The funerals of Daniel Kelly

It was surprising to find that Grandfather Horne was two men. And very surprising to learn that one was a Great Australian Hero. But that sort of thing comes up at a funeral, that’s what Mother said anyway when she brushed my hair that night.
“The Hornes have a bit of a view of themselves,” she said.
Then she tugged at my hair so hard that I begged her to stop.
“Owww. Ooo. Oooch.”
Father whispered in passing “Must be your paddy hair” but not loud enough for Grandmother Horne to hear. Then he winked at Mother who laughed out loud.
“It’s like a bougainvillea Ivy” she said to me. “Not like my own.”
And she smoothed her chignon. Her hair is sleek from its weekly wash in rose petals, and now she has taken to rolling it at the back. Mother likes to keep up with the fashions. She has the new magazine for women. I sneak into her room and look at the pictures of corsets and brassieres. I will be wearing these too when I have my bust.

Father likes them too. He laughs over the women in their slips and brassiers, but not when Mother is near. My hair is a poor colour of rust I know, and I have freckles on my cheeks and nose.
“Your hair is such a disappointment to me,” Mother says. She overlooks my own disappointment when I had planned on the auburn type of hair that father has. But now I think it is Grandfather’s hair I must have got: the ‘Paddy’hair. Grandmother says I am not to say such things.
“There isn’t an ounce of the Irish in you,” she says.
“In spite of the Belfast voice on Papa,” Father mutters but not loud enough for her to hear.

After the empty coffin was put in the ground and we’d all trooped back to the house Father sat out in his squatter’s chair. He had his glass of stout and his pipe and he patted the space in his chair where I might squeeze in.
“Come sit with your Dad Ivy,” he said to me. “And keep me company on this funny old day.”
Then he chuckled a bit, and after a time he winked and said “Good on the old man” and puffed on his pipe a few times. I like the whiff of Father’s pipe, it gives him the smell of sweated hide. But Grandmother Horne did not join us there on the verandah. After the Moderator had left she went up to her room and stayed there.
“I am not prepared to discuss it,” she said when I called to her through the door. And with Grandmother that is that. When she came down for supper her eyes were puffed as Dottie’s, my cat. It’s the paspalum Mother says. It gives people allergies.
“Is it the paspalum troubling you Grandmother?” I asked across the dinner table, but Mother gave me an old-fashioned look and Grandmother didn’t respond.

It wasn’t Grandfather dying of the sepsis that got Grandmother Horne upset. No. More than once she called him “a terrible rogue.” And once I heard her say that either that blessed chamber pot of his left their room or he would. After that she moved to the upstairs front room and Mother and Father found a room elsewhere in the house. It is Grandmother’s house. She likes us to be there with her, but sometimes we get on her goat. I listen to most things through the verandah windows. That is how I knew why Grandfather went to the back room while Grandmother went upstairs to the front.
“Ivy is forever sneaking about,” I hear Grandmother complain. “I never know when she’s listening in.”
“It comes from being a lonely only,” Mother said. She lay on the sofa in Grandmother’s room. “And that’s not for want of our trying.”

In fact I am not lonely. I have Mother and Father and I have Emily who works for Grandmother in the kitchen and sometimes shares my room. Emily is a Native. Emily and I like to sing. She teaches me her songs and I teach her mine. She sings this one a lot:

Daffy down dilly is new come to town
With a bright blue petticoat and a green gown

I gave Emily my second best petticoat as she liked it so much. But it is not blue it is lemon. And she does not wear it as a petticoat but as a shift. Emily rides to school with me on my pony Tessa. I sit behind her and hang on tight and in the afternoon she comes back and rides home again with me. I have Dotty, my cat, who sleeps in the wardrobe. And there are the house roos Rusty and Ripper who are always haround by the kitchen door. And I have my ducks and poddy sheep to feed. So I am busy all day long.

When Grandfather’s friends paid their respects to Grandmother she sat on the front verandah in a high cane chair and received them like the Queen. But Grandmother didn’t hold for ‘showings’ she said and was cross when Mother went ahead and laid him out in the downstairs parlour. That was after Mother had cleaned him down with soap and a cloth, and dressed him up in his suit and cravat. Emily declared she could not touch a dead white feller and ran off to hide. She is not scared enough of Mother to do as she is bid. But she was scared enough of Grandfather.
“Showings are for the Papists,” Grandmother humphed. “And for other primitive peoples.”
Then she whispered to Mother that she never wanted to see him again alive or dead.

