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January 8, 2002
REVIEW: Outlaw icon of Australia
THE renaissance in Australian literature began with Patrick White who won the weighty Nobel Prize in 1973. Since then the country has produced a small band of gifted authors who have written their way into international literary acclaim and Peter Carey is arguably the most talented among them.
Carey has now joined Salman Rushdie in achieving the dazzling literary feat of winning the Booker Prize twice. All through his career, Carey has concerned himself with portraying the image and identity of his fellow Australians — from the transplanted convicts and early settlers struggling to deal with the strangeness of Australia’s vast, inhospitable open spaces to the contemporary urban Australians coming to terms with their hybrid British heritage encapsulated, as they are, by generational experiences of living in rugged Antipodean landscape.
In 1980 Carey began with a series of short stories in The fat man in history that dazzled international readers and book reviewers. He achieved his first major success with Illywhacker (slang for ‘confidence trickster’), a novel shortlisted for the 1985 Booker Prize. With his third novel Oscar and Lucinda, Carey stormed to the forefront of the literary world by winning the 1988 Booker Prize. Since then he has been ratcheting up further successes with novels such as The tax inspector and Jack Maggs.
Modern Australia, with its inauspicious convict roots and its relatively short history, is said to possess only three national heroes: Sir Donald Bradman, the incomparable cricketer; Phar Lap, ironically a New Zealand born stallion but regarded by Australians as the world’s greatest race horse, and the bushranger Ned Kelly. In writing True history of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey has delved into the life of this quintessential Australian icon.
The outlaw Ned Kelly appeals to the Australian inherent rebelliousness and distrust of authority. Rugged and resilient, he mirrors the defiance and toughness of the early pioneers who settled Australia’s harsh and hostile land. In local jargon ‘as game as Ned Kelly’ remains the ultimate compliment for bravery.
Before his capture and eventual execution in 1880 at the young age of twenty-six, Kelly wrote an 8,300-word public statement, now known as the “Jerilderie letter”, in which he eloquently outlined the injustices that turned him into an outlaw. To Carey the language used in the letter — which consisted of ‘extremely long sentences’, absence of commas and few full stops — was oddly modernist, complete with its own complexities and humour.
In 1965 Carey hand typed a copy of the “Jerilderie letter” and carried it with him for over three decades before deciding to write a novel based on the life of Ned Kelly. According to Carey it was the “the book I’ve waited my whole life to write”.
Using the ungrammatical language of the “Jerilderie letter” as the template for the novel, Carey employs three writer’s tricks of invention. The first is the artifice that Kelly has, in the last two years of his life, maintained a diary through which he intends to provide ‘a true and secret part of the history’ to his unnamed daughter, and that this account has been preserved as ‘13 parcels of stained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kelly’s distinctive hand’, which form the novel itself.
The second is the love affair with a fictitious Mary Hearn, who bears him the daughter. The third is the ‘ventriloquism’ through which Carey provides a voice to Ned Kelly.
In the novel Kelly narrates his history using comma-less grammar, and by using it Carey provides an authentic ring to the tale. Initially it may prove difficult to comprehend, but as one persists (and one most definitely should), the language starts to grow on the reader and soon begins to flow as a torrent of prose. Carey has an extraordinary ear for first person narrative, and his re-enactment of the voice of a poor nineteenth century Irish-Australian farmer turned bushranger is very believable. The author turns Kelly’s lack of education to his advantage, using Kelly’s writing to subvert the reader’s expectation of punctuation and tense. Many times I became so completely mesmerized by Carey’s Kelly that I had to remind myself that I was reading Carey’s words and not Kelly’s.
Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly is not simply a symbol of a daring bygone era. Comparisons with American outlaws such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid do not suffice for the author. Australians do not have a Thomas Jefferson or an Abraham Lincoln, but according to Carey, Ned Kelly, who was neither a thinker nor a statesman, occupies a similar place in the Australian consciousness. This uniquely Australian attitude is perhaps best reflected by the many attempts over the years to replace the sedate Australian national anthem ‘Advance Australia Fair’ with the more popular unofficial national anthem, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. This national song narrates the story of a ‘swagman’ (or hobo), who is caught stealing a sheep. He escapes the clutches of the police and prison and obtains his treasured freedom by committing suicide by drowning.
Every year millions of Australians extol the hobo sheep thief by singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ at sporting events and other public gatherings, often with an emotional tear streaming down their face. It is a song about the poor and dispossessed who laid the foundations of their country. The story of Ned Kelly has almost exactly the same effect.
As True history of the Kelly Gang recounts, Kelly faced up to the oppression of the Catholic Irish; the subjugation of ‘selectors’ (poor small farmers) by ‘squatters’ (English landlords), and the constant scrutiny and injustice of the police and other mediocre and corrupt officials of the British-run colonial administration. And in doing so, Kelly proves himself, in Carey’s novel, to be more decent, wittier, braver and generally more competent than the officialdom that opposed him.
Of course, there is a vocal minority of Australians, probably embarrassed by the country’s convict past, which dismisses Ned Kelly as a thug and common criminal. But the vast majority of Australians, who eulogize Kelly as a charismatic Robin Hood figure who championed the downtrodden underclass in the harsh colonial society, would agree with Carey’s sympathetic treatment of the young bushranger in True history.
True history of the Kelly Gang is an audacious work, which has already been acclaimed by many as Peter Carey’s masterpiece. Great novels, it is said, teach one more about the human condition than a dozen books on local history. Tolstoy’s sweeping chronicles of the nobility and serfs in early nineteenth century Russia, Dickens’ tales with their graphic descriptions of life in the slums of London at the time of the industrial age, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpieces based in Colombia and South America are all ‘living’ testaments of this truism. In Carey’s True history, Ned Kelly is clearly more than an Australian outlaw wearing a metal bucket on his head. In portraying Kelly as a hardy individualist, the bushranger becomes a voice of late-nineteenth century Australia as it marches towards approaching nationhood.
Australia was largely peopled with the impoverished working classes of Britain. Most settlers were forcibly transported there, often under unjust laws, as convicted criminals. Through the device of Carey’s ventriloquism readers should discover what makes the modern Australians tick. Their tradition of plain speaking, devotion to egalitarianism, distrust of authority and often undisguised contempt for the English (or ‘bloody whinging Poms’ in local vernacular) are clearly traits inherited from their hardy forebears who overcame their harsh surroundings to build themselves a proud new country. By writing an imaginatively original account of Australia’s most famous outlaw, Peter Carey has managed to produce a brave book worthy of serious admiration.
True history of the Kelly Gang
By Peter Carey
Faber and Faber
ISBN 0571192165
352pp. £16.99 (HB)
ISBN: 0571209874
432pp. £7.99 (PB)
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