I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.
God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age. How queer and foreign it must seem to you and all the coarse words and cruelty which I now relate are far away in ancient time.
Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun. My da had sworn an oath to evermore avoid the attentions of the law so when he saw the streets of Melbourne was crawling with policemen worse than flies he walked 28 mi. to the township of Donnybrook and then or soon thereafter he seen my mother. Ellen Quinn were 18 yr. old she were dark haired and slender the prettiest figure on a horse he ever saw but your grandma was like a snare laid out by God for Red Kelly. She were a Quinn and the police would never leave the Quinns alone.
MY first memory is of Mother breaking eggs into a bowl and crying that Jimmy Quinn my 15 yr. old uncle were arrested by the traps. I don't know where my daddy were that day nor my older sister Annie. I were 3 yr. old. While my mother cried I scraped the sweet yellow batter onto a spoon and ate it the roof were leaking above the camp oven each drop hissing as it hit.
My mother tipped the cake onto the muslin cloth and knotted it.
Your Aunt Maggie were a baby so my mother wrapped her also then she carried both cake and baby out into the rain. I had no choice but follow up the hill how could I forget them puddles the colour of mustard the rain like needles in my eyes.
We arrived at the Beveridge Police Camp drenched to the bone and doubtless stank of poverty a strong odour about us like wet dogs and for this or other reasons we was excluded from the Sergeant's room. I remember sitting with my chillblained hands wedged beneath the door I could feel the lovely warmth of the fire on my fingertips. Yet when we was finally permitted entry all my attention were taken not by the blazing fire but by a huge red jowled creature the Englishman who sat behind the desk. I knew not his name only that he were the most powerful man I ever saw and he might destroy my mother if he so desired.
Approach says he as if he was an altar.
My mother approached and I hurried beside her. She told the Englishman she had baked a cake for his prisoner Quinn and would be most obliged to deliver it because her husband were absent and she had butter to churn and pigs to feed.
No cake shall go to the prisoner said the trap I could smell his foreign spicy smell he had a handlebar moustache and his scalp were shining through his hair.
Said he No cake shall go to the prisoner without me inspecting it 1st and he waved his big soft white hand thus indicating my mother should place her basket on his desk. He untied the muslin his fingernails so clean they looked like they was washed in lye and to this day I can see them livid instruments as they broke my mother's cake apart.
Tis not poverty I hate the most
nor the eternal grovelling
but the insults which grow on it
which not even leeches can cure
I will lay a quid that you have already been told the story of how your grandma won her case in court against Bill Frost and then led wild gallops up and down the main street of Benalla. You will know she were never a coward but on this occasion she understood she must hold her tongue and so she wrapped the warm crumbs in the cloth and walked out into the rain. I cried out to her but she did not hear so I followed her skirts across the muddy yard. At 1st I thought it an outhouse on whose door I found her hammering it come as a shock to realise my young uncle were locked inside. For the great offence of duffing a bullock with cancer of the eye he were interred in this earth floored slab hut which could not have measured more than 6 ft. x 6 ft. and here my mother were forced to kneel in the mud and push the broken cake under the door the gap v. narrow perhaps 2 in. not sufficient for the purpose.
She cried God help us Jimmy what did we ever do to them that they should torture us like this?
My mother never wept but weep she did and I rushed and clung to her and kissed her but still she could not feel that I were there. Tears poured down her handsome face as she forced the muddy mess of cake and muslin underneath the door.
The complete review's Review:
Ned Kelly is an historical figure. He lived from 1855 to 1880 and is a folk hero of sorts in Australia -- a legendary outlaw figure from the wilder days down under. Peter Carey's book, presenting what purports to be the True History of the Kelly Gang, has Ned Kelly telling his own story.
Aside from brief introductory and concluding descriptions the book consists of thirteen "parcels", each a manuscript penned by Kelly in which he recounts his life and adventures. Brief editorial notes and content summaries aside, the story is all Ned's. It is fine and fun material: a fill of treachery, bank robbery, and murder -- with odds and ends such as transvestism thrown in for good measure. The first pages -- a brief account of Ned's last hurrah -- are enough to grip any reader.
