The two Michaels

Michael Scanlan came to Victoria Police in 1865 by way of a classroom. He had trained as a teacher in Ireland and had never policed or soldiered. In Melbourne he was made an aide to the Chief Commissioner, found the pay of a foot constable would not stretch, and took a night job as an usher at a theatre. It ended the evening he showed his own superior officer to a seat. He transferred to the mounted branch and in 1871 was posted to Mansfield.

Michael Kennedy had been the only policeman at Doon since 1870. The two worked the same stock theft cases across the same country and in 1873 they brought in the Donnelly brothers, the worst cattle thieves in the district, which earned Kennedy his first stripe. They were not alike. Kennedy did not drink at all and talked to everyone. Scanlan was reserved until he had a few in him, and the drink had already earned him reprimands. The morning he turned up to work drunk it was Kennedy who told him plainly that he was about to waste a good career. Scanlan cut it back. He became a fixture at the Kennedy table in Doon, reciting verse and singing Irish ballads late into the evening with Michael and Bridget.

The work was the same for both of them. Up at half past five, seven days a week, twelve days of leave a year, and five or six hundred miles a month in the saddle riding from selection to selection asking about lost stock and trouble. Kennedy kept a weekly diary of duty and occurrences and recorded everything, down to what each horse was fed; the pencil marks are still on the old Mansfield stable wall. In between there were fence disputes to settle, crop and herd statistics to collect, vaccinations to enforce, truants to find and bushfires to think about. A country policeman was expected to know the tracks, the soil and the people, and to tell the next station what he knew.

The drought of 1876 to 1878 made all of it harder. Farmers cut saplings to feed stock and impounded each other's wandering cattle, and thieves worked the confusion. The two Michaels began staking out the big farms that had not yet been robbed and watching the saleyards. One night they came out of the bush either side of Daniel McIntosh, a known sheep thief, with a flock that was not his. Kennedy gave him a choice and McIntosh returned the sheep. He got two years in March 1878. The North East Stock Protection Society paid a reward of sixty pounds, forty of it to Kennedy, who passed a share to the locals who had given him information, put half of what was left on the house and banked the rest. Money, he told Bridget, might be needed before anyone expected it.

At the end of 1877 Kennedy dug a cellar under Westmeath because Bridget wanted one and the tradesman's quote had astonished him. He built the roof first so the children could not fall in. Scanlan helped. The night it opened the two of them entertained both families until the small hours.

Ten months later Kennedy was asked to form a party for the Wombat Ranges and Scanlan, by then at Mooroopna near Shepparton, was his first call. He was regarded as a good tracker who knew that country. He accepted at once and said goodbye to his friends in Mooroopna more seriously than they were used to. He had no family in the colony. If he did not come back, he told them, they were to take his dog.

He arrived at Mansfield on the Wednesday leading a chestnut horse for the sergeant. On the Saturday morning the two of them took their lunch and rode north down the creek and east in a wide loop, looking for tracks, and found nothing. They came back along the miners' bridle path just before six. Scanlan was some yards behind the sergeant, his rifle slung, when the firing began. He tried to get down and get the rifle round at the same time. His horse threw him and he landed tangled in the sling, hit three times on the right side. A fourth shot under the right arm went through both lungs. McIntyre, who watched it, swore he never fired and never had the chance.

He was buried at two o'clock on the Tuesday at the Catholic end of Mansfield cemetery with Bridget Kennedy and her children among the mourners. There was no relative to stand for him. The priest, Father Scanlan, was no relation either, though the town had assumed he was; he told the congregation that the way the constable had conducted himself in the district would have made him proud to call the man kin. His belongings were auctioned. His friend in Mooroopna kept the dog.