Happy Saturday everyone. This summer, we put out a call on our Facebook for topic suggestions that were not about the United States or Europe. We got a lot of suggestions from Australia asking us to talk about Ned Kelly or other bush Rangers. They came in but like the same time, because when I put this on our Facebook, it was the middle of the night in Australia, and all of a sudden, all of Australia, not all of Australia. People in Australia started waking up and looking at Facebook and responding to this with questions about Ned Kelly and similar folks and previous hosts Sarah and Debilina actually did three episodes about bush Rangers back in two thousand eleven. So over the next three Saturdays, we are going to share all of those and today we are starting with Ned Kelly, which first came out on June. One thing that comes up in this episode is that Sarah and Debilina didn't know the details of movies about Ned Kelly offhand when it came up in the studio. That happens to us sometimes too, and then they heard from lots of listeners about these movies after the episode originally aired. They talk about this again at the end of the third thing that we're sharing and on a Saturday, but so listeners don't have to wait that long. A couple of the examples that they talk about are the two thousand three Ned Kelly starring Heath Ledger and the nineteen seventy Ned Kelly starring Mick Jagger of all people, of course, there are plenty of others. Bush Ranger movies are a whole genre in Australian cinema. And one last note that we want to make sure we share. This episode is more than eight years old at this point, and if we were recording this same story today we would probably update various language related to criminal justice and incarceration, so just keep that in mind. Otherwise, enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a chocolate boardy and I'm Sar Dowdie. And this episode starts off in one of my favorite way is the mysterious unidentified head or skull. Rather, it is a good way to start a podcast. We've done it a few times, but it's always a classic intro. So here's how this story starts. In two thousand nine, a West Australian farmer named Tom Baxer turned in a skull to the authorities, claiming that it's the skull of Ned Kelly, a famous bush ranger or bandit who was executed back in the eighteen hundreds. His body was believed to be buried in a mass grave, but for decades kelly skull lived in a display case in Melbourne Jail until that is, it was stolen in ninety so nobody has really known where the skull or the head was since then. It's been a mystery, and Baxter didn't really help illuminate that question very much. He refuses to say how he got the skull or if he was involved in its staff, which is kind of sketchy if you think about it. Yeah, I wonder if there will be more details on that aspect of it in the future, But as are as we know right now, researchers haven't positively identified the head as Ned's. In two thousand ten, they issued kind of a request for help. They had sort of reached to the end of the road and as far as they could go and testing things and they asked people to turn in any information that they know, any stories, any photographs, and at least one man, according to a story in August two thousand ten, has come forward with a tooth that he believes belonged to the skull, so a tooth that had been handed down through his family as a souvenir of Ned Kelly exactly, and he has given it to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, where which is the body that's conducting the research, And so we see what happens with that, I know, very funny. So there's been that renewed interest in Kelly, but really he's never really gone away from the Australian collective consciousness. He's been the celebrated outlaw, the subject of many songs, books and films over the years, and some even think of him as a national folk hero. There are others, though, who consider him just as a ruthless criminal, a villain. So we're going to try to get to the bottom of how these takes on his character could be so vastly different. And while we explore that, we're also going to take a look at his wildlife and the last stand that's been so romanticized over the years. But to really understand Ned's story first you need to know a little bit about bush rangers, and if you're not Australian, it probably doesn't really have any context for you, right, But bush rangers were basically bandits or highwaymen who specialized in robbing or bailing up as it was called, stage coaches, banks and small settlements. Yeah, we'll try to use the authentic lingo in this whenever we can. So what they did was sort of in the same vein as the legendary English highway robbers, so they're often compared to the likes of Dick Turpin. Also, sometimes you'll see comparisons to the American wild West, people like Jesse James. But the bush ranging industry actually went for longer than America's Wild West period. The main period of austra earliers bush ranging spanned about a hundred years, from the guy who's considered the first bush ranger, Black Caesar, to Ned Kelly's gang in eighteen eighty. Yeah, and there were also more bush rangers per capita in Australia than there were outlaws in America, about six thousand bush rangers during that period. That we mentioned, and a lot of these bush rangers were really just ruthless killers, but sometimes they've been glorified and characterized as robin Hood type folk heroes, mainly because