Bridget Tobin came from Tipperary in a family of Catholic tenant farmers who had decided to go somewhere they could own the ground they worked. They landed at Melbourne in 1864. She played the piano well. At St Francis' Church on Lonsdale Street she noticed a young Irishman, lately a Dublin policeman, standing by his parents, well dressed and talking to everyone, and he noticed her; the following Sunday he introduced his parents to hers. They danced. On 17 December 1868 they were married at her parents' farm at Dry Creek and went to live in a hut at Maindample, and then to Doon, where he was the town's first resident policeman, and in 1877 to the brick house beside the Mansfield police station that they named Westmeath. By October 1878 there were five children under nine and another coming.
Her husband's superintendent came to the door every day of the week the search parties were out. On the Thursday he came with different news and told her the body was not in a state she should see; the doctor agreed, and she never did. Within weeks she lost the baby. The family recalls that she shook, that she barely slept, and that she held herself together for the children, teaching them their father's sayings and pet names and playing the games he had played so that he stayed in the house.
The money question was immediate. There was no provision for the widow of a policeman killed on duty. The Police Board offered an allowance. Mansfield thought it was not enough and said so to Parliament: in 1879 the Shire Council laid a petition before the Legislative Assembly that the provision for Mrs Kennedy should leave her no room for special grief on account of its inadequacy, that it should secure her a position at least equal to the one she had held in her husband's lifetime, that she had been ill since the tragedy, and that she had medical bills and five helpless children. Members pressed the Chief Secretary, Graham Berry, to pay her the full salary. The local member, James Graves, took the case into the Assembly. The government widened it to Charlotte Lonigan, who had moved her four children to Carlton and was living on relatives and charity. Berry agreed. The pensions, based on each husband's pay at his death, took effect in July 1880, with a deed that paid each child one hundred pounds at twenty one. The children drew on it as they came of age.
The film compresses this into one woman writing until the law changed. The record shows a widow, a council and a member of Parliament pushing the same door for twenty one months, and the door opening.
What she did next is in the town's memory more than in any archive. Locals kept the family in the house when she was close to losing it. The police treated the Kennedys as their own. In 1894, with the children through school, she opened a fruit and vegetable shop beside Westmeath. It grew into a general store and became a fixture of Mansfield. In later years Mary served the customers while Bridget, in the sitting room, confirmed the prices and kept the conversation going through the door. The shop closed in 1917 and she moved to Melbourne to live with her daughter Kate. The family recalls that she was never at peace with the way her husband's killer was written about, and that the Kelly films and the newspaper pieces around them brought on her worst periods. She died in 1924, forty six years after Michael, and was buried beside him and John Thomas at Mansfield.
The watch went a longer way round. It was taken from Michael's body at Stringybark Creek with his money, his chain and his ring. A retired constable named William Wallace spent fifteen years tracing it and in 1893 brought it back to Bridget, who kept it until she died. In 1953, at Mary's funeral, the Chief Commissioner of Police found himself talking to Jimmy Kennedy, the baby of 1877 and by then the last of the sergeant's children. Some time afterwards he came to Jimmy's farm and gave him his father's watch to wear for the rest of his life. Jimmy wound it every morning and pinned it to his coat.
Sources. Petition of the Mansfield Shire Council to the Legislative Assembly, 1879, and the Chief Secretary's reply, as recorded in Black Snake chapter 37. Parliament of Victoria, former member record for James Howlin Graves. The Argus, 1 November 1878. Black Snake, chapters 3, 22, 37 and the epilogue. Family recollections as identified.