Two hundred people in the rain

It rained all day. Bridget Kennedy came to the church with Michael's parents, Hugh and Roseanna, who had followed their son from Westmeath to Melbourne and then to farms in the district. At the door they were met by the Anglican Bishop of Melbourne, James Moorhouse, and his wife Mary, who walked in with them. Father Scanlan took the service. The Reverend Sandiford, who had lent the sergeant his shotgun a week earlier, walked in the procession, and so did the Presbyterian minister, Reverend Reid. Nobody recorded whether three churches walking together was meant as a gesture against the sectarian habits of the colony or simply as a town closing ranks. About two hundred people came, which was Mansfield.

The Argus told Melbourne that the sergeant had been a vigilant officer, generally well liked, and that there was much sympathy for his widow and five children. The station's watch house logbook recorded that a first class sub officer, chosen for his special fitness to search for Kelly and party, had been shot by them near Wombat.

The burials had been hurried, and the three graves were apart. The town wanted the men side by side under one stone and both widows agreed, but the new parish priest, Father O'Reilly, would not have an Anglican in Catholic ground nor a body moved out of it, and Lonigan had died an Anglican. The graves stayed where they were, near but not next to each other. A story told in Mansfield has the people of Castlepollard sending a May Bush seed to be planted at the grave when the news reached Westmeath. The Spiraea that grows in the cemetery now is a replacement, but the family still calls it the May Bush.

Within two months the town had a committee. It sent a circular through the colony asking councils and the public to subscribe, and the case it made was not about grief. Kennedy, Scanlan and Lonigan had died bravely doing a duty they were specially directed to carry out; they were all three men of merit in the force; and it was desirable to show the constabulary that its work in onerous and dangerous service would not be unfeelingly ignored. The first idea had been a memorial at the creek itself, which the newspapers were already calling Murderers Gully. Cooler heads pointed out that the killers were still at large, and the committee chose the middle of High Street instead, where anyone entering the town would see it.

The design came from J Hanson of Carlton: a white marble scroll about twenty five feet high with the names, ages and ranks in black lettering and the particulars of how the men died. It was unveiled on 22 April 1880 in a downpour, with the crowd standing in mud and the speeches kept short. Chief Commissioner Standish, his voice unsteady, said this was not the occasion to speak of the causes that had prevented the capture of the assassins, that he hoped justice would not be long, and that in the whole department there had not been a better or truer man or a more trustworthy and energetic one than Sergeant Kennedy, who had fought to the end against overwhelming odds. Scanlan and Lonigan, he said, were also good and deserving men. Bridget and the children stood in the rain with both sets of parents and with the Lonigans, and afterwards took the good wishes of the crowd. Glenrowan was nine weeks away.

The police at Mansfield did not forget the family. The family recalls that a sergeant taught Jimmy Kennedy to read at the station desk, the boy on his knee until he was tall enough for the chair, and that the Kennedy children did their homework at the station every afternoon while Bridget cooked. Bridget was buried beside Michael and John Thomas in 1924.

The graves have not always been left alone. In May 1960 the three headstones were vandalised, and the Mansfield Courier reported it. Jimmy Kennedy, then the last of the sergeant's children, was told as gently as his family could manage; he died two years later without having made sense of it. The family restored the graves in the 1970s. In 2015 the Freemasons Hospital in Melbourne named an emergency wing for the three men. In 2018 a memorial to them was unveiled at Stringybark Creek itself, a hundred and forty years after the committee first proposed one and decided the ground was not yet safe.