of the actions of a few specific bush rangers, such as Edward Teddy, the jew Boy Davis, who supposedly treated his victims humanely and shared what he stole with the poor. And we see this idea in the Kelly story to there's certainly a robin Hood element to it. So to set up the period that this story takes in a little bit better, we should explain that within that hundred year period of bush ranging, there were two sort of sub periods. From about seventeen eighty nine to the eighteen fifties, bush rangers were mostly escaped convicts, but from the eighteen fifties to eighteen eighty or so most bush rangers were free settlers who had broken the lawn, and ned Kelly definitely fell into that ladder camp. Yeah. So. Ned Kelly was born in June eighteen fifty five in the state of Victoria, Australia, and he was the first son of Irish parents Ellen and James called Red Kelly, and his dad had somewhat of a criminal background himself. He had been transported from Ireland to Australia for stealing and Ned grew up in this clan like atmosphere of Irish Australian families in this area and according to an article by Graham Seal in History Today, they were called free selectors, so basically poor people who were allowed by the government to cultivate tracts of land for a small amount of rent. Many of these free selectors, Ned Kelly's family certainly included, made their living off of a combination of quote legal pastoral activities and illegal activities such as stock stealing, which in Australa was known as duffing, and this would consequently get them into trouble with the law now and then. Yeah, And incidentally, many feel that it's this association with an economically and politically disadvantaged social group that helped characterize bush rangers like Ned as quote poor man's heroes. So that kind of sets up the villain versus hero. Yeah, the Robin Hood motif. Right. So Ned had several run ins with the law while he was growing up. By age sixteen, he had already served one jail sentence and that year, he was convicted of receiving stolen horse and had to serve another three year jail sentence. By the time he got out in February eighteen seventy four, Seal says he had transformed into a hard, bitter man. Yeah. Still, though, he managed to stay out of trouble for a few years. Three years, and then in September eighteen seventy seven, he was arrested for public drunkenness and got into this fight with four policemen while he was trying to escape. Seven months later, though, things really elevated to another level. One of the policemen who had been involved in that fight, Constable Fitzpatrick, came to the Kelly home, not coming after Ned, but to arrest Ned's brother Dan for horse stealing. And what happened next is up for debate. Yeah, Fitzpatrick claimed that he was assaulted by the Kelly's, including the mom Ellen she got in on the fight too, But the Kellys claim that Fitzpatrick tried to molest one of the daughters, one of Ned Kelly's sisters basically, and the assault, including which included a shot to the wrist, was kind of a self defense thing. So the judge was prone to side with Fitzpatrick. He reviewed the case six months later and he sentenced Ellen to three years in jail for her role in this in this fight, and then also said that he would have given Ned and Dan fifteen years each, but they had disappeared. Yeah, Ned and Dan had fled into the Wombat Ranges and set up camp in the hills, which they knew well. Two of their friends, Steve Hart and Joe Burne, joined them there. In October though, a team of four policemen were sent to track this new Kelly Gang as they were known, down where they were camping out. Then on October the police and the Kelly Gang had a confrontation at Stringy Bark Creek and some sources you'll see that it was a police raid on the Kelly camp, and others you see that the Kelly's actually ambushed and bailed up or robbed the police, regardless of how the confrontation came about. A gunfight ensued and the three policemen were killed. One McIntyre escaped to tell the tale back in Melbourne. And after that, I mean, this was really a turning point for them. After that, the government declared the four Kelly Gang members outlaws and put a high price on their heads. They even passed something called the Outlaw React. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. It's kind of a strange word, but this law basically said that the rights and the property of the outlaws are forfeit and any citizen can kill them on site. Sympathizers, and they had many at the time, could also be imprisoned and lose all of their belongings as well. Okay, so you think after this new act the Kelly Gang would have sort of tried to play it cool. You know, you might have your friends turn into enemy suddenly if there's a reward, or your friends could get into trouble for for sympathizing with you. But it didn't cause the Kelly Gang to lay low at all. Less than six weeks later, on December tenth, seventy eight, they raided the town of Euroa and robbed the bank and stole food from the shops in the town. Of course, they made off with a lot of gold and cash two thousand pounds worth, but ned also stole deeds and mortgages held in the bank safe and this is something that really endeared him. To the struggling free selectors in Victoria, to the poor people. They saw the banks as discriminating against poor Irish settlers in the area. This reminded me a little bit of of Bonnie and Clyde. People liked them for for robbing