1891: The Bushranger Who Taught Ned Kelly His Trade Drowned in the Murray River
Harry Power was already a seasoned escaper and highway robber when, in 1869, he took on a teenage recruit: Ned Kelly, son of a sympathetic Irish family who sheltered him in the Ovens district. For a few months the pair stuck up coaches and squatters together, Power later boasting of hundreds of robberies, until Kelly broke away and Power carried on alone, eventually suspecting his young protege of helping police track him down.
Captured in 1870 after being betrayed by a relative of the Kelly family, Power served another fifteen years at Pentridge before his release in 1885. He spent his last years as a guide aboard the old prison hulk Success, now a museum ship, before drowning in the Murray River near Swan Hill in October 1891, his body found days later at Tyntynder. One newspaper suggested suicide, but the drowning of a man who had survived two prison escapes and a life of robbery without ever killing anyone was most likely a simple accident.