I sat close to the coffin that day, the one Father ordered in cedar, and I looked at Grandfather lying there in his dark blue suit, with his yellow teeth and sticky beard. Mother let me put on his cravat and fix up his braces for him and we lathered him up and shaved his face. The bristles had kept on growing. He looked neat in his clothes, but with the tufts from his nose and the fingers as ginger as gloves he was never a tidy man. As I’m not so tidy myself even my doll Genevieve has plaster on her face from falling down.

When the disturbance began in the Service I had lost my place from thinking of Grandfather’s hairy hands.
“Where are we up to?” I whispered to Mother.
She shook her head slightly and raised a finger to her lips.
“Concentrate Ivy,” she whispered back.
But her psalter was opened on the page before and I knew she was thinking still of her passionfruit sponges. The cakes were for after the burial, at the Gathering.
“More Papist claptrap,” Grandmother Horne pronounced.
But Mother likes a bit of a party so she went ahead with it anyway, with Emily in the kitchen. Emily is good at scones and cakes but her icing makes us laugh. One day she iced a cake so much it flowed down the sides like Grandmother’s satin night-gown. Then we got into the giggles and Mother came back to chase me away. Mother ices very well. Emily learned to cook ‘on the mission’. She calls Mother ‘Missus”. Emily also learned how to iron Mother’s frocks and press Father’s trousers. But she doesn’t wear much herself. Sometimes she is in only her shift with nothing else beneath, not like me with all my petticoats in the heat. But I am not to tell anyone. Emily brings me cakes from Mother’s card parties. We each have a piece as we come home from school on Tessa who loves a bit of a sponge. We can get Tessa to go quite far on a mouthful of sponge.

The disturbance began with a noise at the back of the Church. I tried to look but Mother held to me firmly with her black kid gloves until my arm was pained. But I didn’t cry out. Only the lesser classes and Native can make a fuss, or that is what Grandmother says. It is not for ladies to be unseemly. But once the Moderator stopped the service Grandmother Horne turned, so I could too. I waved to Emily up the back, but she was with her friends and laughing and talking in her own words, like pebbles rolling in water. All of us stared at the men who had burst in. Men with mutton chop beards and drunken words.
“Irish louts,” Grandmother said. “Ignorant Paddies.”
“Ye must stop the service” the bigger one called. “The man was a Roman Catholic. He must have the proper rites or he’ll burn in hell.”
He strode right up the aisle and past me where I sat in my detestable frock. It has wings down the back but for Grandfather’s sake I wore it without much complaint. Grandmother shook her fist.
“This man is Emanuel Horne,” she said “and a protestant to his back teeth.”
She breathed so deep that face powder flew into the folds of her funeral hat.
“Of which he had none” the Irishman joked, and turned to the crowd. “Youse can all have a look at his dentures.”
The congregation laughed. Everyone knew of Grandfather’s teeth as he liked to play tricks for the children with them.
“Them Glenrowan traps detached the lot,” the Paddy said. “Down the back of the Glenrowan pub.”
There was an air of the showman about the man. Some people looked quite cheered but Grandmother’s face gave a prim impression. She looked like a woman beset by bees.
“I will not have Papists disturbing his final day.” And she turned to the Moderator and called “Go on with you Sir.”
“Grandmother Horne thinks she’s one of the swells,” Mother whispered behind her hand.
“You can shut yourself up you heathen wretch” the big man said to Grandmother. “What would you know of the man?”
He lifted the lid of the coffin and stared at the corpse, wiping a filthy handkerchief where Grandfather’s head might lie.
“Tis my own true uncle,” he cried. “My uncle Dan as he lived and breathed. And the spit of his sainted brother.”
He crossed himself at mention of saints and burst into tears. I have never seen so large a man cry. When the men at home are in an emotion they mostly kick the dog. Then the Paddy mopped at his own red face and stuck his kerchief in his trousers. Without the jacket his pants had a shapeless array. It was one more thing that Grandmother loathed, the sight of a gentleman’s braces.
“The suspender should never be seen,” she’d say.
“Or heard,” as Grandfather joked before he was dead.
She stood in her pew and glared at the lout.
“Here is the man I am married to all these years,” she said. “And shared his bed. Wouldn’t I know his poor dear face when I see it lying still in his coffin?”
It was strange to hear Grandmother defend her man when she had kept him so long in the spare room.


