Matthew Allen reviews Lachlan Strahan, Justice in Kelly Country: The Story of the Cop Who Hunted Australia’s Most Notorious Bushrangers (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2022).
Justice in Kelly Country is an engaging blend of family and police history. This is the story of Lachlan Strahan’s great-great grandfather, Senior Constable Anthony Strahan, and his career in the Victorian police in the late nineteenth century, notably during the Kelly Outbreak. As the author reports, Constable Strahan was a minor but important figure in the Kelly legend, an active member of the police mobilised to catch the gang. Pointedly, he was called out in the famous Jerilderie letter, for allegedly threatening Ned that ‘he would not ask me to stand he would shoot me first like a dog’ (203).
The discussion of the Kelly Outbreak is an obvious focus but also a particular strength of the book. The author is intimately familiar with the (copious and often repetitive) literature and offers a valuable and critical guide to the narrow path between the pro and anti-Kelly camps. In his detailed unpacking of the alleged threat, he shows that the evidence that Constable Strahan actually said these words is thin, and the tale has clearly grown in the telling of a series of historians who went beyond the evidence. However, the ‘threat’ probably captures a truth about Constable Strahan who is shown, like Kelly, to have had a temper that sometimes veered out of control. More importantly, the author shows how the Kelly legend, and his ancestor’s role in it, have echoed through the generations of his family. In the most powerful passage of the book, the author reveals that his father, Frank Strahan, was a radical nationalist who fully embraced the Kelly myth and disowned the man who had ‘helped hunt “our Ned”’ (214). This is family history at its most rewarding, showing how inherited memories resonate with the larger national story.
But the author also unpacks in detail many much less familiar episodes in Constable Strahan’s career, notably his leading role in arresting two bushrangers, James Smith and Thomas Brady, found guilty and hanged for the murder of a publican, John Watt, in 1872, known at the time as the Wooragee Outrage. Interestingly, like Kelly, Brady wrote a statement intended for publication, attacking the legal system and claiming to be innocent, but like the Jerilderie letter (though more successfully) it was officially suppressed.
Justice in Kelly Country tells a compelling story but grounds it carefully in archival evidence and the balance between story-telling and evidentiary analysis is a key theme of the book. I enjoyed the opening prologue which imagines a second encounter between Kelly and Constable Strahan, an integral part of the family memory, that probably never happened. In this retelling, Kelly spares the constable because, in Kelly’s imagined words, ‘You and your wife did right by my mother’ (xii). The author uses this outburst of fiction to frame the book as a story ‘based on sources from the time’, and accordingly ‘more interesting, less expected and certainly more complicated than fiction’ (xiii), and he makes a virtue of clearly identifying where he ventures beyond the sources (in pointed contrast to some other historians of Ned Kelly). However, I found his repeated use of speculative rhetorical questions – ‘Was Anthony enjoying his newfound bachelorhood?’ (59) – became tiresome. I imagine other academic readers will share my wish that Strahan had addressed his methods more directly, telling us why he chose to speculate, what informed his speculations, and indeed, more about the limitations of his sources; though I appreciate that this may not have been possible in a commercial publication.
Understandably, the book’s focus is exclusively on Constable Strahan and so opportunities for a broader analysis of rural policing in the period are largely neglected. But Strahan’s story offers important insights into policework. The author draws our attention to Constable Strahan’s workload, which included not only exhausting rides through difficult terrain in pursuit of bushrangers, but also undercover surveillance, the challenge of gathering testimony to build a successful case, the role of police in court proceedings, and frustrating interactions with police bureaucracy in requesting reimbursement, accessing rewards and promotion, responding to complaints and engaging in disciplinary proceedings. Over his long career Constable Strahan was repeatedly forced to account for his conduct – with mixed success – and the author’s account of these interactions points to an intriguing archive of internal police bureaucracy that might offer important insights for future historians. More scholarship is needed that seriously engages with policing as labour, and with public perceptions of policing, perhaps especially in this period as the forces professionalised.
The author’s use of these records also points to some limitations of this project. Constable Strahan’s rare encounters with Indigenous people are handled sensitively (though he sometimes falls into the trap of staging their lives as a tragedy) but point to the possibility of a more systematic analysis of post-frontier policing. Reading between the lines, it is clear that constables functioned as the administrators of an emerging system of colonial control that depended less on arrest and more on forms of bureaucracy. More broadly, the story of Constable Strahan shows that rural policing was as much a project of administrative governance as it was of law enforcement. In the light of the archival turn, the records this system produced might be profitably read less as evidence of the past and more as an exercise in official story-telling.
