The Similarities and Differences between Bushrangers and Australia’s Most Wanted Man
Ned Kelly 2003 film played by Heath Ledger.
You type in Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous Bushranger name and the first thing that comes up is ‘Why was Ned Kelly a Hero?’ underneath the Wikipedia entry. Now anybody using Wikipedia must realise it can be quite unreliable and finding reliable sources can be difficult on the net, but there’s not many die hard, dinky-di, self described Australian traditionalist who wouldn’t agree that Kelly is not somewhat of a hero, a man who fought against the system and in the end ultimately failed, ending in his death by hanging.
Anyway. Was Ned Kelly a hero? He and his gang shot and killed police officers in cold blood. They were on the run and did so to make their escape easier.
What are the differences between the Kelly Gang and the now infamous Dezi Freeman? Or other Bushrangers who frequented the area? Has time turned their horrendous crimes in to romanticised story-lines and myths and overlooked their dark past?
Will Freeman not remain free for much longer and be arrested, or go out in a blaze of ‘glory’ ? time will tell.
This area, the South West Slopes Times coverage zone was busy with ex-convicts, bushrangers, outlaws and criminals on the back of stolen horses and on the back of the gold rush who easily picked off mail coaches and civilians in a land that didn’t spread its armed forces very widely or very well.
The Gardiner-Hall gang had many members in the 1860s. One of them is buried just off the Burley Griffin Way at Binalong. John Gilbert was shot dead by police. John Dunn was born in Murrumburrah and made it to just 19 before finding the end of the noose in Darlinghurst Gaol.
Ben Hall’s exploits took him from Bathurst to Forbes and as far south as Gundagai. He was shot dead by police in May 1865 at Goobang Creek. The police claimed that they were acting under the protection of the Felons Apprehension Act 1865, which allowed any bushranger who had been specifically named under the terms of the Act to be shot, and killed by any person at any time with out warning.
At the time of Hall’s death, the Act had not yet come into force, resulting in controversy over the legality of his killing. It’s fair to say that if the police find Dezi Freeman alive he won’t be able to expect much care and comfort after allegedly killing two of their comrades.
What has happened to the Victorian Police Force of old? The Vic blue line used to just shoot people in their beds in the early hours of the morning, claim the person shot, had drawn a gun and did away with plenty of their so called problems. That was a reason it was caused the garden state! The old saying was it was due to the blood and bone. They even had one of the states most notorious criminals, Dennis Bruce Allen, who made $70,000 a week selling heroin, worried enough to front up at the ‘cop shop’ when instructed, instead of sleeping in past 8:00am.
The South West Slopes Times has provided the following information which has come from the State Library of Victoria. After this segment we will provide information from news sources from this week who are currently looking in to the background of who is currently Australia’s most wanted man, Dezi Freeman.
Quick facts
Ned Kelly:
• was born sometime between December 1854 and June 1855, in Beveridge, Victoria. His precise birthdate is not known.
• was the eldest son of eight children to John ‘Red’ Kelly and Ellen Quinn.
• as a child saved another boy from drowning – the boy’s family awarded him a green silk sash in recognition of his bravery.
• was twice convicted and sentenced to prison in the 1870s, first for assault and then for receiving a stolen horse.
• attacked Constable Fitzpatrick while he was attempting to arrest Dan Kelly in April 1878. Fitzpatrick was wounded by a pistol shot and warrants for the arrest of Ned and Dan Kelly were issued.
• with his gang ambushed and killed three police officers at Stringybark Creek, Victoria in October 1878.
• staged bank robberies at Euroa in 1878 and at Jerilderie in 1879.
• composed a document written down by gang member Joe Byrne known as the ‘Jerilderie Letter’ in which Kelly tried to justify his crimes.
• used suits of armour to protect himself and his gang members during a final battle with police at Glenrowan in June 1880.
• was tried, convicted and then executed in Melbourne on 11 November 1880.
How it all began
Kelly’s criminal life started early. In 1869, when he was 14, he was arrested for allegedly assaulting a Chinese man. In 1870 he was arrested again, this time for being a suspected accomplice of bushranger Harry Power. The assault charge was dismissed and the accomplice charges with Power were also dropped after witnesses could not identify Kelly. Power was also of the belief that Kelly had given him up in exchange for his freedom. It was not long be-ore Kelly was in trouble with the law again. In 1871 he served 3 months in prison for assault and later that year received a 3-year prison sentence for receiving a stolen horse.