Ned writes down his story for his daughter: "raised on lies and silences" himself he wants her to know the truth, knowing he is unlikely to ever be able to tell her himself. Carey does a fine job of finding a voice for Ned Kelly. The language is quite spare but often evocative. Ned is a straightforward kind of guy, in his actions as well as writing, but there is room for the occasional rich description: "this day of horror when the shadows of the wattle was gluey with men's blood", for example. Fortunately, Carey does not present Kelly as a litt�rateur manqu� -- though he does have him read and revel in R.D.Blackmore's Lorna Doone.
Ned's grammar is not his strong point, but has an authentic ring to it (and is not annoyingly wrong). He is unfamiliar with the comma so sentences run on without the breaks one expects an eye-catching device that holds the reader's attention. (The only thing we couldn't get a handle on is his use of the apostrophe: there's I'm, I'll, won't, don't, can't -- but also aint, isnt, wouldnt, couldnt.)
Ned is also quite careful with his language, aware that he is addressing his daughter. The frequent expletives are rendered as "b----r" and the like, and there is also the liberal substitution of the word "adjectival" for the inappropriate adjectives.
"It is too rough", Ned says of the life story he has written, but he is reassured that it is history and history "should always be a little rough that way we know it is the truth." It is hard to judge how reliable a narrator Ned is, as there is so little evidence not directly related by him. He includes a few newspaper clippings which describe some of his deeds, but they are not a real counterweight to his version of events. Australians, familiar with the legend and stories around Ned Kelly, may be better positioned to judge; readers who are unfamiliar with the figure (and the legend that has grown around him) will be unable to fully put Carey's figure in proper perspective.
Ned proceeds chronologically with his story, devoting considerable space to his childhood and youth. Always close to his mother (a bit too close), Ned lost his father when he was only twelve years old (after the father was jailed and thus away from the family for a considerable time).
Misadventure and tragedy hang in the air around the Kelly household, but Ned is, by and large, a decent young fellow. He even selflessly saves another boy from drowning -- but none of it is enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. Mrs. Kelly gets a parcel of land, but it is not enough to lift the family out of desperation.
A bad influence appears in the person of Harry Power, a criminal to whom Ned is apprenticed ("bought and sold like carrion" he terms the arrangement). A scared youngster, Ned helps Power, only slowly coming to understand that he does not have that much to fear from him. He helps with some of Harry's highway robberies -- often amusing scenes of crime in the good old days -- and his descent into criminal life seems a certainty.
Ned spends some time in jail, but he means to lead an honest life and tries his damnedest to do so. Events conspire against him -- including the commonly held belief that he betrayed Power in order to win his own freedom, which sets even some of his family against him. He tries to stay out of harms way, but harm keeps coming after him. One score is settled in an organized fight, but even that only aggravates circumstances. As a result of the fight Ned becomes "what is known as popular which was even worse than being hated as a traitor though the condition was in many ways identical."
Eventually Ned is driven to more desperate actions. His brother Dan is in part responsible, with Ned standing up for family (despite the fact that the members of his family -- even his beloved mother -- are often more trouble than they are worth). It leads to some serious crimes and confrontations with the police, the drama growing up to the final events. Along the way Ned also finds love -- Mary, who is the mother of the girl he writes his account to -- and his unusual courtship makes for one of the nicer touches in the book.
There are many successful aspects to the True History of the Kelly Gang, from how Ned recounts his adventures to the leisurely pace of many of the crimes. Despite all the horrors he relates (and lives through) Ned remains sympathetic (without trying too hard to win the reader's sympathy). He always does just what he thinks is right, and while several fateful decisions he makes (such as whether or not to flee with Mary to America) seem decidedly misguided he does always have good reasons for his actions.
