Partway through the Jerilderie Letter, Ned Kelly accused Senior Constable Anthony Strahan of threatening him: 'he would shoot me ... like a dog'. Those few fateful words have echoed through Australian history and been the cause of much bloodshed and violence. They ushered in a national myth: the legend of the Kelly Gang. In the two days after Anthony reputedly made his threat, Ned and his gang shot dead three police in an event now known as the Stringybark Creek killings. Ned's reason for opening fire? He thought one cop was Anthony. Lachlan Strahan, Anthony's great-great-grandson, grew up believing Ned Kelly was a heroic outlaw and Anthony the ruthless cop who pursued him. Yet as Lachlan began to explore his ancestor's life, he discovered an alternative story. Drawing on letters, police reports and newspapers, Lachlan pieces together the life of Anthony Strahan - a tempestuous Irish immigrant who embodied the thin blue line in the bush for 35 years. Bent on justice, he hunted some of the period's most infamous bushrangers, petty criminals and cattle-stealers. Yet his years-long pursuit of Ned Kelly was never publicly acknowledged, and after his death, the Kelly legend grew to distort his legacy. Did Anthony utter those incendiary words about Ned? Whose version of history do we believe? This is a tale about justice and retribution, morality and vengeance. It is about making a life against the odds in a wild frontier society. It is also a story of inheritance: of the words passed from father to son, and the myths we choose to preserve.
Lachlan Strahan is a historian and the Australian High Commissioner to Solomon Islands. His first book, "Australia's China" has become one of the standard works on Australia-China relations. His second, "Day of Reckoning" traced a series of crimes in Papua New Guinea after World War II and was shortlisted for the 2006 NSW Premier's Australian History Prize.
"This compelling and intimate history offers a new perspective on a national legend - the infamous Kelly Gang - and a vivid picture of the life of a policeman on the colonial Victorian frontier. Strahan's career takes us constantly into the dark side of the colonial world, into the rough, vain and violent underside of a frontier society. Through the unfolding stories of individual cases and court dramas, we examine Constable Strahan's character in action - and it is character that goes to the heart of the book's defining scene, the conversation near Greta during the Kelly Outbreak. The story moves towards and away from that pivotal moment, showing how it framed a life and, perhaps, precipitated a tragedy. The book is also a beautiful meditation on history and memory and the power of family storytelling. This is a fascinating and original history, taut and suspenseful, written with subtlety and flair." -- Tom Griffiths
"In this story of his ancestor, Senior Constable Anthony Strahan, Lachlan Strahan brings to life a lost world of rural Victoria in the era of gold-seeking, free selection and bushranging. The book climaxes in the pursuit of the Kelly Gang, the moment when Anthony steps briefly into national history, but this is above all the story of an Irish migrant who makes his way in colonial Victoria by pursuing the hard life of a country policeman. It is also a family history: in tracing the life and times of Anthony, Lachlan is also learning something more about his own father, Frank, an archivist, historian and radical who admired the rebel and folk hero - Ned Kelly - and despised a man of the law, his own relative, who had helped bring a killer to justice." -- Frank Bongiorno
