Ned Kelly

Suits of Armor

The truth is Ned Kelly and the gang had spent most of the early part of the year on the defensive. They had been, most historians believe, holed up in the rocky hills in a remote part of the Victorian bush. But they were not idle. They were planning their next — and as it would turn out — last attack.

No one really knows for certain when Ned Kelly first got the idea to turn the tables on the police who were scouring the hills looking for him. What is clear is that he developed an elaborate plot to trap Hare and his men along a stretch of railway outside the settlement of Glenrowan. There is no evidence that the attack on Glenrowan was ever intended to be anything other than a strike on the police forces. There was no plot for a robbery, no plan to deliver another manifesto.

This was going to be bloody. In preparing for it, Kelly developed the now famous iron suits that the gang wore during its last stand.

The suits were made, as police later noted, out of plowshares, crudely hammered together by the gang as they hid in the hills. It still remains a subject of some debate where they found the metal. Some believe they picked it up in bits and pieces during various heists. But there are others who suggest that the makeshift suits of armor were actually cobbled together from pieces brought to them clandestinely by supporters who were, in an almost poetic way, willing to risk capture and imprisonment just so they could gird the young men who now claimed to be their champions for battle.

By late June, the armor and the plot were ready. Kelly had decided that he would launch the attack at the town of Glenrowan because of its strategic location. The railway leading to town was laid out in such a fashion that the Kelly gang could rip up a stretch of track on the way to Melbourne, thus preventing reinforcements from arriving, and then, lay in wait, derailing a police train on its way into town, in essence trapping the police in a kind of killing field.

The question was; how could he be certain that the police would come at the appointed time?

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1. The Man in the Metal Mask
2. The Enigma Behind the Mask
3. The Roots of Rebellion
4. A Small-Time Crook
5. First Conviction
6. A Beggar on Horseback
7. Home
8. A Shot in the Dark
9. The Temperature Rises
10. Showdown at String Bark Creek
11. Recasting the Rebellion
12. First Draft of History
13. Jerilderie
14. Desperate Times
15. Suits of Armor
16. Last Stand
17. The Verdict of History
18. Bibliography