Still, the book is not as riveting as one might expect and hope a book about such a colourful figure to be. Perhaps greater familiarity with the figure itself might help. For those readers not raised on this particular legend there seems too much that is missing. There are also bits of the story that don't seem to be followed through fully, and Ned's one-sided account can occasionally be wearing.
A solid, often entertaining read, but with some disappointments.
Quotes
"Through Kelly's keen eyes, we see the rural landscapes of 19th-century Australia: the stunted white-trunked gum trees, the mustard-coloured puddles, the ramshackle homesteads with swaybacked roofs. But it is the moral aspect that is most apparent. In this 'colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers', injustice suffocatingly darkens the atmosphere. 'They were Australians,' Kelly observes, 'they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood.' True History of the Kelly Gang is a handsome act of reparation to a figure that Carey sees as an outstanding victim of that great unfairness." - Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
"Whatever one's (slight) misgivings about its status as a 'true history', the book's power as a narrative is nearly overwhelming. The twang of Ned's untutored but vibrant prose would be hypnotic in itself, yet Carey adapts it to a series of set pieces -- Ned's rescue of the drowning boy, a boxing match, his first meeting with the woman who will become his wife, the ambush, even the small drama of felling a tree -- that are as gripping as any you could wish to read. His control of dialogue is similarly impressive, whether it be droll or deadpan or just plain laconic. Nor is it simply that Carey has immersed himself in the texture and language of late-19th-century rural Australia. More than this, he has transformed sepia legend into brilliant, even violent, color, and turned a distant myth into warm flesh and blood. Packed with incident, alive with comedy and pathos, True History of the Kelly Gang contains pretty much everything you could ask of a novel. It is an adjectival wonder." - Anthony Quinn, The New York Times
"Pushed centre stage with neither a definite nor an indefinite article for moral or theatrical support, True History of the Kelly Gang signals the first of its many deceits. Peter Carey's skills, passions and obsessions are all fully on display in this long-awaited take on colonial Australia's most enduring myth. Ned Kelly, cattle thief, bank robber and folk hero, was hanged at the age of 25 in Melbourne jail in 1880. Carey tells his story in the first person, in a narrative - recalling Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, Hanson's Jesse James and perhaps even Burroughs's Dutch Schultz - that his publishers refer to as a dazzling act of ventriloquism. But this is not the short-lived gimmickry of ventriloquism; it is writing, and though the voice it renders is loud, distinctive and beguiling, the concessions made by Carey to the modern reader create several potential flaws in the construction that, to begin with at least, threaten to undermine the otherwise carefully woven illusion. Happily, Carey is far too accomplished and adventurous a writer to expect anything so simple or so obvious as the suspension of disbelief in the reader. Rather, he makes a valid and sustained plea for accommodation, for readers to bring all they think they know about Ned Kelly - all those half-remembered childhood memories of a man in the heat of an outback summer with a bucket on his head - and then to allow Carey himself to fill in the empty spaces that remain. We are not seriously expected to believe that this is a transcript of Kelly's own work; we are not so easily fooled by the archive sources cited; we are not so swiftly seduced by the atrocious punctuation in a narrative otherwise so finely tuned, plotted and controlled." - Robert Edric, The Guardian
"True History shares the spare, low-key loquacity of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, but with a tenderness replacing McCarthy's nihilism. "In a settlers hut the smallest flutter of a mothers eyelids are like a tin sheet rattling in the wind," Kelly reflects mournfully as he watches his mother accept charity from a bushranger. Or again: 'If you have felled a tree you know that sound it is the hinge of life before the door is slammed.' Kelly is finally betrayed to a train-load of police by a crippled schoolteacher who has just recited King Harry's St Crispin exhortation from Henry V. The juxtaposition of such hope, such heroism with the bloody demise of Edward Kelly is discordant and affecting. The man was an outlaw � but we are the richer for Peter Carey's picaresque demonstration of quite how equivocal that branding can be." - James Urquhart, The Independent
