The Argus
28/ 1/1879
... part of the KellyGang story
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With reference to Sir Bryan O'Loghlen's caution to the newspapers against making public the movements of the police, the Riverine Herald says:-"If the outlaws are regularly furnished with the information which appears in the newspapers, it must be by persons living in some of the centres of population, and it ought not to be a work of any very great difficulty to discover by whom. We hear a great deal of the wide-spread sympathy existing in the district for the cold-blooded miscreants whose bravest deed was the shooting down of three defenceless men, but it is impossible to believe that any considerable portion of the inhabitants are in league with them, or are giving them active assistance. Such assistance must necessarily be confined to a few individuals, and with ordinary sagacity it ought to be a comparatively easy task to discover who they are, and to turn their movements into a means of assisting rather than frustrating the efforts of the police. Where their confederates go the police ought to be able to follow; or if that course does not recommend itself to their discretion they should at least have little trouble in cutting off the communication. There are at present in the North-Eastern district a sufficient number of mounted constables to allow of one being told off as a guard against every possible sympathiser.
The towns are garrisoned by soldiers, the detectives are presumed to be actively at work, and the outcome of it all is an official announcement by the Acting Chief Secretary that the Kelly gang are regularly supplied with the metropolitan and country newspapers for perusal at their breakfast table, and that, consequently, there is an 'absolute necessity' to deprive the public of certain information because it would be in- conveniently useful to the outlaws! We venture to assert that such an ingenuous confession of 'absolute' incapacity was never made by the head of a department before."
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