Kelly gang's hostages.
By late that night, Mr Curnow had already tried once to escape.
When his brother-in-law, David Mortimer, started playing the concertina so that the hostages could dance, Curnow asked the gang to let him get his dancing boots from home.
When that failed, he convinced the gang that he was a Kelly gang sympathiser, and he wouldn't cause any trouble if allowed to take his pregnant wife, baby and sister home.
The gang allowed it.
But Mr Curnow was determined to alert police.
David Mortimer's great-granddaughter, and Thomas Curnow's great-great-niece, Judith Douthie, has spent years researching the lead-up to the siege.
Mrs Douthie described the 1870s in Glenrowan and Greta as a "pressure cooker", when the Kelly gang ran rampant.
Two years before the siege, the gang had murdered three policemen at Stringybark Creek, sparking a manhunt for the outlaws in the north-east of the state.
"It was a horrible point in time," Mrs Douthie said.
On June 27, 1880, when police learnt that the gang had murdered informant Aaron Sherritt at Beechworth, they sent a train full of reinforcements and trackers north to capture the bushrangers.
The gang tore up the train tracks beyond Glenrowan, then laid in wait for the trap to be sprung, the locomotive to derail and roll down a steep slope.
Hearing the pilot engine approaching Glenrowan about 2am, Mr Curnow hurried to the railway line — armed with a candle, a red scarf and matches to alert them of the danger.
The train stopped at the station, and police reinforcements disembarked to surround the inn.
The man in charge was Superintendent Francis Hare, who had been hunting the gang since the Stringybark murders.
Superintendent Hare's great-great-great-niece Sue Brown has been researching her relative and said he was "absolutely focused" on catching the gang.
"He was very keen to rid the state of bushrangers."
Superintendent Hare was shot in the wrist during the gunfight, and was taken to hospital, but his efforts to catch the gang had succeeded.
By dawn, the siege was over.
Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart laid dead, Ned Kelly had been captured, and the inn had been burnt to the ground.
The Kelly gang's reign of terror was over, but for those left behind, difficult times endured.
Ann Jones, the owner of the inn, was left homeless with her children.
"They ended up camped, under a tarp, [hung] off the side of the burnt-out building," Mrs Douthie said of her research.
Mrs Jones's son, Jack, was killed in the fighting.
Thomas Curnow and his family swiftly returned to their home town of Ballarat, and though he was applauded by the police and government, his role in the Kelly gang's demise "ruined their lives".
Mrs Douthie said her great-grandfather David Mortimer told her that once Kelly sympathisers had told Mr Curnow to "watch his back" as they walked in a Ballarat park.
Mr Curnow's wife warned her grandchildren never to speak of his actions, or their connection to him, fearing for their safety.
The gang's relatives were also implicated, long after the bushrangers had died.
Anthony Griffiths is the great-grandson of Grace Kelly, Ned's younger sister.
He said the Kelly gang's violence cast a long shadow over the family, as recently as his father's generation.
"Speaking about it was not a done thing, and that's two or three generations afterwards," he said.
Today, the siege site sits on privately owned land.
Mr Griffiths says he's still floored by the events and the ripple effects, 145 years on.
"The impacts it had on the rest of the family, the women who were left behind … while the men were on the run or in jail," he said.
"Some of their friends and family supported them at terrific cost [and] personal risk to themselves."