"You can't escape the black square with the ominous slit: it's about as familiar and inevitable in Australia as the icon for male or female. Ned's iron mask now directs you to the National Library's website of Australian images. There it is, black on red ochre, an importunate camera, staring back as we look through it. It's modernist, postmodernist, merged into desert art just as surely as Ned has been incorporated into the Dreaming of the Yarralin people of north-western Australia. The black imp of myth and Sidney Nolan's depiction is now wild and out of control -- as unpredictable as a Mimi spirit and about as omnipresent...I don't believe Peter Carey set out to tame the mythic Ned Kelly in his True History of the Kelly Gang. True, he gives him a black face, real feet that need real boots, a memorable voice and a familial context. Carey is an unabashed apologist -- a romantic apologist what's more -- for Kelly and his clan, but he is also too much the ironist not to be alive to the density and contradictions of the historical record. He seems almost as interested in why Ned Kelly matters to Australia, what he says about what we have been and what we want to believe about ourselves, as he is in revising or revisiting the old story. Or at least that's the subterranean pulse. The wherefore. But novelists transmute wherefores into story, and Peter Carey, whatever else you might say about him , is a master at telling a tale, and a slave to the imperative. Give him mouldy underfelt and he'll have you flying to Samarkand...The tale he tells in True History of the Kelly Gang has a dramatic logic and a necessary economy of means. Carey shapes the story, neatens many (not all) of the ragged edges of the conflicted Kelly history. He explains rather more perhaps than can be explained, even by the now immense historical archive. Carey's Ned is a boy too attached to his mother. 'Hubba hubba Mamma is your girl' is his brother Dan's drunken taunt. The Oedipal bond is a deft narrative device -- it explains some of Ned's moves. With his mother still imprisoned, Carey's Ned knows his duty -- to get money (the bank robberies), see his mother free, and assume responsibility for the family -- to stick around rather than lighting out for the territory." - Morag Fraser, Australian Book Review
"In allowing Kelly to speak through fiction, Carey offers the bushranger yet another symbolic retrial. So what is the author's verdict? In a forgiving portrait that plays down some of Kelly's uglier traits (for instance, he was arrested for assaulting a Chinaman at the age of 14), Carey offers the defense that he was but a man: "he was not the Monitor, he was a man of skin and shattered bone with blood squelching in his boot." His is a Kelly of swagger, heat and, finally, humor. For in Carey's book, behind the mask, behind the beard, there is always a wry smile." - Michael Fitzgerald, Time Magazine
"In Carey's previous work, we have been treated to his literary dexterity, his poetic turn of phrase and his talent for piecing words and phrases together in a fresh way. He is, unusually, a writer who reminds you, page after page, of the pleasure of reading. His deliciously chaotic epic, Illywhacker, seemed a natural opening act for Oscar and Lucinda. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith took Carey away from traditionally perceived history into a startlingly imagined universe of his very own....There was also his touching autobiographical work, A Letter to Our Son. And here, in True History of the Kelly Gang, we have Ned's letter to his daughter...Carey has reportedly said he waited a lifetime to write this novel. It has probably taken him a lifetime of writing to be able to accomplish it." - Matt Condon, Sydney Morning Herald
First Paragraph:
By dawn at least half of the members of the Kelly gang were badly wounded and it was then that the creature appeared from behind police lines. It was nothing human, that much was evident. It had no head but a very long thick neck and an immense chest and it walked with a slow ungainly gait directly into the hail of bullets. Shot after shot was fired without effect and the figure continued to advance on the police, stopping every now and then to move its headless neck slowly and mechanically around.
I am the b----y Monitor, my boys.
The police had modern Martini-Henry rifles yet the bullets bounced off the creature's skin. It responded to this attack, sometimes with a pistol shot, but more often by hammering the butt of its revolver against its neck, the blows ringing with the clearness and distinctiveness of a blacksmith's hammer in the morning air.
You shoot children, you f-----g dogs. You can't shoot me.