The Fitzpatrick Incident
After his release from gaol Kelly worked as timber cutter and in other labouring jobs. In April 1878, a police officer named Fitzpatrick went to the Kelly home to arrest Kelly’s brother Dan for stealing horses. Fitzpatrick was shot in the wrist by Ned Kelly, and their mother Ellen was arrested for aiding and abetting an attempted murder. Ellen was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment by Judge Redmond Barry (who also sentenced Ned Kelly to death by hanging). Ned and Dan went into hiding, and were later joined by Ned’s friend Joe Byrne, and Dan’s friend Steve Hart.
Stringybark Creek
In October 1878, Ned, Dan, Joe and Steve headed for Bullock Creek, where they hoped to earn enough money to appeal Ellen Kelly’s sentence by running a whisky distillery. Shortly after their arrival, they received a warning that four policemen were planning to track them down. Ned rode around the surrounding areas and found sets of horse tracks leading to Stringybark Creek, close to where the gang was camped.
The gang ambushed the police camp at Stringybark Creek and found two of the four policemen – Constables Lonigan and McIntyre – standing around a fire. The gang drew their guns and Ned shot Lonigan. McIntyre surrendered.
When the other two policemen Sergeant Kennedy and Constable Scanlan returned they were shot by the gang. From this moment on, these four men were officially outlaws: the notorious Kelly gang.
Ned Kelly’s suit of armour
Prior to the Glenrowan siege and Ned’s ultimate capture – the Kelly gang began constructing the suits of armour from mould boards, the thick metal parts of a farmer’s plough. The suits allowed the gang to walk away unharmed from close-range shooting, but they also made the gang members – Ned in particular – seem larger, more intimidating; even ghostly. The shock factor of the metal-clad Kelly gave him some psychological advantage over his attackers during the confrontation with the police at Glenrowan. But the weight of the armour also greatly reduced his mobility which prevented any chance of escape.
A journalist present at the Glenrowan siege, Tom Carrington, described the metal-clad Kelly in this way: ‘there was no head visible and in the dim light of morning, with the steam rising from the ground, it looked for all the world like the ghost of Hamlet’s father with no head, only a very thick neck…. The figure continued gradually to advance, stopping every now and then and moving what looked like its headless neck mechanically round, and then raising one foot onto a log, and aiming and firing a revolver. Shot after shot was fired at it, but without effect’ Eventually under sustained police attack, Kelly was wounded several times in parts of his body not protected by the armour and brought down. The other gang members had been killed and Ned Kelly was captured. The police officers involved in the capture wanted to keep parts of the suits as souvenirs. Various pieces of the suits were separated, some making their way into private ownership. In 2001, Allison Holland’s research into the four sets of armour revealed that the set held by the Library, previously believed to be the set worn by Steve Hart, was in fact that worn by Ned Kelly. Both shoulder pieces were reunited with the set at later dates – one owned by State Library Victoria, the other by Museums Victoria.
The Jerilderie letter
There’s no denying that Ned Kelly was a notorious criminal, feared around Victoria and beyond as a robber and murderer. However, while it is not known how many sympathisers Kelly had in his day, over time a national myth emerged that pitched Kelly as a victim of police harassment and an underdog with the courage to challenge the authorities. This perception was no doubt fuelled by Kelly’s Jerilderie letter, an 8000-word document in which he tried to justify his crimes and make a case for unfair police persecution of himself and his family. Kelly dictated the letter to Joe Byrne, who later rewrote it in clearer handwriting. The letter was written in 1879, around the time that the gang robbed the Jerilderie Bank. Kelly gave the letter to the bank’s accountant, Edward Living, and told him to have it published. Living, however, hopped on a train to Melbourne and passed the letter on to the police.
Despite its rough language and lack of grammar or punctuation, the Jerilderie letter offers a valuable insight into Ned Kelly’s personality. It documents Kelly’s version of several incidents leading up to the Fitzpatrick incident and the murders of the police by the gang at Stringybark Creek. The language is at times very vivid and arguments are not always expressed coherently but Kelly’s chief belief that he was acting in self-defence is clearly evident. Also evident is his sense of aggrievement at what he saw as a long history of oppression of the Irish people by the British.
The events described in the letter, and in particular the colloquial language and passionate tone, also provided inspiration for Peter Carey’s prize-winning novel, The true history of the Kelly gang (2000).
Dezi Freeman
The suspected Porepunkah gunman had a criminal record stretching more than 30 years, but had not been convicted of any serious offences, court extracts show.
