The Siege of Glenrowan (1880): The End of the Kelly Gang

Armored in plough-steel, Ned Kelly’s gang made their last stand against Victorian police at the Glenrowan Inn.

Glenrowan was not part of the Frontier Wars. It belongs to a different colonial story: bushranging, rural poverty, and the relationship between Irish selector families and the colonial police in northeast Victoria.

By 1880 the Kelly Gang, Ned Kelly, his brother Dan, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, were outlawed after killing three police officers at Stringybark Creek in 1878. In June 1880, after Byrne killed a former friend turned police informer, the gang took over the Glenrowan Inn and planned to wreck a special police train.

The siege

The plan was revealed, and police surrounded the inn early on 28 June 1880. The gang wore homemade armor made from plough mouldboards. Joe Byrne was shot and killed inside. Ned Kelly, badly wounded in the legs, was captured at dawn. In the afternoon police set the inn on fire. Dan Kelly and Steve Hart died inside; their bodies were recovered burned.

Byrne’s body was pulled from the building, taken to Benalla, and hung upright against a door so that it could be photographed. Many at the time thought that display went too far, even for an outlaw.

Ned Kelly was tried in Melbourne and hanged on 11 November 1880. His armor is now held by the State Library of Victoria, and his story remains one of the most argued-over in Australian history.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Reading Notes: John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (2002)

A military historian examines tactics, weapons and strategy on both sides of the early frontier.

John Connor, a military historian, approached the frontier as a war and asked how it was fought. He compares the British Army’s experience with Aboriginal methods of warfare and shows why the colonists’ advantages were not as decisive as often assumed.

Key ideas

• Muskets were slow and unreliable; Aboriginal warriors understood their limits and used the landscape, speed and surprise.
• The turning points came with mounted troops and, later, with breech-loading guns.
• Covers the Hawkesbury–Nepean, the Bathurst War, Tasmania’s Black War and early Western Australia.

Connor’s book is a good companion to Reynolds: one tells the story from the Aboriginal side, the other through the lens of military history. It is in copyright; these are Reader notes.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Narezushi: How Fermented Fish Became Sushi

The first sushi was not a snack. It was a way to preserve fish for months by fermenting it in rice.

Long before nigiri, people in the rice-growing regions of mainland Southeast Asia preserved freshwater fish by packing it with salt and cooked rice. The rice fermented, producing lactic acid that kept the fish from spoiling. The rice itself was usually thrown away. Food historians such as Naomichi Ishige have argued that this technique began among rice-farming peoples of the Mekong region and spread through China to Japan.

Sushi as tax

In Japan this fermented fish, narezushi, became valuable enough to pay taxes with. Japan’s ancient legal codes, the Taihō and Yōrō codes of the early eighth century, set out taxes paid in goods, and the Engishiki, a book of government procedures completed in 927, lists provinces sending fermented fish and shellfish sushi to the imperial court as tribute.

A living tradition

The oldest style survives today as funazushi, made with crucian carp from Lake Biwa near Kyoto and fermented for a year or more. It has a strong, cheese-like flavor and is still made by families and specialist shops.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

The Australian Frontier Wars: An Overview (1788–1930s)

For about 150 years, British colonization of Australia met armed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resistance. Historians now call these conflicts the Australian Frontier Wars.

When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788, the land was already governed by hundreds of Aboriginal nations, each with its own country, law and language. As the colony pushed outward for farms and grazing land, those nations defended their country.

The fighting was rarely a set-piece war. It was a long series of raids, reprisals, punitive expeditions, and massacres, stretching from the Sydney basin in the 1790s to the Coniston massacre in the Northern Territory in 1928. Colonial governments sometimes used soldiers, sometimes mounted police, and often relied on armed settlers acting on their own.

Why the name matters

For much of the twentieth century, school histories described the settlement of Australia as largely peaceful. From the 1970s onward, historians working from colonial records, settler diaries and Aboriginal oral history showed that violence was widespread and that Aboriginal people fought back. The term “Frontier Wars” recognizes that resistance.

On this shelf

The readings that follow cover the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars, the Bathurst War and martial law of 1824, the later siege at Glenrowan, and three major works of scholarship. Some of this history is violent and distressing. It is presented so that it can be understood and remembered.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Salt Cod and the Atlantic Empires

Dried, salted cod from Newfoundland fed sailors, soldiers and enslaved people, and tied the Atlantic world together.

Soon after John Cabot reached Newfoundland in 1497, fishing fleets from Portugal, the Basque country, France and England crossed the Atlantic every year to fish the Grand Banks. Cod was split, salted and dried on wooden racks on shore or salted heavily on board. Properly cured, it kept for years.

Fuel for empire

• Navies and armies relied on salt cod as cheap, durable protein.
• Catholic Europe bought huge quantities for meatless fast days; Portugal’s bacalhau tradition comes from this trade.
• Caribbean plantations imported the lowest grades of salt fish from Newfoundland and New England to feed enslaved Africans, while sugar and molasses went north. This trade linked the fishery directly to slavery.

Salt fish is still part of Caribbean cooking, as in Jamaica’s national dish of ackee and saltfish. The cod fishery itself collapsed from overfishing, and Canada closed the northern cod fishery in 1992.