As the figure moved towards a dip in the ground near to some white dead timber, the police intensified their attack. Still the figure remained erect, continuing the queer hammering on its neck. Now it paused and as its mechanical turret rotated to the left the creature's attention was taken by a small round figure in a tweed hat standing quietly beside a tree. The creature raised its pistol and shot, and the man in the tweed hat cooly kneeled before it. He then raised his shotgun and fired two shots in quick succession.
My legs, you mongrel.
The figure reeled and staggered like a drunken man and in a few moments fell near the dead timber. Moments later a crude steel helmet like a bucket was ripped from the shoulders of a fallen man. It was Ned Kelly, a wild beast bought to bay. He was shivering and ghastly white, his face and hands were smeared with blood, his chest and loins were clad in solid steel-plate armour one quarter of an inch thick.
Meanwhile the man responsible for this event had drawn his curtains and was affecting to have no interest in either the gunshots or the cries of the wounded.
At dark a party of police escorted him and his wife directly from his cottage to the Special Train and so he neither witnessed nor took part in the wholesale souveniring of armour and guns and hair and cartridges that occurred at Glenrowan on June 28th 1880. And yet this man also had a keepsake of the Kelly Outrage, and on the evening of the 28th, thirteen parcels of stained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kelly's distinctive hand, were transported to Melbourne inside a metal trunk.
Summary This novel purports to be the story of Ned Kelly, the most famous of all Australian outlaws, as told in his own words. We learn that after Ned's capture in the shoot-out at Glenrowan on June 28th, 1880, "thirteen parcels of stained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kelly's distinctive hand" (p. 4), were discovered among his things. These parcels turned out to be a memoir, addressed to the infant daughter whom he was never to see because his wife fled to San Francisco.
Ned was the son of poor Irish immigrants who farmed a "selection" (i.e. homestead) in the northern part of the colony of Victoria. After his father died, in order to help support her children, Ned's mother took up with a series of dubious men, including an outlaw named Harry Power, who became the boy's manipulative mentor. The memoir presents Ned as a goodhearted, loyal, and basically honest young man who came to blows with the law partly as a result of his bad companions, and partly through the intrinsic malice of the police.
Along with his brothers and two friends, he reluctantly becomes a bank robber, commits a few incidental murders, and ends up as a popular hero whose final capture has become part of Australian legend. The memoir shows us that the 26-year-old Ned could have escaped to America with his wife, but chose to remain in Victoria because he hoped somehow to free his mother, who was serving a jail sentence in Melbourne. The memoir also describes the origin of the famous iron armor that Ned was wearing when he was captured.
Commentary Ned Kelly is Australia's own Robin Hood. In a country just a couple of generations removed from being a penal colony, Ned's brand of insouciance appealed to the popular imagination. He stole from the wealthy bankers, took care of his poor relatives, thumbed his nose at authority, and totally confounded the police. Since his death at the hands of the hangman in Melbourne in 1880, the legend of Ned Kelly has skyrocketed. Today the Old Melbourne Gaol is a major tourist attraction largely because of its association with Kelly. And now a major Australian novelist has "discovered" new source materials that further humanize this heroic outlaw.
Peter Carey makes his pseudo-memoir work by delivering just the right balance between poor grammar and word selection, which demonstrate Ned's poor education, and humor and poetic sensitivity, which demonstrate Ned's imagination. Ned is a great storyteller, and Peter Carey sees to it that his subject's near illiteracy doesn't get in the way of the reader's enjoyment. In that sense the novel is a tour de force of narrative style.
In today's world of cultural diversity in medicine, True History of the Kelly Gang presents a fascinating example of a story in which the supposed "facts" may lend themselves to radically different interpretations: in this case, the interpretation of Victorian officialdom, which overreacted to Ned because he threatened the basis of its authority, versus the peasant culture of Australia, which held Ned's insouciance and disrespect for authority to be his strongest virtues. Which of these opposing cultural perceptions is "right"?