Dezi Freeman, 56, made a series of threats against police, and had his firearms licence cancelled, in the years before allegedly killing two police officers at a remote property in north-eastern Victoria on Tuesday. Victoria police is now investigating whether its risk assessment before the incident was adequate.
His court record, however, shows no history of violence or firearms-related offending. Victorian magistrates court extracts, released to Guardian Australia, show Freeman, formerly known as Desmond Filby, had matters dating back to September 1990, when he was fined in Sydney as a 21- year-old.
Freeman, then known as Filby, was fined several times in the early 1990s in the city, though the court records do not say what for. Because these fines of only a few hundred dollars were unpaid, NSW authorities issued a warrant for his arrest that would have resulted in him spending time in prison “in default of payment” for up to two days for each of the six fines. The court records show his first conviction related to exceeding the speed limit in Violet Town, in Victoria’s north-east, in October 1991. He also failed to pay this $155 fine, and in 1993 he was ordered to do eight hours of community work.
It appears he had no further interaction with the courts until 2018, when he appeared before the Myrtleford magistrates’ court and a 2013 traffic camera infringement was revoked. By this time, his name was recorded as Dezi Bird Freeman in the court system. In February 2021, a charge of breaching a personal safety intervention order dating back to June 2019 was withdrawn. Guardian Australia reported on Thursday last week that this matter is believed to relate to a neighbour.
Freeman appeared in court again in June 2022 and was found guilty of using a mobile phone while driving on the Great Alpine Road in September 2020 and refusing to provide a saliva sample for police. He applied for a judicial review in the supreme court, which was resolved last November.
In documents filed as part of that supreme court bid, Freeman said his family, including his wife and three children including a one-year-old, were homeless, and “living in a van and gazebo”.
He said they had always lived in the Alpine shire, and the family’s only source of income was a Centrelink payment. Freeman referred to “seven years of harassment and persecution by malicious police”, despite the court extract showing that over this period he only faced one charge, and had it withdrawn, and also succeeded in having a speeding fine withdrawn.
“Given the dire situation that we are in, it only takes a straw to break the camels back. The loss of license is more like a tree trunk than a straw,” he wrote. “The curtailing of my right to travel extends directly to my family and manifests itself as a form of child abuse by the State in so many ways.
“Whatever happens to me affects my family. The stress, hardships, injustice, misery and poverty exacerbated by not being able to drive affects us all.”
Freeman said in his submissions he had his “firearms licenses cancelled and lost my club membership” as a result of the driving matter, also claiming “we endured 4 acts of criminal trespass and harassment on our home by police and I have been dragged through 4 years of court hearings”. He said he had to pay more than $2,300 to have his wife’s van returned after it was “stolen” by police, a likely reference to the vehicle being impounded.
Freeman, whose bid for the supreme court review of his driving convictions failed, wrote towards the end of his submissions: “I hope I didn’t get too off track or be abrasive but I’m just doing the best that I can under extreme duress with what sanity I have left.”
He had been granted permission to drive while his appeal was outstanding, and the court records show he was convicted and fined in December 2023 for driving at 71km/h in a 60km/h zone in June that year. He was fined $450 with $90 costs. The magistrate in the case was Peter Dunn, who Freeman previously attempted to arrest.
Can the alleged crimes of Dezi Freeman really be put down to the road offences? Did this push him over the edge? If found alive or delivered alive to police, what motivations, reasons or defence will Freeman have to attempt to justify what has gone on?
A week on from the shooting deaths of two police officers in Victoria’s north-east, investigators are changing their approach to finding the man believed to be responsible. It hasn’t worked yet. Freeman vanished into bushland around his Porepunkah property after he allegedly opened fire on a group of police officers as they attempted to execute a warrant for what police state are historical sex offences. It’s clear that previous behaviour and interactions with police as sourced by the ABC and the Guardian don’t reflect this sort of behaviour.
Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim De Waart were killed in the shooting, while a third officer was seriously injured. This is where the similarities between Bushrangers from yesteryear and Freeman somewhat come in to line with each other. A member of society who under duress from police has decided to take the lives of police. Something the families of those officers will never get over. On Monday, police said their tack would change as the search for the fugitive, believed to be heavily armed, continued. During a press conference Superintendent Brett Kahan said officers believe Mr Freeman was alive and was being helped. Mr Kahan provided no evidence of this. It appears the media interactions are for the public’s benefit and not based on what is actually occurring in the field.
