Paper no.26, 15 July 1880

Melbourne 15th July 1880 / / My dear Frank / I have been trying to see Ramsay for the last five days but he has been away auctioneering[?] and has never been near his office since I saw you. / I have therefore been unable to ask him to publish your and Sadlier’s reports which I am very anxious should be made public. As the Ministry have had such a thorough defeat, I suppose Mr Berry will be in office tomorrow & I will lose no time in referring the request to him & urge him to publish the reports. / My mind was much relieved by Mrs Hare’s telegram. The cackler[?]-general, I mean [??] Genl, whenever he attends a patient goes about talking nonsense & seems to take a sombre view of everything; as a doctor I have not the slightest faith in him & the less you see him the better. He was to have gone up last night to Sunbury[?] but after I showed him Mrs Hare’s telegram he gave up the idea. He and Bob gone up this morning for a few day’s shooting near Kerang. / we are going to have another long dose of the Berry blight; I expect Nicolson will try his but to injure me now, but I think Levy & Syme will take my part & as for the Argus I wd far sooner be pitched into than patted on the back by this conservative organ. /

I am sorry to lose Ramsay as my Minister for he was always most kind & considerate & did not interfere with the management of the Dept As for Service’s abdication I am not in the least aggrieved, in his nasty & untruthful attack on me in his Maldon speech shows that he is a stick-at-nothing kind of politician. There is no doubt that although a great many [?] his have been circulated against the outgoing ministry, they have been guilty of a great many most injudicious acts which have done them a great deal of harm. / I saw Sadlier yesterday & had a talk with him about the new[?] stations in the Kelly district; he however asked me to await his report before arriving at my decision as in the present state of things it seems absolutely necessary to have a second officer in Benalla, I propose transferring B there permanently & will ask the Govt to make him a pecuniary allowance for his transfer. / With reference to my application for a Board[?] ( I sent you a copy) I fear very much that, under the present regime, we shall not have a very fair & impartial tribunal but we must accept the inevitable. / I saw Curnow yesterday; he came down at my request from Ballarat & handed me a detached[?] report of all in connection with his capture by the Kellys & subsequent proceedings. He is anxious it shd be published as his friends in Ballarat have rcd sundry letters from the Glenrowan district stating that Curnow was a notorious Kelly sympathiser who had turned traitor at the last moment for his own benefit / Very truly yrs / F C Standish /

This is part of the digitized version of the Francis Hare Correspondence held in the University of Melbourne Archives. It consists of 54 letters and documents, of which this is one, from 1859-87 and received by or relating to Superintendent Francis Hare, one of the members of the Victoria police force involved in the pursuit and capture of the Kelly Gang. The collection complements Hare’s published memoir, The Last of the Bushrangers (London, 1892) and includes letters by some of the key figures of the Kelly story including the Police Commissioner Frederick Standish, Superintendents Charles Hope Nicolson and John Sadleir, Detective M Ward and John Sherritt, as well as items by Hare himself.