Ned Kelly was born in rural Victoria in the mid 1850s, the third of eight children of Red Kelly, an Irish convict transported for stealing pigs. The family were selectors, poor farmers working bad land under heavy installments while police looked after the interests of wealthy squatters. Red drank himself to death when Ned was 12, leaving the boy head of a watched and hungry household. As a child he had pulled a drowning boy from a creek and been given a green silk sash for it. As a teenager he was pistol whipped by a constable and given three years of hard labor over a horse he believed was borrowed.

This episode follows the feud from the disputed Fitzpatrick incident of 1878, which sent Kelly’s mother to prison and Ned and his brother Dan into the Wombat Ranges, to the killing of three policemen at Stringybark Creek and the law that made the gang outlaws anyone could shoot on sight. It then tracks the bank raids staged as public theater, the last stand at Glenrowan in 1880, and the argument over whether he was a champion of the poor or a killer with a gift for publicity.

• At Jerilderie the gang locked the police in their own cells and wore their uniforms around town, and at one raid Kelly burned the bank’s mortgage records.
• Police jailed about 30 suspected sympathizers for months on renewed remand orders without trial, which turned the press and public against them.
• The Glenrowan plan to wreck a police train failed when a schoolteacher Kelly released flagged it down with a lantern and a red scarf.
• The armor, beaten from plow moldboards, weighed nearly 100 pounds and stopped more than two dozen bullets, but left the legs exposed. Kelly fell to a shotgun blast to the thighs.
• He was sentenced to hang by Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who had jailed his mother. Barry died 12 days after the execution.