He said, “People know the whereabouts of the person who has [allegedly] killed two cops,” he said on Monday. “People have chosen for whatever reason, not to come forward.”
He urged anyone potentially harbouring the 56-year-old or who might know where he is, to come forward so police could formulate a surrender plan. Police will continue to saturate towns around Porepunkah in the hope that someone will approach them with information that could lead to a breakthrough. They specifically want information on locations the fugitive may have previously visited within Mount Buffalo National Park, which remains closed.
On Monday, officers established a public information caravan in the nearby town of Bright to encourage community members to come forward with information that could assist in their search. Providing an update on Tuesday morning, Superintendent Kahan said police had received a “remarkable” amount of information in the past 18 hours. He also said that posting a reward in relation for information was “an avenue that we will explore”.
This probably should have been done day 1 not entertained around day 10.
“All I say is that the number of police in the area is increasing at the end of the week [since the shooting],” he said. “So instead of decreasing our commitment to this, we’re increasing, and we’ll continue to throw the full arm of Victoria Police towards the search for this armed fugitive.”
Police also returned to Mr Freeman’s property in recent days. However, they will not reveal what prompted them to conduct further investigations there. The last confirmed sighting of Mr Freeman, according to police, was at the time of the shooting, despite officers looking into a number of alleged sightings reported by the public. It has left members of the local community uneasy as they try to return to normality. One resident, Andrea Siede, said she feels “on edge”. “Especially at night-time,” she said.
Ms Siede and her husband own two caravan parks at the foot of Mount Buffalo, where the fugitive was believed to have run towards. “Every noise you hear, every car that goes past the park … at night time it’s probably the worst,” she said.
Helicopters continued to fly overhead and hundreds of police officers, including from the Australian Federal Police and interstate, have descended on the picturesque Alpine town. Superintendent Kahan said more than 450 pieces of information had been received as of Monday. About the same number of officers on the ground.
Multiple search warrants had been executed in relation to the manhunt and a number of people arrested, including Mr Freeman’s wife, Amalia Freeman, and their teenage son.
Ms Freeman and her son were released pending further inquiries and on Sunday, she issued a statement through her lawyer, calling on her husband to hand himself in. Police confirmed Ms Freeman was in contact with authorities.
“Speaking to police and cooperating is two different things,” Superintendent Kahan said.
Businesses call for support
On Monday the search focused on areas around Mr Freeman’s property as well as at nearby Eurobin, and the Mount Buffalo National Park.
Ms Siede said the road closures near her caravan parks, combined with a general hesitation to visit the area, had led to all her bookings being cancelled. “We’ve still got our mortgages to pay, we’ve got our staff to pay. Our bills don’t stop and it just puts you on the back foot again,” she said.
“It sounds selfish when you talk about your business and finances … when two police officers have lost their lives but you can’t help but think ‘Okay we’ve got to try and push through this’ and ‘how long is this going to take?'”
The couple were forced to evacuate their park during the 2019/2020 Black Summer Bushfires and months later were again sending visitors away when COVID-lock-downs restricted travel.
“But we’re not holding our breath and we’re just planning towards the next few months ahead of us.”
Alpine Shire Mayor Sarah Nicholas said the local council was working on support services for people in immediate need a well as for the longer term.
“We’re really looking forward to being able to roll that out and work with our community about what’s needed,” she said in a video posted to social media on Monday night.
Federal independent member for Indi Helen Haines said early indicators pointed to a “significant loss of income across multiple sectors, including accommodation providers, hospitality businesses and local tourism operators”.
“With significant snow on our alps, these towns would in other circumstances be a hive of activity and are particularly reliant on winter trade,” she said.
“The impact on casual staff who have lost work is also significant. “Given the nature of the incident, the profile of the offender and the scale of the police operation, it is not clear what the longer-term impact will be.” She said she was in regular contact with the local council and chamber of commerce.
With the search now in its tenth day, Victoria Police is also looking towards the funerals of the two slain officers. Separate services will be held on Friday and the following Monday with Police Veterans Victoria confirming that veterans and serving members would be welcome to attend and pay their respects.
“We honour Neal and Vadim’s service, and the ultimate sacrifice they made in the line of duty,” a spokesperson said.
On Tuesday morning, Superintendent Kahan reiterated the force’s commitment to capturing the alleged offender. “I hear all the time that Dezi is a master of navigating the bush,” he said. “But I’d like to say Victoria Police are pretty good at it too. So the hunt will continue until we find him.”
Where’s Dezi? It appears, only Dezi knows.
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