Then the Irish rogues picked up the box and began hoicking Grandfather down the Church towards the door. I watched as he rolled from side to side in his coffin without the lid.
“Yer Irish fool” the older one hissed. “Git the lid before we go.”
By now they were caught in a bind as Father later described it. People had blocked the aisle and barred the doors and stood in a crowd to stare. A voice called out, asking to stop the theft of Grandfather and the Moderator patted his hands on the air, his fingers outstretched like a plate, as though to settle a whinging baby.
“We must find out the truth,” he said “before proceeding.”
So Grandfather was put in the aisle between us and could take his place on the wooden floor. Grandmother began to speak again but the Moderator was firm.
“Mrs Horne. You must sit down in your pew.”
And he waited with patience while the noise was quelled and the Irishmen found a spot to perch and Grandmother was seated again with a lot of huffing and puffing and fanning of herself under the huge black hat. It was hot in the crowd. I thought of Emily just in her shift and wished I could be like that too instead of my dress with the wings, and the high button boots.

“It is important we establish” the Moderator said “just who we have here in the coffin.”
People got up to peer.
“It is Emanuel,” people whispered. “Isn’t it?”
“Of course it is” Grandmother hissed. “You should be asking who these two are?”
She turned to them. “The reprobates.”
“Huhemm” the older one coughed. “We’d rather not say jist yet. This one’s a bit of a famous man for all the wrong reasons so we’d like to keep dark about that. But he was a Catholic lad and true to the faith and deserves a proper send-off.”
Grandmother glared.
“Wrong reasons? The man was a model citizen as all of us here can a test.”
But the congregation hummed and a few people laughed. There was the whiff of a fight and the whiff of a joke.
“Lightning Jack?” somebody guessed.
“Of course not yer fool when he’s never a bushranger with that size of a gut on him.”
I thought of Grandfather with his tusky whiskers and his leathery smell of sweat. I did hope for at least one bushranger in the family where there was only Grandmother’s cousin Algernon, the Governor’s aide de camp. Father put his hand on my shoulder.
“You best be off now Ivy,” he said. “It’s no place for a young girl. So Emily can take you home.”
Emily was no happier than I, but home we went together, racing each other to escape the hot sun. Emily was much faster without the clumping boots that I have to wear.



Grandmother has interesting things in her room. There are her poudres which Emily and I like to pat on our chests as Grandmother does. And when Grandmother is out we try on her bloomers. I get into one leg and Emily the other. Then we stick out our bottoms as Grandmother does and step back and forth together.
“After you,” I say to Emily.
“No Missus, after you,” she says back to me. She likes to pretend I am Grandmother.
Emily calls this dance the Emu. Sometimes we laugh so hard we have to lie upon Grandmother’s counterpane and get rid of a stitch in the side. We put our feet in the air so as not to leave a mark. Grandmother has down pillows and one of the new spring mattresses. I have only a poor horsehair one for myself with no give at all. I don’t know what Emily sleeps upon when she is not with us.

For a while we bounced one another up and down to see who could reach the highest. Then we opened the windows and stared out at the Church in the distance. But nothing of interest was there. Emily tired of our games and said that she would go back to the Church and find out what was happening but I could not as I had promised Father. So once Emily had left I found there were other things to do. I opened Grandmother’s glove drawers where she stores her letters, and then I explored her wardrobe. A special small trunk lay under her shoes at the back and the key in her crystal rouge pot opened it very well.

Although I am now able to read, Grandmother’s letters did not interest me. But the trunk had things which did. I liked her Certificate of Birth with its flowery script and all her middle names. One of them is Ivy, and the other is Una. And Grandmother is older than she allows. I am able to add and subtract quite well for my years. This is what teacher tells Father. There was a picture with Great Grandmother and Grandpapa wearing a black expression. Poor Grandmother has a teardrop on her cheek and no hair or teeth, in the way of the young. I am not fond of babies. It is lucky for me there have been no others. Grandmother’s trunk also had pictures and clippings. I looked through all of these. Most concerned the robber Ned Kelly and his gang.