A note on accuracy: colonial cod was salted and dried rather than fermented raw. Fermented fish sauces and pastes belong to other traditions, such as Roman garum and Southeast Asian fish sauce.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Reading Notes: Hsin-I Feng, Beyond Nigiri and Anisakiasis (2006)

A Harvard Law School paper that traces sushi from ancient tribute to modern food-safety law.

Beyond Nigiri and Anisakiasis, The Tale of Sushi: History and Regulation was written by Hsin-I Feng in 2006 as a paper in Harvard Law School’s food and drug law program. It joins two stories: how sushi developed, and how governments regulate the risks of eating raw fish.

What it covers

• The origins of fermented fish preservation and narezushi as a form of tribute and tax in early Japan.
• The Edo-period shift to vinegared rice and nigiri.
• Anisakiasis, an infection caused by parasitic worms in raw or undercooked fish, and the freezing rules used to control it.
• How the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s food code approaches raw fish served in restaurants.

Takeaway

Sushi’s history is also a history of food safety. Fermentation, vinegar, salt and, later, freezing were all ways to make fish safe to eat.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Pemulwuy and the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars (1794–1816)

A Bidjigal warrior led more than a decade of resistance around early Sydney. After he was killed in 1802, his head was sent to England.

As the colony at Sydney spread west to the rich river flats of the Hawkesbury and Nepean, farms were built on land that Dharug and neighboring peoples used for food and ceremony. From 1794, clashes over crops, land and killings became a sustained conflict that lasted until about 1816.

Pemulwuy

Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal man from the Botany Bay area, became the best-known leader of the resistance. In 1790 he speared the governor’s gamekeeper, John McEntire. Over the next twelve years he led raids on farms and was wounded several times, including at the Battle of Parramatta in 1797.

In 1802 he was shot and killed by settlers. Governor Philip Gidley King had his head removed, preserved in spirits and sent to Sir Joseph Banks in England, describing Pemulwuy as a “terrible pest” but also “a brave and independent character.” The remains have never been found. Descendants and communities continue to call for their return.

How the wars ended

Resistance continued under his son, Tedbury, and other leaders. In 1816 Governor Lachlan Macquarie sent soldiers against Aboriginal people in the region. On 17 April 1816, troops killed at least fourteen Dharawal men, women and children at the Appin massacre. It is remembered each year.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Inclusion Starts on the Field: Special Olympics and Unified Sports

Special Olympics began with a simple belief: people with intellectual disabilities deserve the same chance to play, compete and belong.

Special Olympics offers year-round training and competition to children and adults with intellectual disabilities, in more than 30 Olympic-style sports. It reaches millions of athletes in more than 170 countries.

Unified Sports

In Unified Sports, athletes with and without intellectual disabilities train and compete on the same team. The idea is simple: friendship and respect grow when people play together. Unified Champion Schools extend the same approach to school clubs, leadership and whole-school activities.

Why it matters

• People with intellectual disabilities are more likely to be socially isolated and to face barriers in health care, education and employment.
• Sport builds confidence, fitness and friendships, for athletes and for the partners who play beside them.
• The Healthy Athletes program provides free health screenings at events, often the first some athletes have received.

How you can take part

Volunteer at a local event, coach, become a Unified partner, cheer from the stands, or ask your employer to sponsor a team. Inclusion is something we do, not just something we say.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

From Narezushi to Nigiri: The Edo Fast-Food Revolution

How a months-long preservation method became a quick snack sold from street stalls in 1800s Tokyo.

Over centuries, Japanese cooks shortened the fermentation time. By the 1400s and 1500s, namanare sushi was eaten after a few days, rice and all. In the 1600s, cooks began adding vinegar to the rice so there was no need to wait for fermentation at all, creating hayazushi, or “fast sushi.”

Edo street food

In the busy city of Edo, now Tokyo, the chef Hanaya Yohei (1799–1858) is often credited with popularizing nigiri in the 1820s: a small hand-pressed block of vinegared rice topped with fish from Edo Bay, sold from stalls for people to eat on the go. Fish was often cured, marinated in soy sauce or lightly cooked, because there was no refrigeration.

Going global

After the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, many Edo-style sushi chefs moved around Japan, spreading nigiri nationwide. Refrigeration after World War II made raw fish practical, and sushi spread around the world in the late twentieth century.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.

Words Matter: Respectful, Inclusive Language

Small changes in how we talk can make people feel respected or pushed aside.

In 2009, Special Olympics youth leaders launched a campaign to end casual use of the “R-word,” a slur against people with intellectual disabilities. It is now called Spread the Word and focuses on building inclusive schools and communities.

Simple guidelines

• Ask people what they prefer. Many people prefer person-first language (“a person with a disability”); others, including many Deaf and autistic people, prefer identity-first language (“a Deaf person,” “an autistic person”).
• Avoid pity words such as “suffers from,” “victim of” or “confined to a wheelchair.” Say “uses a wheelchair.”
• Don’t use disability as an insult or a joke.
• Talk to the person, not to their companion, interpreter or aide.
• Describe athletes as athletes. Special Olympics athletes compete; they are not “kids” when they are adults.

Language keeps changing, and nobody gets it perfect. What matters is listening and being willing to adjust.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.