The tense event in Euroa is among those captured in a new book detailing police efforts to bring the criminal and his gang to justice.

Author David Dufty recounts how Kelly marched from room to room, gathering men, women and children together, including a shocked Anne Calvert.

"Before departing [the Bendigo district, she] had joked to her friends, 'Goodbye, the next you will hear of me will be that I am in the hands of the Kellys'," Dufty writes in his new book Nabbing Ned Kelly.

The reality of Ned's unexpected appearance was troubling, to say the least.

The known cop killer had stormed into a house connected to Euroa's bank, which his gang was robbing.

Children were terrified. A nursemaid wept.

"Kelly tried to make her drink whiskey to stop her from making a racket, but she choked and coughed on the drink, causing the baby in her arms to start crying too," Dufty writes.

Calvert's daughter Susie Scott was there with bank manager and son-in-law Robert.

Between her, her family, two bank clerks and a hostage the gang had brought to Euroa, there were 14 prisoners.

Kelly ordered everyone to leave with the gang.

Kelly was no hero, Dufty says in the book, which charts the extraordinary efforts police went to as they pursued his gang.

He concedes Kelly was tall, strong, good-looking, charismatic and a formidable hand-to-hand brawler but is quick to point out he was also a paranoid, delusional compulsive liar.

He was not an Australian Robin Hood and he did not commit his murders in self defence, Dufty said. His bank robberies and kidnappings were not ploys to raise awareness of social ills.

Kelly's talent was stealing livestock from the rich and poor alike, then funneling them through a crime network the police were ill-equipped to combat.

And when Kelly pointed a gun at someone, he expected to be obeyed.

His gang hit the Euroa National Bank on December 10, 1878 and stole a fortune in cash and gold. None of the victims were under any illusions about the danger they were in.

Police were in the midst of a highly-publicised manhunt for the gang after it had ambushed officers at Stringybark Creek, killing three of them and searching their bodies for valuables.

"It's something that has been misunderstood in more modern times. The vast majority of Victoria's population was in fear of the Kelly gang," Dufty told the Bendigo Weekly in an interview.

"They didn't have popular support helping them hide and fight the powers that be.

"They did have the support of an extended criminal network, though."

Kelly told Calvert she should not be frightened.

"Nothing will happen to you. I have a mother of my own," he said.

Kelly was probably being earnest, Dufty said. He was not one to attack people without reason.

That might not have meant much to Calvert.

"We can only speculate about what went through her head," Dufty said.

In later years, Calvert's family would regularly recount being trundled out of town to a farming station the Kelly gang had occupied, and the other hostages who were held there overnight.

Calvert herself was apparently fond of retelling it to neighbours, her daughter would later relate to younger generations. And why wouldn't she? It was not like anyone had been killed.

Still, as Duftly pointed out, "if they had not obeyed [Kelly], who knows what would have happened?

"Kelly was quite happy to kidnap every person in the house. To me, that's an act of violence of a different kind. It was done with the threat of shooting."

As it was, Calvert, her daughter and the children were among those allowed to roam free through the station's grounds.

The gang kept a far tighter rein on its male prisoners.

Kelly warned one that he would be shot dead within six months if he gave information to the authorities.

"We have plenty of friends," Dufty quotes the bushranger saying.

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The gang members eventually locked all their hostages in a shed.

Then they vanished.

For Dufty, the real heroes of Kelly years are people like Detective Michael Ward, the officer who crisscrossed remote regions doggedly gathering evidence, and Costable Thomas McIntyre, the lone survivor of the Stringybark Creek murders.

The myths surrounding Kelly took off in the 20^th century, he said.

Maybe Australians needed Kelly to be a hero back then.

"But the helmet never really fit - metaphorically or literally," Dufty said in reference to Kelly's amour at the Glenrowan siege.

Some Kelly supporters seem to conflate the rampant police authoritarianism of the 1850s with the force of the 1870s, he said.

Others give too much weight to a land-owning "squattocracy" that had exerted more power in previous decades, Dufty said.

His book is the latest in works trending away from glorifying Kelly, even if there are still those who regard him as a great bloke.

"People realise that this romanticised view of Ned Kelly is not realistic," Dufty said.

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This is the latest story in the Bendigo Weekly's regular history series, which is entitled 'WHAT HAPPENED?'

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