banks. Yeah, once they got away, the Kelly gang divided up the loot between themselves, their families, and their sympathizers, so again sharing with people who helped them out. Authorities increased the reward for the Kelly's at this point from two thousand pounds to four thousand, but this didn't have an effect on the loyalty of their supporters at all. They even wrote songs about it. So here's just a little bit from one here. Oh Patty dear, did you hear the news that's going around on the head of bold Ned Kelly. They have placed a thousand pounds for Steve Hart and Dan Kelly. Five hundred more they'll give, but if the sum were doubled, sure the Kelly boys would love. I wish we could set that to some music. I know, if only we knew what the tune was supposed to be. Maybe maybe some of you all do. We're both thinking the same thing um. So you know, obviously, if you have people writing folk ballads about you, you're pretty popular. And that loyalty really continued into their next job, which was a raid on Gildery and during that they locked at police officers in their own cells and masqueraded around hound in the police uniform, So pretty bold stuff. Yeah, they did their usual. They held up banks and shops again, and they locked up the townspeople in the hotel. It wasn't so bad to be a hostage though, aman as long as you were in a policeman right. Apparently, the Kelly gang treated everyone to drinks and Ned made speeches. They made off with two thousand pounds once again, and once again they also burned mortgages. Ned also left a ten thousand words statement with a bank teller that came to be known as the Gildery Letter. Now that letter only exists in a copy, but it's got some pretty interesting content. It catalogs complaints and grievances of Ned Kelly and his gang against the government, the police, wealthy squatters, and basically just shows his whole point of view and why lays it all down, why people sympathize with him so at this point that Kelly Gang was really riding high, but they were also kind of nervous because the police seemed to be getting too hot on their trail. They needed to shake them off somehow. So their last raid took place June on a small town surrounding a rail station called glenn Rowan. But the raid was really about more than just getting looted this time. The night before they killed a man named Aaron Sharrett, who was a one time pier but who had also been acting as a sort of double agent. So he was a friend of the Kelly Gangs, but he was informing on them to the police, and so they had reason to kill him for for that that fact, of course, but they also hoped that his murder would lure the bulk of the Special District Police Force onto a train that would pass through glen Rowan, so his murder would essentially act as a trap for the police. So, banking on the fact that all the police would be on this train taking this train, the gang had lifted the rails off to the side near a hilltop with the intent of derailing the train and killing all the police on board and then picking off whomever was left. So after setting this up. They raided the town as usual, stole food and money, and locked up the locals and Glenn Rowan's Jones Hotel, where they sang, dance, drank, and basically carried on with the crowd while they waited for the police to arrive. So it seemed like a pretty good plan, but Ned made a couple of major mistakes here. He told the hostages about his plans for one, and then he let a few of them go home. One of them, a school teacher named Thomas Kernow, went to the track and warned the police by waving a lantern. So the train stopped just in time, and about thirty seven police got off and headed for the hotel. So when the Kelly gang heard the train stop, they knew the jig was up and they had just one more move to pull out of their bag of tricks. A few months before the attack on Glen Rowan, plowshares and some cast iron started disappearing throughout the area, and it turns out that the gang had used it to create crude suits of armor for themselves. So a little bit about this armor, which has become famous over the years. It's one of the best. Next, Yeah, if you can easily look at pictures of this, and it's probably one of the best known things about Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang. This armor. It consisted of back and breastplates and an adjustable metal apron that protected the growing area of the wear and each suit. This is what I found really remarkable. Each suit weighed eighty pounds. Only one of them, that was Ned's, had a helmet that had slits and advisor, and that itself weighed about sixteen pounds, and he was the only one strong enough supposedly to wear the suit, the helmet and still handle a gun at the same time. Yeah, it sounds like it would be quite cumbersome, but yeah, it doesn't look very comfortable. If you do get a chance to check out these pictures, it's kind of like a broke down tin man. It does look like a really shabby tin man. And it looks like some pretty crucial areas are left vulnerable. Still, so maybe it's not quite worth it. Well, we're gonna it's funny. You should mention that. Sarah out more about that. So the bush Rangers put on this this crude armor and stood outside the hotel waiting for the police and of course, a gun battle ensued, and civilians trying to get out of the hotel during the fight didn't want to get caught in the crossfire. But the armor really didn't seem to do the gang that much good. It was clunky, of course, and