Brisbane Courier 17 February 1879: “About 1 o’clock three gentlemen entered the bank in the usual way, not thinking anything was the matter, when Kelly rushed in from another room with two revolvers and the gentlemen who saw him ran out. Eventually he brought them back and threatened to shoot one of them, but better counsel prevailed. About $2000 was taken from the bank. When they had finished this cool proceeding they went to one of the hotels, treating everyone civilly and had drinks.”

Ned is a great hero to us all. There is a game of swinging on a rope and the boys like this at school. They pronounce his final words ‘Such is life’. Then they pretend to hang by poking out their tongues and jerking their heads and generally strangling and gargling.

There were tales from the newspaper of the siege of the Kelly Gang, and the fire at Glenrowan where all the gang died but Ned. And there were stories of Daniel Kelly about how he he had got away.

“The Argus” 15 October 1902: "The Cape Town correspondent of the "London Daily Express" contributed to that journal on September 8 a long story of how he met in Pretoria two men, alleged to be Dan Kelly and Steve Hart, who were burned to death in the Glenrowan Hotel in 1880."

Grandmother’s clippings were most about Dan. Some said Dan was in Queensland. “Is this Dan Kelly, the one that got away?” said one with a blurry picture. And “Did Dan Kelly really die?” said another. Then there was a picture of Grandfather and on the back was ‘Yore husbin Daniel Kelly – bushranjer?’ in a rough hand.

At that point I heard Tessa’s particular clop coming down the street, and Grandmother’s particular voice rising above all as she spoke her thoughts into Father’s ear.
“And your father lying there still in his worsted suit,” she said. “With the burial long overdue.”
Poor Tessa has to support such a weight of people in her sulky. Grandmother is stout inside her corset and Mother seems fatter than before. Emily and I are small and light and we give Tessa rewards and don’t mind how slow she goes. But now she was trotting quite fast so I pushed the papers back where no-one could see I had pried and I ran to the kitchen where Emily surprised me by being already there. My hair is red and my boots are loud but Emily has a silent way of getting about. This is something I hope to learn too.

Grandmother went straight to her room and she stayed there. It seemed that the Moderator finished the service but could not finish the burial. The Paddies smiled through their teeth and showed off their arms as big as a blacksmith’s thigh. And proceedings were paused at that point. The Paddies were set on carrying Grandfather off, and some cousins had taken the corpse on a horse-drawn tray now stood by the Factory door. Inside the cool store Grandfather lay with the pats of butter and tubs of cheese. So the Butter Factory vigil began and Grandmother watched from the back of her gauzy curtains.
“A farce.” She sniffed into her lavender square. “The man should be meeting his maker without such a crew alongside of him.”
But the town enjoyed it a lot. Wherever I went on Tessa there was interest in Grandfather’s fate and even the Sergeant joked about my ‘Kelly’ hair. He has a set of red whiskers to match my own head, but not a blade of a hair under his policeman’s cap. Father read from the Boonah Gazette when Grandmother wasn’t about and Mother sat laughing alongside on the verandah chair. Lately poor Mother has been unwell so her enjoyment of the stories was pleasing. Father and I sat alongside to laugh too.
“This one’s from the Fassifern Guardian,” and Father put on a special voice like a man on the wireless. “Let Dan R.I.P.”

We were all of us tickled pink by the Kelly connection, except for Grandmother who had married a Horne from Ballintoy, as she liked to say. Mother read from the Queensland Times.
“Dan Kelly dead and under siege. Again.”
She could hardly read the rest of the words from laughing so hard. There was even the picture of Grandmother’s arrival with Mr Emanuel Horne of Ballintoy, appointed town clerk. They step from the Boonah train and Grandmother looks awfully swell with her bulk of clothes and the travelling coat. I cut these out myself to keep in an Arnott’s tin which I have in my wardrobe under my boots.

