Ned Kelly

A Beggar on Horseback

Once again, they found a way to lock him up.

It was an incident that would later figure prominently in the myth of Ned Kelly, an incident that helped give shape to the public view that Kelly was a man who had been marked by the local police.

It was the spring of 1871; just a few months after he returned home from the jail at Beechworth the Kellys were visited by a family friend, Isaac "Wild" Wright. Wright was a soft-spoken but rugged young man who, like Kelly, would spend much of his life in trouble with the law.

There is ample evidence that Wright was not the sort of man who worried much about other people's property rights, and when he came to visit the Kellys, he came astride a handsome chestnut mare, which, as it later turned out, had been stolen. While at the Kellys, the horse wandered off. It was, in the far flung reaches of the bush, a common practice in those days that when a visitor's horse escaped, the host would provide the stranded guest with another, and claim the nomadic mount when it was found.

That, according to most historians is precisely what Ned Kelly did. As Max Brown, author of the 1956 biography of Ned Kelly "Australian Son" wrote, "the visitor was in a fix because the chestnut mare he was riding had strayed, so Ned loaned him a mount. The missing mare was of distinctive appearance having a white blaze and a docked tail. Ned found her, rode her into Wangaratta and loaned her to the publican's daughter to ride around town. This, he suggested, was proof he had no knowledge the mare had been lifted from the Maindample Park Station."

Police and prosecutors, however, did not accept Kelly's version of events. It was, it seemed, incomprehensible to them that Kelly could have innocently come into possession of a stolen horse. Later, while he was riding the mare, a local constable named Edward Hall grabbed him pistol-whipped him so mercilessly that it took nine stitches to close the gaping wounds in his head. He was charged with a receiving a stolen horse, and was sentenced to three years in prison. He was just 16 years old.

Kelly was not the only one convicted in connection with the stolen horse. Wright was also convicted, and spent 18 months in prison. It is an interesting side note, that in the years that followed, Isaac "Wild" Wright remained a fast friend to the Kelly's. On one occasion, he and Kelly staged a bare-knuckle boxing match that went twenty rounds in front of an astounded crowd before Kelly finally knocked the much larger Wright unconscious. And when Ned Kelly was finally captured, Wright was among those in the crowd.