Peter Carey

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Heroic Underdog Down Under

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SOURCE: Ross, Robert. “Heroic Underdog Down Under.” World and I 16, no. 6 (June 2001): 251-56.

[In the following review of True History of the Kelly Gang, Ross explores the Australian glorification of the outlaw Ned Kelly, viewing Kelly's adulation as a statement against the imperial power of British colonialism.]

Australian writer Thea Astley once commented that after a dozen or so novels she sometimes thought that she had written the same book over and over. Much the same might be said of Peter Carey, whose new novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, continues his chronicle of Australia's quest for national identity. If he is indeed writing the same novel again and again, he has done so with flair and infinite variety. His first major book, Illywhacker (1985), spirals through 150 years of Australia's past. Its title taken from a slang word for con artist, the novel exposes the country's history as a string of lies. In Oscar and Lucinda, the 1988 Booker Prize recipient, Carey examines how British values and Christianity clash with the Australian landscape and the ways of the continent's original inhabitants.

In The Tax Inspector (1992), Carey looks at the underside of contemporary Australia and insinuates that corruption and depravity continue to infect a nation that had its beginning as a convict colony. His most original work so far, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), imagines a futuristic colony, apparently Australia, dominated by a mythical, powerful nation, which resembles the United States. Jack Maggs (1997) fills out the story of the convict Magwitch, who was transported to Australia in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Here Carey comes closer to reconciling his ambivalent feelings toward his native country, whose values he has been exploring from his home in New York City for most of his career.

Whatever form Carey's preoccupation with Australia takes, it always serves up a fictional feast. And that is surely true of his latest work of fiction—or perhaps more accurately a work that pretends to be fiction.

AN OFTEN-TOLD STORY

Australians who read Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang will find it a familiar story told in a fresh way. For them, the real Ned Kelly is a national hero. Born in 1855, Kelly was the eldest son of an Irishman who had been sent to Australia as a convict in 1842 to serve out his sentence. After the elder Kelly's death in 1866, his widow and their children took up a “selection” (or homestead, as it would be known in America). There they struggled to survive. Being Irish and bearing the taint of convictism, the Kelly family, like many others with similar backgrounds, lived on the fringe of a society whose economy and legal system were controlled by the British.

In the early nineteenth century a number of gangs known as “bushrangers,” many of them Irish and ex-convicts, roamed the countryside, stealing horses and cattle, robbing banks, and generally terrorizing the settlers. One of the last gangs to be apprehended, Ned Kelly and his companions drew widespread attention and generated endless fear among the British settlers. On the other hand, the Irish settlers admired their daring exploits and protected them from the authorities. Once the gang had killed three policemen, its members were chased with a vengeance. Yet it took nearly two years to hunt them down. In that final encounter, Kelly's companions died but he survived, clad in homemade armor. Captured, tried, and convicted for his multiple crimes, he was hanged in 1880 at age twenty-six. According to tradition, his final words were “Such is life,” which in 1903 became the title of a classic novel by Joseph Furphy.

Kelly's brief life earned him a place in Australia's mythology as a heroic underdog who dared to defy authority. Australian intellectuals have long debated how a man who murdered and robbed could gain the stature of national hero. To some degree he is seen as an early rebel against British imperialism and social injustice. As well, he embodied the cherished Australian concept of a “fair go” for each individual.

Whatever the case, Kelly is firmly entrenched in the national psyche. To be called “as game as Ned Kelly” is a compliment. His life and death have been celebrated on the stage and in films, novels, ballads, and historical accounts. The noted Australian painter Sidney Nolan produced a series of paintings recording events in Kelly's life. Several depict his last stand, wearing his rudimentary bulletproof suit and looking like a folk knight. During the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney one number was a strange spectacle indeed and probably a mystery to those unfamiliar with the Ned Kelly story: a dance troupe wearing costumes inspired by his armor and waving sparklers to represent gunfire. Even today the area in the state of Victoria where the gang reigned is known as “Kelly country.” So Australians must not be tired of the story, considering that Carey's new version remains at the top of the country's best-seller list.

International readers will certainly approach the novel far differently. Lacking familiarity with the true story and unaware of its national resonance, they will probably see it as an absorbing adventure tale—which it proves to be. Like the Australians, though, they may well take Kelly's side, admiring his bravado and defiance of authority. Some overseas reviewers have placed the novel in the tradition of American westerns, but that may not be altogether accurate. The western novel focuses on the struggle between good and evil, with good triumphant in the end. As Nolan said of his artistic rendering of the Kelly tale: “Whether or not the painting of such a story demands any comment on good and evil I do not know. There are doubtless as many good policemen as there are good bushrangers.” Such is the incongruity—and the appeal—of Kelly's life.

DRIVEN TO THE BRINK

During the gang's raid on a country town called Jerilderie, Kelly actually wrote a letter justifying his actions and attempted to get it published in the local newspaper. The account never appeared because the printer fled in fear when Kelly approached him, but what is known today as the “Jerilderie Letter” was preserved. Carey expands on the famous letter and tells the story in Kelly's own voice. Exercising his artistic license, Carey gives Kelly a lady friend named Mary. Though they meet in a house of prostitution, Mary possesses the classic heart of gold and remains faithful to her outlaw lover. With funds from one of the robberies, she escapes to San Francisco, where she bears their daughter.