it caused painful bruising when it did stop a bullet. It just was like a sheet of cast iron hitting your chest, which couldn't be very comfortable. So, perhaps not surprisingly, Joe Byrne, Dan Kelly, and Steve Hart were all shot dead during that gunfight. Ned Kelly was shot in the foot, the arm, and the thumb and several other places. It seems he retreated into the bush and lost consciousness briefly. When he woke up, though instead of escaping, he tried to attack the policeman, crashing out from behind them and firing at them the whole time. He fought them for about a half an hour, some sources say, before they finally took him down by a shotgun blast to the legs. After that, he was taken to Melbourne, where he recovered from all thirty of his wounds and stood trial and was found guilty sentenced to be hung, Even though there were public protests and some people even campaign to have a sentence reduced. Yeah. So Kelly was hanged on November eleventh, eighteen eighty and his last words were such his life. But weirdly, he'd told Justice Barry, who was the same judge who had sentenced his mom, probably already had a grudge against him, but he told Justice Barry that he Barry would shortly follow him to the grave, and sure enough Barry died of a heart attack just two weeks later. Yeah, and this must have just only added to the legend that's lived on through stories and songs. In fact, Australia's first feature length film was nineteen o six, is the Story of the Kelly Gang. I wonder if there have been movies on Kelly since then. I'm sure. I'm sure there are. I don't unfortunately have the names here, but I think there are many movies, books, um stories, songs. As we've said, there are plenty of opportunities, including many biographies on Ned Kelly's life to learn more about him. I think it's time for a new movie considering this lost, potentially rediscovered head too. Yeah, well, I think we'll have to wait to see how that mystery unravels a little more before that story is completely fleshed out. But I think you might be right. But you know, even if you're not an expert on ned Kelly, you could sort of invoke him in speech. There's a saying if someone says you're as game as Ned Kelly, that means that you're highly courageous, wicked, brave, willing to tackle big odds. Um So you could pass this on. It's like a nice thing to say to people. I hope the Australians say wicked brave. That's what you get from living in Boston. Yeah, well, what can I say? Language seems to stick with us no matter where we are. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at History podcast, asked at I heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday everyone. This summer, we put out a call on our Facebook for topic suggestions that were not about the United States or Europe. We got a lot of suggestions from Australia asking us to talk about Ned Kelly or other bush Rangers. They came in but like the same time, because when I put this on our Facebook, it was the middle of the night in Australia, and all of a sudden, all of Australia, not all of Australia. People in Australia started waking up and looking at Facebook and responding to this with questions about Ned Kelly and similar folks and previous hosts Sarah and Debilina actually did three episodes about bush Rangers back in two thousand eleven. So over the next three Saturdays, we are going to share all of those and today we are starting with Ned Kelly, which first came out on June. One thing that comes up in this episode is that Sarah and Debilina didn't know the details of movies about Ned Kelly offhand when it came up in the studio. That happens to us sometimes too, and then they heard from lots of listeners about these movies after the episode originally aired. They talk about this again at the end of the third thing that we're sharing and on a Saturday, but so listeners don't have to wait that long. A couple of the examples that they talk about are the two thousand three Ned Kelly starring Heath Ledger and the nineteen seventy Ned Kelly starring Mick Jagger of all people, of course, there are plenty of others. Bush Ranger movies are a whole genre in Australian cinema. And one last note that we want to make sure we share. This episode is more than eight years old at this point, and if we were recording this same story today we would probably update various language related to criminal justice and incarceration, so just keep that in mind. Otherwise, enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to bling a chocolate boardy and I'm Sar Dowdie. And this episode starts off in one of my favorite way is the mysterious unidentified head or skull. Rather, it is a good way to start a podcast. We've done it a few times, but it's always a classic intro. So here's how this story starts. In two thousand nine, a West Australian farmer named Tom Baxer turned in a skull to the authorities, claiming that it's the skull of Ned Kelly, a famous bush ranger or bandit who was executed back in the eighteen hundreds. His body was believed to be buried in a mass grave, but for decades kelly skull lived in a display case in Melbourne Jail until that is, it was stolen in ninety so nobody has really known where the skull or the head was since then. It's been a mystery, and Baxter didn't really help illuminate that question very much. He refuses to say how he got the skull or if he was involved in its staff, which is kind of sketchy if you think about it. Yeah, I wonder if there will