Four goodbyes on the Violet Town road

On the morning of Thursday 24 October 1878 Constable Thomas Lonigan rode out of Violet Town for Mansfield. He got a short way along the road and turned back to hold his children again. Then he rode on, and turned back again. He did it four times. The last two turns brought him back three miles and six miles. The Kilmore Free Press printed the story a fortnight later, when the whole colony knew how the ride ended.

He was thirty seven. He had been born in County Sligo in 1841 to William and Mary Ann Lonigan, which put his childhood inside the Famine years, and he was raised Catholic. The love of his life was Anglican. He changed his faith to marry Maria Siggins, whom everyone called Charlotte, and their first daughter Emily was born in Ireland in 1868. The three of them landed at Melbourne in January 1870 on the Caduceus.

By 1871 he had joined the Artillery Corps, which was then the door into Victoria Police, and before the year was out he was a constable. He transferred to the mounted branch in 1872 and served at Kilmore, Beechworth, Benalla and the Ovens before Violet Town. Eight years in the colony, a move every year or two, four children with Emily now ten, and a fifth on the way. His record described him as intelligent and efficient. The Lonigans had just begun to feel settled.

He was not Kennedy's choice. Kennedy wanted three men and had them: Scanlan, McIntyre and himself. His superiors overruled him because none of the three had ever seen Ned Kelly except in a photograph, and they wanted someone who could know him on sight. Lonigan could. In Benalla the year before he had helped bring Kelly under control in a street scuffle after an arrest, and Kelly was reported to have told him that if he ever shot a man, Lonigan would be the first. The remark was repeated across the colony after October 1878.

At Stringybark Creek on the Saturday his job was the horses. They wandered after the thin grass and he kept fetching them back. Between times he read a newspaper pamphlet McIntyre had lent him, an interview with the old bushranger Harry Power. Around noon he heard something down at the creek that he did not like, went to the tent and buckled on his revolver. Just before five he was feeding the big fire on the north side of the logs when four armed men stood up in the spear grass and called on the two policemen to bail up.

He ran. He was heading for the cover of the logs, his long coat in the way, his right hand pulling at the flap over his revolver. He was shot through the right eye as he looked back over his shoulder and fell where he ran. He had not drawn the weapon. McIntyre's statement, written the next afternoon, says he made a motion to draw his revolver and was shot. When Dr Reynolds traced the wound three days later he found it ran level from the eye toward the back of the skull, which meant a man upright and turning, not one crouched behind a log with his head up. It was what McIntyre had said.

Two other wounds, to the left arm and the left thigh, had no place in McIntyre's account. He saw one shot fired at Lonigan. The doctor, the searchers and later examinations all found the extra wounds. They were made after.

As the family tells it, Charlotte Lonigan had barely been told before she was put into a carriage and driven to Mansfield, and she arrived as the funeral was beginning on the Tuesday afternoon. People who saw her wrote that she could barely stand. She lost the baby. She moved the children to Carlton and lived on family help and charity until the pension came through in July 1880. She died fourteen years after her husband, at fifty, when the youngest had just come of age.

The men who found Thomas Lonigan at first light on the Monday said his face looked surprised.