ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

UQP 1st edition with dustjacket

As regular readers will know, it was this month’s #6Degrees that prompted me to read Peter Carey’s award-winning True History of the Kelly Gang.  For ages I have had two editions of this novel on my TBR in my collection of Booker Prize winners. I bought the US first edition first, but I waited patiently until an affordable true first UQP edition came my way.  It doesn’t have the dustjacket, but as you will see, I like it better the way it is.

The Margaret and Colin Roderick Award, which recognises the best Australian book of the year that deals with any aspect of Australian life, was first to recognise True History of the Kelly Gang in 2000, the year of its publication by UQP.  Prestigious as that award is, it was swamped the following year in 2001 when True History won the Booker, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Overall, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.  In 2002 it was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC award and it won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for Roman in 2003.

UQP 1st edition, (hardcover protected by mylar film)

The reason I prefer my (still pristine) UQP first edition without its dustjacket, is because it feels more authentic.  The novel purports to be thirteen parcels of undated, unsigned, handwritten papers then held in the Melbourne Public Library, and written in the hand of the real life bushranger Ned Kelly (1850-1880).  This unadorned edition looks just the way those uncut papers might have looked had they been bound together in the 19th century when dustjackets were not a thing…

1st US edition (Knopf)

However, reading the jacket blurb of the US first edition published by Knopf in 2000 offers an interesting frisson for the Australian reader.  It goes like this:

Out of nineteenth century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs.  Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also — at a distance of many thousands of miles and more than a century — a Great American Novel.

A Great American Novel?? True, Carey has lived in the US since 1990, but that doesn’t necessarily make him American and True History has nothing to do with America.  (Except that some of the outlaws want to escape to it.)  In fact, it looks as if Carey isn’t much interested in writing ‘American’ novels.  He didn’t set a novel in the US till he’d been there for 20 years (Parrot and Olivier in America, 2010, see my review). After that The Chemistry of Tears (2012) was set in London, (my review here) and then there was A Long Way Home (2017) which brought him back to an Australian setting, see my review). So it seems a bit rich for anyone to claim True History as a Great American Novel… until you read on and see what the Knopf blurber is doing.  It’s an appeal to an American audience using a well-worn trope in US literature and film: the idea of a hero against the authorities, in a novel with all the force of a classic Western.  

But just as it would be a mistake to read this novel as a semi-factual fictionalisation of Ned Kelly’s life, it would also be a mistake to read this as a mere tale of Goodies and Baddies.  Carey is too interesting a novelist to write an apologia – where would be the authorial challenge in that?  Carey’s Ned Kelly is more complex, more slippery than his folkloric image.  He portrays himself as a man trapped into a life of crime by his circumstances almost as if it were inevitable.  He is a man who tells his unborn daughter and purported reader that he is a man more sinned against than sinning, but he’s not a good judge of character at all.  In his justifications for murder and armed robbery he is a poor judge of his own character, and he’s a poor judge of the people around him too. That’s one flaw in his character that causes his downfall, because he never sees betrayal coming.  The other flaw in Carey’s Ned Kelly is that he fails to understand that even amongst people equally desperate and oppressed, murder is unconscionable.  The lives he has taken do not weigh heavily on his conscience.  Sometimes, it is what he does not say in this long, carefully crafted letter to his daughter that is most telling.

Yes, this epistolary novel is written by an ungrammatical hand with a poor grasp of punctuation, but it is crafted to be coherent, sequential and comprehensive. And its most consistent feature is that Ned always blames someone else for his predicament…

Ned doesn’t realise until it’s too late that it was his mother who set him on the path to major crime by apprenticing him to bushranger Harry Power.  He doesn’t learn that she paid Power to take him, a lad of only 15, not until she sends him back to Power’s brutality after he’d made his escape.  He makes one wrong judgment after another about his mother’s lovers, and he’s wrong about the loyalty of other members of his family and his gang members too.  He’s horribly wrong about his lover Mary Hearn as well, but he still trusts her even after she makes off with his money.  It’s not even clear that the unborn child is his.

(In the real life historical record, Kelly did not have a lover or a child.  He was only 26 when he was hung, and had hardly had a life at all, even by the life expectancy standards of his era.)

Most crucial to the Ned Kelly myth is that he avoided capture for so long because he had won the hearts and minds of the poor and oppressed — and this is where close reading shows Carey’s skill in constructing this tale.  Kelly’s quest for redemption in his daughter’s eyes slips up here and there, when he demolishes his own myth because it’s so critical to him that he should blame others for his fate. His narrative shows that early on in his career a member of his own family had claimed a reward for dobbing him in.  And even before there were tempting rewards for his betrayal, he admits that there was resentment against him because the police harassed his family, friends and mere acquaintances on his account.  He says they were gaoled on trumped up charges because of their association with him.

Doubts about the extent and reliability of his support network is suggested by his admission that he’s vulnerable to betrayal when he’s hiding away in the Warby Ranges:

If you will lead men you cannot be away from them no more than from a dairy herd or to put it another way when no rooster is present the cockerels will grow their combs till they’re red and flapping across their beady eyes for once their leader is absent they exercise their own judgement setting plans in course they would never dream of if their Captain were up front. (p.261)

‘Their Captain’?  As the novel reaches its conclusion we see that Kelly’s self-aggrandisement has warped his judgement.   Writing his ‘history’ to denounce police corruption, he valorises his efforts, describing himself as Napoleon writing at his table before going into battle.  Fatally, he fails to see that Curnow, a schoolteacher taken hostage in the Glenrowan Pub, is buttering him up in order to gain his trust and make his escape.  Curnow quotes the St Crispian’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V where Henry rallies the troops just before the Battle of Agincourt when they were outnumbered five to one. Kelly claims in his moment of hubris that even if the meaning were not clear they cd. see a man of learning might compare us to a King.

