The
Catholic Weekly
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18 January 2004
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A hero at Glenrowan
IN THE LINE OF DUTY: Fr Matthew Gibney braved fire and gunfire in the Kelly siege
By Dr Joe Morley
A priest who was later to become Bishop of Perth earned a place in Australia’s bushranger history in June 1880 when Victorian police were besieging the Kelly Gang at a hotel in the village of Glenrowan, nestled between Benalla and Wangaratta.
Members of the Kelly gang, who were led by Ned Kelly, had been holed up in the hotel for two days. And a a large police contingent was exchanging fire with them.
Dean Matthew Gibney’s heroic part in the closing stages of the siege
was widely acclaimed.
He told his story to the Royal Commission set up in 1881 to investigate
the circumstances of the siege after the trial and execution of Ned Kelly.
Ned, the only gang member to survive the siege, was hanged at Old Melbourne Jail on November 11, 1880.
Matthew Gibney, who was born on November 2, 1837, in the Aghaknock parish
of Killeshandra In Ireland, studied for the priesthood at All Hallows
College in Dublin.
He was ordained there on June 14, 1863, for the West Australian diocese
of Perth, where he arrived in December 1863.
He was appointed Vicar General to the then Bishop of Perth, Bishop Martin Griver (Apostolic administrator 1862–73, bishop 1873–86).
Fr Gibney plunged into the task of ministering to the Catholics spread over the vast area of the diocese.
He would ride for days, often thirsty in the parched land, swim
flooded rivers in the wet season and endure many other hardships
to visit
outlying settlements
and homesteads.
On one such visit to Martinup, near Broomehill, he stopped for
a meal at the home of Anna Maria Norrish Treasure.
Mrs Treasure gave him some freshly baked scones to eat.
Unfortunately, while making the scones, she mistakenly used arsenic
instead of baking soda.
Fr Gibney almost died.
As part of his activities Dean Gibney established an orphanage for girls in Perth in 1868 and for boys at Subiaco in 1871.
The boys’ orphanage was later damaged severely by lightning, so Dean Gibney toured the eastern states of Victoria and New South Wales to collect money to help rebuild it.
So it was that he boarded a train in the Victorian town of Kilmore on June 29, 1880, to travel to the border town of Albury, NSW.
When the train stopped at Benalla he heard about the
Kelly gang’s stand
at Glenrowan.
The gang was still under siege, although Ned Kelly
himself had been severely wounded and captured.
There was no Catholic priest at the scene, so Fr
Gibney decided to go to Glenrowan himself.
He discovered on arrival that Ned had been taken
to the stationmaster’s
office.
The priest, assisted by Dr John Nicholson, fought his way through the crowd of onlookers outside the office and knelt beside Ned, who was lying on the floor, bleeding.
He and the doctor stemmed the flow of blood.
Then, alone with Ned for an hour, Fr Gibney heard the bushranger’s confession and administered the last rites.
He then asked Ned if it would be safe for him (Fr Gibney) to go to the hotel where the other members of the gang were holed up and ask them to surrender.
Ned said: “I wouldn’t advise you to go. Thinking you are a policeman in disguise, they will surely shoot you.”
Dean Gibney then asked Ned’s sister Kate, who, by then, was at Ned’s side, if she would go to the hotel and tell her brother Dan that a Catholic priest wanted to come to see him and ask him to persuade the others to allow him to enter the hotel.
At 3pm a constable made his way to the back of the hotel, screened from the crowd’s view and set the walls alight using straw and kerosene.
Kate tried to reach the hotel but was restrained by the police.
Fr Gibney then said he was going to go there.
As the flames had spread to the roof and walls of the building, the police officer in charge tried to prevent him doing so.
But Fr Gibney disobeyed the policeman’s order and ran to the hotel verandah, calling out: “I am not controlled by you. I am going to do my duty and there is no time to lose.”
His words were greeted with loud clapping and calls of encouragement from the crowd of onlookers, estimated by a Melbourne Herald reporter at ‘more than one thousand’.
As Gibney reached the verandah, someone in the crowd called out that one of the Glenrowan townspeople who had been in the hotel when the shooting started had not escaped with the other villagers.
The man, Martin Cherry, was still inside the hotel.
The police officer later said that he saw Fr Gibney make the sign of the cross on his forehead as he stepped into the burning building.
The priest entered the hotel with his arms raised above his head to show he was not armed. No shots were fired from the interior.
A policeman ran towards the hotel, intending to accompany the priest, but the flames drove him back.
First Fr Gibney went into the empty dining room of the hotel and then to the bar room, the walls of which were ablaze.
He saw Joe Byrne on the floor outside a passage way. He was dead.
Dean Gibney called out: “For God’s sake, men. Let me speak to you. I am a Catholic priest.” There was no reply.
The priest stepped over Byrne’s body and burst through a burning doorway into a back room.
A cry of horror went up from the crowd as his figure was seen in the midst of the flames.
In the bedroom off the passageway he came upon “two headless boys (Dan Kelly and Steve Hart) lying full length on the floor on their backs with their heads pillowed on sacking” and still wearing the improvised armour.
A dead dog lay with them.
With the walls and the calico ceiling blazing, Fr Gibney knelt down and felt the pulse of the nearer of the boys.
He was lifeless.
Then he checked that the other boy was also dead.
Fr Gibney plunged into the wall of flame and got out the back door.
He called out: “They are all dead.”
[In his evidence before the 1881 Royal Commission, Dean Gibney said he believed Dan Kelly and Steve Hart committed suicide, possibly with poison.]
When he reached the front of the building, amidst cheers from the crowd, he saw a policeman in the still burning bar room with his pistol raised as if he was about to fire into the lifeless body of Joe Byrne. He yelled out: “Don’t shoot. The man is dead.”
The local man, Martin Cherry, was found alive and dragged from the hotel but he died soon afterwards from gunshot wounds and burns.
Two policemen went into the smouldering remains of the hotel and dragged the charred body of Joe Byrne outside.
The
body was
propped up
against a
wall and
photographed
by
newspaper
photographers.
Late
in the
day the
police released
what was
left of
the bodies
of Dan
Kelly and
Steve Hart
to their
relatives
who,
after a
wake, buried
them in
nearby Greta
cemetery.
Fr Gibney did not join with those who complained that the police did not give him any of the reward money for the capture and elimination of the gang.
When the Royal Commission ended he resumed his task of raising money to pay for the restoration of the orphanage.
Then he returned to Perth, where, on September 29, 1886, he became Coadjutor Bishop of the diocese.
He was appointed Bishop of Perth five weeks later and ordained into that post on January 23, 1887.
He resigned in May 1910 and was appointed bishop of the titular diocese of Balanea. Bishop Gibney was 88 when he died on June 22, 1925.
The Kelly gang were wanted over the killing of three policemen – Kennedy, Scanlon and Lonigan – at Stringybark Creek and bank robberies in Euroa (Victoria) and Jerilderie (NSW). And Joe Byrne had just killed an associate, Aaron Sherritt, while he (Sherritt) was under police protection.
The gang captured Glenrowan railway station on Saturday, June 27, 1880, then herded a number of people into Mrs Ann Jones’ hotel nearby. The telegraph wires were cut, then Ned Kelly ordered a railway fettler to tear up sections of the railway track to make access to Glenrowan by train impossible.
The gang and their hostages heard the sound of an approaching train – carrying police from Melbourne – early on the Monday morning.
They waited for the sounds of a derailment. But Ned’s plans had been foiled by a schoolteacher, Thomas Curnow, who stopped the train before it reached the broken track. The Kelly gang’s last stand was about to begin.