Case File 01: The Red Scarf
The Kelly Outbreak, Stringybark Creek to Glenrowan, Victoria, 1878 to 1880.
Case File 01, Volume 2: the real file
This page is for readers of Outback Case Files, Volume 2: Bushrangers and Gold. It describes real crimes of the bushranging years, factually and without gore. If you have come here from a puzzle, finish your accusation first: this page gives the game away.
Campfire Quests acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands on which these stories took place. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this page may contain the names, images and stories of people who have died.
The Kelly Outbreak: Stringybark Creek to Glenrowan, Victoria, 1878 to 1880 (Ned Kelly)
In the book this case appears as “The Red Scarf”. The names of people and most places were changed to make the puzzle work. Below is what really happened.
On 26 October 1878 Ned Kelly, Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart killed Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlan at Stringybark Creek in the Wombat Ranges; Constable Thomas McIntyre escaped to raise the alarm. The gang was outlawed, robbed the banks at Euroa and Jerilderie, and on 26 June 1880 murdered the police informer Aaron Sherritt to lure a police train to Glenrowan, where they had torn up the rails.
Schoolteacher Thomas Curnow stopped the train with a candle and a red scarf early on 28 June 1880. In the siege that followed Byrne was shot dead and Dan Kelly and Hart died in the burning Glenrowan Inn. Ned Kelly, wounded in the legs, was tried before Sir Redmond Barry in Melbourne, convicted of the murder of Constable Lonigan on 29 October 1880, and hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880. Queensland Native Police trackers under Sub-Inspector Stanhope O'Connor were on the train and in the siege; Curnow received £1,000 of the reward, the trackers £50 each that they were never paid.
How it was really cracked
The real man with the scarf was Thomas Curnow, the Glenrowan schoolteacher. On Sunday 27 June 1880 he spent the day in the Glenrowan Inn making himself useful to Ned Kelly, who let him take his sick wife and family home late that night on his promise to stay there. Curnow waited until the sentry went in, then walked up the line with a candle and his wife's red llama-wool scarf and stopped the pilot engine at about 2 am on Monday 28 June. The police special, carrying Superintendent Hare, Sub-Inspector O'Connor and the Queensland Native Police trackers, walked into Glenrowan instead of going off the embankment.
Kelly, in forty-four kilograms of plough-steel armour, was brought down at dawn by Sergeant Arthur Steele with shotgun blasts to the legs. Joe Byrne was shot dead in the inn; Dan Kelly and Steve Hart died when it was burned. Curnow was paid £1,000 from the reward and moved to Ballarat for his safety. The six Queensland trackers, Hero, Johnny, Jimmy, Jack, Barney and Sambo, were each allotted £50 that the two governments never paid them.
Read more
These are public sources we used. They open in a new tab and carry more detail than this page, including the places where the old records disagree with each other.
A word about respect
These were real people, and in most of these districts their descendants are still here: police families, bush families, and the Aboriginal communities whose trackers did so much of the finding. We have kept to the public record and left out the gore on purpose. If you share this page, please share it the way you would want your own family talked about.
Banner photo: Glenrowan from the air, by Chensiyuan (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.