be more details on that aspect of it in the future, But as are as we know right now, researchers haven't positively identified the head as Ned's. In two thousand ten, they issued kind of a request for help. They had sort of reached to the end of the road and as far as they could go and testing things and they asked people to turn in any information that they know, any stories, any photographs, and at least one man, according to a story in August two thousand ten, has come forward with a tooth that he believes belonged to the skull, so a tooth that had been handed down through his family as a souvenir of Ned Kelly exactly, and he has given it to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, where which is the body that's conducting the research, And so we see what happens with that, I know, very funny. So there's been that renewed interest in Kelly, but really he's never really gone away from the Australian collective consciousness. He's been the celebrated outlaw, the subject of many songs, books and films over the years, and some even think of him as a national folk hero. There are others, though, who consider him just as a ruthless criminal, a villain. So we're going to try to get to the bottom of how these takes on his character could be so vastly different. And while we explore that, we're also going to take a look at his wildlife and the last stand that's been so romanticized over the years. But to really understand Ned's story first you need to know a little bit about bush rangers, and if you're not Australian, it probably doesn't really have any context for you, right, But bush rangers were basically bandits or highwaymen who specialized in robbing or bailing up as it was called, stage coaches, banks and small settlements. Yeah, we'll try to use the authentic lingo in this whenever we can. So what they did was sort of in the same vein as the legendary English highway robbers, so they're often compared to the likes of Dick Turpin. Also, sometimes you'll see comparisons to the American wild West, people like Jesse James. But the bush ranging industry actually went for longer than America's Wild West period. The main period of austra earliers bush ranging spanned about a hundred years, from the guy who's considered the first bush ranger, Black Caesar, to Ned Kelly's gang in eighteen eighty. Yeah, and there were also more bush rangers per capita in Australia than there were outlaws in America, about six thousand bush rangers during that period. That we mentioned, and a lot of these bush rangers were really just ruthless killers, but sometimes they've been glorified and characterized as robin Hood type folk heroes, mainly because of the actions of a few specific bush rangers, such as Edward Teddy, the jew Boy Davis, who supposedly treated his victims humanely and shared what he stole with the poor. And we see this idea in the Kelly story to there's certainly a robin Hood element to it. So to set up the period that this story takes in a little bit better, we should explain that within that hundred year period of bush ranging, there were two sort of sub periods. From about seventeen eighty nine to the eighteen fifties, bush rangers were mostly escaped convicts, but from the eighteen fifties to eighteen eighty or so most bush rangers were free settlers who had broken the lawn, and ned Kelly definitely fell into that ladder camp. Yeah. So. Ned Kelly was born in June eighteen fifty five in the state of Victoria, Australia, and he was the first son of Irish parents Ellen and James called Red Kelly, and his dad had somewhat of a criminal background himself. He had been transported from Ireland to Australia for stealing and Ned grew up in this clan like atmosphere of Irish Australian families in this area and according to an article by Graham Seal in History Today, they were called free selectors, so basically poor people who were allowed by the government to cultivate tracts of land for a small amount of rent. Many of these free selectors, Ned Kelly's family certainly included, made their living off of a combination of quote legal pastoral activities and illegal activities such as stock stealing, which in Australa was known as duffing, and this would consequently get them into trouble with the law now and then. Yeah, And incidentally, many feel that it's this association with an economically and politically disadvantaged social group that helped characterize bush rangers like Ned as quote poor man's heroes. So that kind of sets up the villain versus hero. Yeah, the Robin Hood motif. Right. So Ned had several run ins with the law while he was growing up. By age sixteen, he had already served one jail sentence and that year, he was convicted of receiving stolen horse and had to serve another three year jail sentence. By the time he got out in February eighteen seventy four, Seal says he had transformed into a hard, bitter man. Yeah. Still, though, he managed to stay out of trouble for a few years. Three years, and then in September eighteen seventy seven, he was arrested for public drunkenness and got into this fight with four policemen while he was trying to escape. Seven months later, though, things really elevated to another level. One of the policemen who had been involved in that fight, Constable Fitzpatrick, came to the Kelly home, not coming after Ned, but to arrest Ned's brother Dan for horse stealing. And what happened next is up for debate. Yeah, Fitzpatrick claimed that he was assaulted by the