Grandmother passed the next few days with the salts to ease her and Mother for the company. They do not like one another. It is only their love for Father and me that keeps them civil, or that’s what Mother says. The food for the Gathering went to the factory door rather than letting it waste and the Paddies had quite a party with Grandmother listening from the darkness of the verandah. The fiddles and button accordions got up and an Irish tenor that could melt your heart. He was better than Father, Grandmother said, unless it was Father gone to join them along with the rest of the town. In the morning the cousins propped under the wagon tray and smoked their baccy pipes and waited. I tried sitting with Grandmother too as she waited in state in the parlour. But she shooed me away as a nuisance. So it was under the house for me, where sooner or later I heard what went on, and that was how I learned of Grandmother’s bargain with the Paddies.

The Paddies arrived cap in hand on the third day cap and full of respect for the widow.
“Tis sorry we are for your troubles Missus,” the big one said, as Mother showed them in to where Grandmother sat.
“Sorry is it?” Grandmother humphed. “You’re here as a laughing stock to me now, when I’ve been good to you all these years.”
As no-one was ever to sit upon Grandmother’s chairs, the two men stood as they talked while Grandmother reigned like Her Majesty. The big one walked about but the little one stood in silence. I watched the termite nest in the corner to see if a boot might come crashing through.
“You’ve kept your word it’s true” he said. “But now it’s the Lord we’re up against, and the thought of your Dan’s next life.”
I pictured Grandmother’s head to one side in a way she had. She liked the effect of a pause.
“He was never my Dan,” Grandmother said “but always Emanuel and you know it. And I can’t have him carted orff on that donkey tray while the whole town watches.”
She sniffed to herself. “When I’ve said all along that I married a Horne of Ballintoy.”
The Paddy stopped in his walk and stood for a while to think.
“We can steal him away in the dead of night if that will stifle your fears.”
Another of Grandmother’s pauses began.
“And you’ll let me alone if you take him?”
“He’s dead now Missus and everything’s over.”
“And what of the coffin without its body?”
“Oh we’ll put something there to weight it right. You can have your burial soon as we’re off.”
There was the sound of Grandmother pouring the one cup of tea but no offer of drink for the Paddies.
“And you’ll go away and leave us be?”
“We’re off to Glenrowan tonight if you so agree.”
Grandmother grumbled away to herself. It was hard to hear from below in the dirt.
“The man’s been nothing but trouble to me,” she said. “And I’m glad to see the back of him.”
“Poor old sod” the Paddy said. “You shouldna married our poor Dan . Not with that mouth on you like a half-sucked lemon.”
“As if I knew he was an Irish Kelly when he came courting me for my money,” she said.
The Paddy laughed. “Well he found a good hiding-place didn’t he though, with a protestant prude for a wife.”

So the Paddies went home with their long lost son and Grandmother watched that night as the horses drew him away in the darkness. And then in the morning sun we watched as the coffin slipped into the burial plot beside her own. The words were said and the family wept but I do not think any anyone thought that the coffin contained a man. Every week Grandmother took Emily with her and they tidied the plot where the coffin of Mr Emanuel Horne lay buried. And she planted one of her lavenders there and it grew very well in the dry old dirt. With all the excitement of Dan Kelly’s death the news got out there were more. Grandmother collected the sightings and read them aloud to us all.
“There” she said from ‘The Truth’. “Here is the true Dan Kelly here, buried today in a pauper’s grave.” She read to herself for a time then resumed the story aloud.
“Decapitated by a passing goods train.” She shook at the paper with satisfaction. “That’s much more likely him.”
Her trunk filled up until she had so many Kellys it was all a bit of farce. There were Daniel Kellys from Barcaldine to Boonah and all of them lying under their imposter names. But the true Dan Kelly went back home to join his mother, but not Ned his brother who stayed in the walls of Melbourne Gaol.

After the sadness of Grandfather’s death Father brought me unwelcome news.
“A new life starts when an old one ends” he said. “And you won’t be a lonely only soon as Mother is to have a new little one, perhaps a sister just for you.”
As Emily and I had learned of this days before it wasn’t news I needed to hear. Mother had grown fat. And then Grandmother decided on names. A girl would be Una, after her, just as I had been Ivy. But a boy could only be Emanuel. I stamped my foot.
“But I don’t want for a sister,” I said. “When I have my Emily.”
Grandmother sat outside in the sun with her teacup on a little round table. She raised up her cup and gave a laugh.
“As Ned would have said if you’d asked him Ivy - Such is life.”