Another medically related issue concerns the relative roles of charisma and right action in producing a "good" doctor. Medical students, house officers, and patients often thrill to the virtuoso performance of a charismatic physician who breaks all the rules of good interpersonal communication and shared decision making. Alternatively, they might have little respect for a doctor who does the right things, but lacks the charismatic spark. What is the right balance? Or is "balance" itself precisely the feature that makes people (and stories) less interesting?
Australian writer Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang pulls out all stops in a story which has already been the subject of several biographies, two films, a stage musical and a comic book. Carey, who won the 1988 Booker Prize for his novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is the right chronicler to re-visit the saga of Australia's most notorious outlaw. A pastiche of history, folklore and brash inventiveness, Carey's look at the legendary Ned Kelly proves a page-turner.
Consider the book's cinematic appeal, with its plot-perfect take on the swaggering bandit-hero of a continent with a complex. Australia, author Carey has noted, is without political or historical heroes, and colourful outlaws must fill the bill in a former penal colony now graduated to good times. Ned Kelly's string of hit-and-run adventures lend themselves, almost equally, to a good read or to the vivid images of the movie screen.
Ned Kelly was born in the northeastern Australian territory of Victoria, in 1854. His first brush with the law occurred when, at the tender age of 10, he killed a neighbour's calf to help feed his family. Evidence left behind convicted Ned's father John, a dour, defeated man who had been transported from Tipperary to Tasmania and sentenced to seven years for stealing pigs. When he died, after his release from prison on the calf-killing charge, the bereaved family pulled up stakes and settled on land granted to homesteaders.
Although Ned wishes to work the land to please his mother, English squatters, with anti-Irish police and courts to back them, have seized the area's most fertile acres. The land left to the Kellys, arid and prone to frequent drought, is hard to farm. When the venture fails, Ned's widowed mother sells illegal whiskey to eke out a living, while her feisty young son is apprenticed to Harry Power, a highway robber with the fake job description of "bushranger." Adventure abounds, but Ned yearns for a return to the "honest life," a decision more hazardous than he had bargained for, a change that catapults him into life on the lam, into a brief yet brilliant career as a Robin Hoodish brigand armed with courage and a kind heart.
Ned's ties to his mother and siblings and his loving relationships with his wife, Mary Hearn, who brings a powerful voice to the mute misery endured by the Kellys, are convincingly described. "'Tis not poverty I hate the most," Ned Kelly once lamented, "not the eternal grovelling, but the insults which grow on it." One of the worst insults the family bears is the imprisonment, for three years, of Ned's much-loved mother, after a shootout gone awry.
Ned Kelly's crowded narrative is told through illiterate, stream-of-consciousness letters written in his mind to his infant daughter. He wants the child, whom he has never seen, to know her father and to understand his life. It is an effective way to present Ned's story, a distillation of fact and fancy calculated to prove a felon's worth and portray a father's love. The missives are gentle and laced with feeling, burnishing Carey's view of the famed Kelly as engaging victim, a worthy hero for an unfettered frontier.
Kelly's letters to his daughter contain, the fugitive declares, "no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false." He voices his hope that he will live "to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age."
Ned wrote his heart-wrenching letters while on the run, with his brothers and two friends, for almost two years, eluding authorities and what the country's landed squires deemed justice. He forfeited his only chance to escape from Australia, remaining in the country to aid his imprisoned mother. He was hanged in a Melbourne jail in 1888 and became an Australian legend.
Carey's version of Kelly's chequered career is brimming with action and interest. His sprawling epic, which often needs trimming, includes rousing fights, horse theft, bank robbery, gritty poverty, dank prison cells, demonic curses and pure, unbridled affection. Its characters seem part of a pattern, one rendered vivid by Carey with his trademark dash and originality.
Although some readers may find Ned Kelly an almost too-perfect hero, loyal, stalwart, resolute and tender, he is an appealing adjunct to history. His story, full of action, pathos and high good humour recalls biographer Charlotte Gray's observation that there lies, between fact and fiction, a jagged seam. It echoes, too, the dictum from William Faulkner that Carey has chosen as epigraph for the book: "The past is not dead. It is not even past."
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