Kelly's, including the mom Ellen she got in on the fight too, But the Kellys claim that Fitzpatrick tried to molest one of the daughters, one of Ned Kelly's sisters basically, and the assault, including which included a shot to the wrist, was kind of a self defense thing. So the judge was prone to side with Fitzpatrick. He reviewed the case six months later and he sentenced Ellen to three years in jail for her role in this in this fight, and then also said that he would have given Ned and Dan fifteen years each, but they had disappeared. Yeah, Ned and Dan had fled into the Wombat Ranges and set up camp in the hills, which they knew well. Two of their friends, Steve Hart and Joe Burne, joined them there. In October though, a team of four policemen were sent to track this new Kelly Gang as they were known, down where they were camping out. Then on October the police and the Kelly Gang had a confrontation at Stringy Bark Creek and some sources you'll see that it was a police raid on the Kelly camp, and others you see that the Kelly's actually ambushed and bailed up or robbed the police, regardless of how the confrontation came about. A gunfight ensued and the three policemen were killed. One McIntyre escaped to tell the tale back in Melbourne. And after that, I mean, this was really a turning point for them. After that, the government declared the four Kelly Gang members outlaws and put a high price on their heads. They even passed something called the Outlaw React. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. It's kind of a strange word, but this law basically said that the rights and the property of the outlaws are forfeit and any citizen can kill them on site. Sympathizers, and they had many at the time, could also be imprisoned and lose all of their belongings as well. Okay, so you think after this new act the Kelly Gang would have sort of tried to play it cool. You know, you might have your friends turn into enemy suddenly if there's a reward, or your friends could get into trouble for for sympathizing with you. But it didn't cause the Kelly Gang to lay low at all. Less than six weeks later, on December tenth, seventy eight, they raided the town of Euroa and robbed the bank and stole food from the shops in the town. Of course, they made off with a lot of gold and cash two thousand pounds worth, but ned also stole deeds and mortgages held in the bank safe and this is something that really endeared him. To the struggling free selectors in Victoria, to the poor people. They saw the banks as discriminating against poor Irish settlers in the area. This reminded me a little bit of of Bonnie and Clyde. People liked them for for robbing banks. Yeah, once they got away, the Kelly gang divided up the loot between themselves, their families, and their sympathizers, so again sharing with people who helped them out. Authorities increased the reward for the Kelly's at this point from two thousand pounds to four thousand, but this didn't have an effect on the loyalty of their supporters at all. They even wrote songs about it. So here's just a little bit from one here. Oh Patty dear, did you hear the news that's going around on the head of bold Ned Kelly. They have placed a thousand pounds for Steve Hart and Dan Kelly. Five hundred more they'll give, but if the sum were doubled, sure the Kelly boys would love. I wish we could set that to some music. I know, if only we knew what the tune was supposed to be. Maybe maybe some of you all do. We're both thinking the same thing um. So you know, obviously, if you have people writing folk ballads about you, you're pretty popular. And that loyalty really continued into their next job, which was a raid on Gildery and during that they locked at police officers in their own cells and masqueraded around hound in the police uniform, So pretty bold stuff. Yeah, they did their usual. They held up banks and shops again, and they locked up the townspeople in the hotel. It wasn't so bad to be a hostage though, aman as long as you were in a policeman right. Apparently, the Kelly gang treated everyone to drinks and Ned made speeches. They made off with two thousand pounds once again, and once again they also burned mortgages. Ned also left a ten thousand words statement with a bank teller that came to be known as the Gildery Letter. Now that letter only exists in a copy, but it's got some pretty interesting content. It catalogs complaints and grievances of Ned Kelly and his gang against the government, the police, wealthy squatters, and basically just shows his whole point of view and why lays it all down, why people sympathize with him so at this point that Kelly Gang was really riding high, but they were also kind of nervous because the police seemed to be getting too hot on their trail. They needed to shake them off somehow. So their last raid took place June on a small town surrounding a rail station called glenn Rowan. But the raid was really about more than just getting looted this time. The night before they killed a man named Aaron Sharrett, who was a one time pier but who had also been acting as a sort of double agent. So he was a friend of the Kelly Gangs, but he was informing on them to the police, and so they had reason to kill him for for that that fact, of course, but they also hoped that his murder would lure the bulk of the Special District Police Force onto a train that would pass through glen Rowan, so his murder would essentially act as a trap for the police. So, banking on the