Three revolvers and a borrowed shotgun

By the evening of Thursday 24 October 1878 the four policemen at Mansfield had this much between them. Three service revolvers. Eighteen spare rounds. Two pairs of handcuffs, one for each Kelly brother. Two weeks of basic rations for a packhorse. That was the inventory of a Victoria Police party about to ride into the Wombat Ranges after two armed men who had been living there for six months.

The reason is in the pay book. A constable started on six shillings and sixpence a day, less than the going rate for country labour and well short of a tradesman. Out of that he paid twelve pounds for his uniform: trousers, shirt, tunic, jumper, white gloves and boots. The black helmet, worth nine shillings, was the one item issued free. Anything found damaged on parade was replaced at his own expense. Most men took a year or more to clear the uniform debt, which is why they wore plain clothes on patrol and saved the livery for town. There was no wet weather kit worth the name.

Weapons followed the same rule. A revolver was the standard arm and, as Kennedy's party found, not every man had one. Ammunition was charged to the man who fired it, so nobody practised. A constable who wanted a rifle found one himself. Sergeant Kennedy, who had learned the Spencer repeating rifle riding gold escorts in 1865, knew exactly what he did not have.

So they borrowed. McIntyre talked Constable Thomas Meehan out of his revolver. Kennedy went to the Church of England minister, the Reverend Samuel Sandiford, and came back with a shotgun, which at least might bag a kangaroo for the pot. At Lonigan's urging he stopped a gold escort passing through from Woods Point and begged the loan of its Spencer rifle and its shells, which left the escort thinner on the road to Benalla. The tent came from Kennedy's friend Archibald McKenzie. Kennedy's own horse, a young white mare, was ruled out by Superintendent Sadleir as too easy to see in the bush, so Scanlan brought a chestnut up from Mooroopna for him. Lonigan and McIntyre took their pick of the spare horses in the paddock and had one day to get them used to hobbles.

That was the kit that rode out at dawn on the Friday. The shotgun went to McIntyre, the cook. On the Saturday he fired it twice at a noise by the creek and then at two parrots, which he was plucking for dinner when the camp was taken. The men who took it had, between them, more than twenty five loaded shots before anyone needed to reload. The police fired none.

Afterwards Mansfield had nothing. The few weapons the station owned had gone into the ranges with the party. The town asked Melbourne for arms so people could defend their own houses, and waited past midnight for the first three constables to arrive from other districts. Spencer rifles were eventually sent up from Melbourne, to men most of whom had never been shown how to use one.

The Royal Commission got to this in its first report, on 6 July 1881. Among its four recommendations was that immediate steps be taken to arm the mounted police with the regulation Martini Henry carbine, alongside a proper patrol system for the north east and the permanent employment of Aboriginal trackers. It took three dead policemen and a public inquiry to put a rifle in a trooper's hands as a matter of course.

The Reverend Sandiford, who had lent the shotgun, walked in Michael Kennedy's funeral procession on 1 November.