What the doctor found

Samuel Reynolds had been the Kennedys' doctor since Doon. He had strapped Michael's crushed ankle in 1873 after a police horse called Ginger Pop shied at a snake and left him in the dust, and had sat with the family through the eleven months of John Thomas's short life. On the night of Sunday 27 October 1878 he rode into the Wombat Ranges with Constable McIntyre, who had been out of them for a few hours.

The first party was small: McIntyre; Constable James Allwood, a first class bushman who had served under Kennedy; two volunteers, Percy Bromfield and Willie Reynolds, who had mined at Stringybark the year before; and the doctor. They picked up the sawmiller, Monk, on the way and reached the clearing at about two in the morning, striking matches. They found Lonigan and Scanlan, and the sergeant's notebook near the burnt tent with pages torn out, and called for him, and got nothing back. At first light they saw what they had found. Both men had been shot more times than McIntyre had witnessed, and both had their pockets turned out. A gum tree near where the sergeant and Scanlan had ridden in was pocked with bullets. The searchers tied the two constables across Monk's draught horse Tommy and led him back to Mansfield by one in the afternoon. The station occurrence book records that no trace of Sergeant Kennedy could be found.

The town was frightened. Two constables were left in it and a couple of firearms. The town telegraphed Melbourne for police and arms and got three constables sometime after midnight. Archibald McKenzie, who had lent the tent and was a friend to both dead men, wanted to go out with the next party. As the story is still told in Mansfield, his wife Mary, who had been orphaned and widowed once already, hid his trousers, and won.

On Tuesday morning Reynolds conducted the post mortems at Mansfield Hospital. Lonigan had been shot through the right eye. The doctor traced the wound with his finger and found it ran level, diagonally toward the back of the head, which told him the man had been standing with his head turned back over his shoulder, running. It could not have been fired down at a man lying behind a log. He noted the separate wounds to the left arm and the outer left thigh. Scanlan had four: hip, chest, the top of the breastbone and the shoulder, and the fatal one under the right arm through both lungs. Henry Kitchen, a local justice, held the magisterial inquiry and found that both had died of gunshot wounds inflicted as McIntyre had described. The two men were buried at two o'clock, and a second party of twenty went out under Sub Inspector Pewtress and searched until dark. Four constables were left on watch at the sawmill.

Pewtress, one of the fifty men recruited in London in 1852 to found the colony's force, had never worked in the bush and said so in writing to Sadleir at Benalla. He thought it near useless to lead a handful of men after four well armed bushrangers and admitted he might, through ignorance, lead them into danger. The letter never arrived; the constable carrying it convinced himself he was being followed by two of the killers, turned his horse loose and hid. The riders were a squatter's sons. Pewtress went out anyway.

On the Wednesday McIntyre was examined and found bruised the length of his back, and was ordered to rest. He went out instead with the third party, twenty five men under Pewtress and the shire president James Tomkins with Monk again guiding and rations for several days. They camped at half past six. On Thursday morning they walked a line a mile south of the camp and back, then a mile north along McIntyre's escape route, spread out and moving west of the creek. At about eight Henry Glendower Sparrow, an overseer at Mount Battery station, sang out. Kennedy lay a quarter of a mile north west of the camp under his own coat, which had been thrown over him afterwards. The men counted the bullet marks in the tree behind him and the scuffed ground at its foot. His pockets were out; his money, watch, chain and ring were gone.

They wrapped him in bagging, then in the coat, then in a blue Inverness cloak one of the searchers gave up. Constable Robert Orr and two others lifted him onto a pack saddle to Monk's mill, where a spring cart was waiting. They covered him in gum branches against the flies. Orr drove, and wept the whole way.

On Friday 1 November Reynolds examined him at the hospital. Because of the state of the body it was a post mortem only, and the report gave one cause of death: a gunshot wound to the chest. The inquest recorded the rest from McIntyre and Pewtress: a wound under the arm, another to the right side of the chest, one to the temple, and damage to the right side of the face and the ear. The funeral was that afternoon.

Pewtress wrote to the Chief Commissioner afterwards to say what the people of Mansfield had done. They had gone out again and again, he said, under fear of attack, to bring their sergeant home.