Learning of the child's birth and knowing that he will never see her, Kelly takes time out from robbing banks and tormenting the settlers to write an account of his life. He addresses it to his daughter so she might better understand her father. Except for the prologue and the last two chapters, which recount Kelly's capture and hanging, the book is in his words. His first-person accounts cover thirteen “Parcels,” each with the kind of formal subhead that an archival librarian would attach to valuable documents. According to the headnote for Parcel 13, it appears to have been written in “some urgency”; then “on page 7 the manuscript is abruptly terminated,” apparently when Kelly was captured.

A highly original way of presenting this sad history, the form makes extraordinary demands on the novelist. Carrying out this archival charade means that the story must be told in Kelly's own words. Coming from poor Irish descent and starting his bushranging career at age fourteen, Kelly had little formal schooling. Yet Carey, whose earlier novels display a mastery of prose style, assumes his hero's unlettered voice and rarely falters. Here is an example:

Kelly you are adjectival mad he cried slamming his fist onto the splintered table I will not effing do it I'm damned if I will I've gone too deep already.


In the silence that followed Mary quietly lit the lamp and once the yellow light washed up the cobwebbed walls it shone into Joe's beard and I seen that flaw to his looks that harelip hidden deep in the shelter of his fair moustace. I will not rob a bank he said.


What are you frightened of asked Dan they are going to hang us anyway.


He were a brave little b——r but I got his pimply beak and twisted him off his chair and down onto his bony knees I promise you I cried I promise all of youse that you will not be hanged.

In the tradition of the nineteenth century, the swearwords are disguised. “Adjectival,” which is used throughout, serves as a euphemism for “bloody,” an expression still heard in Australia. Though the run-together sentences, vernacular expressions, grammatical errors, lack of punctuation, abbreviations, misspellings, and other such oddities distract at first, before long the story takes over and its style grows familiar, in fact becomes altogether appropriate. Further, Carey captures the Australian landscape, for Kelly's persona has a keen eye and a sensitivity to the world about him.

All the major events in his life receive full attention. While the exact details remain unclear, one episode played a pivotal role in the young man's rebellion. A much-hated policeman, supposedly with his eye on one of the Kelly sisters, came calling at the household and in the ensuing confusion was wounded. He claimed, probably untruthfully, that Ned had fired the shot. Later Ned's mother, Ellen, was sentenced to prison for her role in the attack. The injustice done by the police, especially the jailing of his mother, apparently drove Kelly over the brink and served as the motivating factor for his subsequent actions.

Ellen emerges as one of the most intriguing characters in this personal history, considering that Carey has burdened the hardy bushranger with an Oedipus complex. Hardly an admirable or ideal mother, Ellen has a weakness for the wrong kind of men, and her son appears jealous of her various attachments. She even initiated his criminal career by apprenticing him to one of her male friends, a noted bushranger. Yet, despite his mother's weaknesses, Kelly remains determined to free her from prison. His account stresses that he wants nothing more than a home, preferably with his mother. There he hopes to farm and raise stock and develop the land, unhampered by the police. As well, he wants to be free from the enemy of the Irish poor: the squatocrats—that is, the wealthy British settlers who dominated the countryside.

Kelly's self-portrait serves to explain and justify actions that are neither explicable nor justifiable. Yet somehow they become so, and sympathy lies with Ned Kelly. The villain tells his unsavory story and in the process manages to transform himself into a hero. A century after his capture and execution, a movement surfaced in Australia to grant him a retrospective pardon.

A STORY WITH RESONANCE

In an interview with the New York Times, Carey said that Ned Kelly resonates through Australian history and into the present. He called Kelly's life “the ultimate Australian story,” evoking the country's origin as a penal colony and settlement for renegades. Australians should be able to identify with Kelly, Carey said, seeing this dubious hero as the representative figure of an underdog culture and adding: “He is the convict stain.” Although Carey is too subtle a writer to weave such propositions into the fabric of the novel, the way he tells the story through Kelly's voice makes the author's position clear.

Of course, there are Australians who disagree with Carey and probably wish that Kelly would disappear from the national horizon. This opposing view surfaces in the novel's final chapter, “The Siege at Glenrowan.” Here Carey introduces Thomas Curnow, the historical personage who tipped off the police, an act that led to the downfall of the gang during its occupation of a country town. According to this portrayal of Curnow, he regrets that he is not hailed as a hero and finds disturbing the “ever-growing adoration of the Kelly gang.” Curnow asks: “What is it about we Australians, eh? … What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might not we find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?”

Brashly titled True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey's novel not only reviews the “adoration of the Kelly gang” a hundred or so years later but also indirectly comments on Australian national identity. In this “true history,” Ned Kelly bears the “convict stain” and is a horse-thief and a murderer. Yet he recognizes his flaws, rises above his origins, and in a metaphorical twist evolves into a fearless, wild colonial boy who mocks and challenges the very imperial order that produced him.

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