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.