fact that all the police would be on this train taking this train, the gang had lifted the rails off to the side near a hilltop with the intent of derailing the train and killing all the police on board and then picking off whomever was left. So after setting this up. They raided the town as usual, stole food and money, and locked up the locals and Glenn Rowan's Jones Hotel, where they sang, dance, drank, and basically carried on with the crowd while they waited for the police to arrive. So it seemed like a pretty good plan, but Ned made a couple of major mistakes here. He told the hostages about his plans for one, and then he let a few of them go home. One of them, a school teacher named Thomas Kernow, went to the track and warned the police by waving a lantern. So the train stopped just in time, and about thirty seven police got off and headed for the hotel. So when the Kelly gang heard the train stop, they knew the jig was up and they had just one more move to pull out of their bag of tricks. A few months before the attack on Glen Rowan, plowshares and some cast iron started disappearing throughout the area, and it turns out that the gang had used it to create crude suits of armor for themselves. So a little bit about this armor, which has become famous over the years. It's one of the best. Next, Yeah, if you can easily look at pictures of this, and it's probably one of the best known things about Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang. This armor. It consisted of back and breastplates and an adjustable metal apron that protected the growing area of the wear and each suit. This is what I found really remarkable. Each suit weighed eighty pounds. Only one of them, that was Ned's, had a helmet that had slits and advisor, and that itself weighed about sixteen pounds, and he was the only one strong enough supposedly to wear the suit, the helmet and still handle a gun at the same time. Yeah, it sounds like it would be quite cumbersome, but yeah, it doesn't look very comfortable. If you do get a chance to check out these pictures, it's kind of like a broke down tin man. It does look like a really shabby tin man. And it looks like some pretty crucial areas are left vulnerable. Still, so maybe it's not quite worth it. Well, we're gonna it's funny. You should mention that. Sarah out more about that. So the bush Rangers put on this this crude armor and stood outside the hotel waiting for the police and of course, a gun battle ensued, and civilians trying to get out of the hotel during the fight didn't want to get caught in the crossfire. But the armor really didn't seem to do the gang that much good. It was clunky, of course, and it caused painful bruising when it did stop a bullet. It just was like a sheet of cast iron hitting your chest, which couldn't be very comfortable. So, perhaps not surprisingly, Joe Byrne, Dan Kelly, and Steve Hart were all shot dead during that gunfight. Ned Kelly was shot in the foot, the arm, and the thumb and several other places. It seems he retreated into the bush and lost consciousness briefly. When he woke up, though instead of escaping, he tried to attack the policeman, crashing out from behind them and firing at them the whole time. He fought them for about a half an hour, some sources say, before they finally took him down by a shotgun blast to the legs. After that, he was taken to Melbourne, where he recovered from all thirty of his wounds and stood trial and was found guilty sentenced to be hung, Even though there were public protests and some people even campaign to have a sentence reduced. Yeah. So Kelly was hanged on November eleventh, eighteen eighty and his last words were such his life. But weirdly, he'd told Justice Barry, who was the same judge who had sentenced his mom, probably already had a grudge against him, but he told Justice Barry that he Barry would shortly follow him to the grave, and sure enough Barry died of a heart attack just two weeks later. Yeah, and this must have just only added to the legend that's lived on through stories and songs. In fact, Australia's first feature length film was nineteen o six, is the Story of the Kelly Gang. I wonder if there have been movies on Kelly since then. I'm sure. I'm sure there are. I don't unfortunately have the names here, but I think there are many movies, books, um stories, songs. As we've said, there are plenty of opportunities, including many biographies on Ned Kelly's life to learn more about him. I think it's time for a new movie considering this lost, potentially rediscovered head too. Yeah, well, I think we'll have to wait to see how that mystery unravels a little more before that story is completely fleshed out. But I think you might be right. But you know, even if you're not an expert on ned Kelly, you could sort of invoke him in speech. There's a saying if someone says you're as game as Ned Kelly, that means that you're highly courageous, wicked, brave, willing to tackle big odds. Um So you could pass this on. It's like a nice thing to say to people. I hope the Australians say wicked brave. That's what you get from living in Boston. Yeah, well, what can I say? Language seems to stick with us no matter where we are. Thank you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic. If you have heard any kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our email address again. You can now reach us at History podcast, asked at I heart radio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.