Kelly’s letter is really more of a memoir, one which suffers from subjectivity more than most.  It is in fact one of a number of attempts to ‘set the record straight’. (In real life, he wrote what is known as the Jerilderie Letter which shares some of the insights into his character with Carey’s novel). Kelly has misinterpreted a newspaper report that the government will hold an enquiry into any reliable allegations into police behaviour: he takes that as a promise that his mother will be released from her gaol cell where she is doing time for Aiding and Abetting Attempted Murder.  He sends his account of things to a newspaper for publication and is outraged that the newspaper publishes only a summary.  His indignation again clouds his judgement, and there is a ludicrous and risky attempt to get his allegations printed in Jerilderie.

It’s not until near the end of the book that Mary is involved in writing this splashed and speckled history.  In Parcel 10 we see in Ned’s account that Mary Hearn was an active conspirator in plans for robbing the Euroa Bank — or alternatively, (unwittingly, or by design if he hasn’t really forgiven her for abandoning him) that Kelly was testifying against her. (That would be a good reason for her to scarper off to America.) But her additions to Ned’s account offer a hint that she might have been wanting to take credit for the planning.  Mary keeps a scrapbook of press clippings about all the gang’s exploits, and Ned mentions her annotations about the robbery in a clipping from The Morning Chronicle of December 11, 1878…

Dear daughter you know I never had no proper education at Avenel I would have to be there with my sixpence each Monday morning except when my father were in the lockup and then my mother must be granted a CERTIFICATE OF DESTITUTION. From the time we went to Greta I had no school at all so there are much better educated men than me to write the story of our robbery and you may study this account as a fair example.  Yet not one of those scribes was sufficient for your mother’s taste as you will note from her comments on the sides.  Heres my cutting and theres your ma she sits watch on these sentences like a steel nibbed kookaburra on the fences in the morning sun. (p.290)

Kelly’s other ‘editor’ was Curnow.  The novel is bookended by introductory and concluding explanations of its provenance.  At the beginning we are told that the informant responsible for the final shootout did not take part in looting souvenirs afterwards and yet had in his possession 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.  

But at the end of the novel in a (purported) pamphlet tells a different story:

If this lack of lasting recognition disappointed him, he never revealed it directly, although the continuing, ever-growing adoration of the Kelly Gang could always engage his passions.

What is it about we Australians, eh? he demanded.  What is wrong with us?  Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli?  Might we not find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?

In private, his relationship with Kelly was more complicated, and the souvenir he carried from Glenrowan seems ot have made its own private demands on his sympathy.  The evidence provided by the manuscript suggests that in the years after the Siege of Glenrowan he continued to labour obsessively over the construction of the dead man’s sentences, and it was he who made those small grey pencil marks with which the original manuscript is decorated.  (p.350)

Carey’s Ned Kelly is a complicated man who defies both demonisation and folk hero status. This is a very fine novel indeed, and it was a worthy winner of all its awards!

Update, later the same day: I did wonder how readers not from Australia would react to True History so it’s a pleasure to link to Marianne’s blog for her review.  Marianne lives in Germany but has also lived Belgium, England and the Netherlands!

PS Further Thoughts since Cathy’s comment (below)…

Cathy’s comment triggered the thought that despite his infamy not much is really known about Kelly the man which left Carey free to create an entirely new character.  The character that he crafts — aspects of which can be deduced from the real life Jerilderie letter and which I’ve already noted above — is an example of the amoral self-aggrandisement which can lead any man to believe that he can achieve great things… Thus we see Kelly claiming that the police are in a drama writ by me. 

But the novel also shows that (as in real life) Kelly was not representing a great cause.  His cause was always all about him and his resentments; it was not about making substantive reforms to benefit his society.  Kelly’s allegations in real life and in the novel were that his actions were in self-defence and that the police and judiciary were corrupt, part of British oppression of the Irish transplanted to the colony.  But Carey’s Kelly is no Garibaldi, gathering support for a great cause from common people across the country and creating an army willing to die for that cause. He was no Peter Lalor either.  Carey’s Kelly alludes scornfully to the Eureka Rebellion in 1854, (when he and the real life Kelly were four).  He says that it achieved nothing — which is simply not true since the Eureka miners achieved adult male suffrage with no property qualification and the eventual election to Parliament of their leader Peter Lalor.  The real life Kelly had the vote. So did all the other adult males in his company.  And that must be so for Carey’s characters as well.

Yet in his last days at Glenrowan Carey’s Kelly believes he’s gathering an army of supporters, sharing his resentments and led by him in the persona of Napoleon and revered as a Shakespearean King. These delusions of grandeur make him think that this ‘army’ is forging his (in)famous armour when in fact there were only the four of them in the Kelly Gang, and these other men refused to wear the armour because they couldn’t see or move freely to shoot.

Nevertheless, in the 21st century, when we have had a federal government steadfastly refusing to legislate for a corruption commission, we can perhaps hear the plaintive cry of a man who did not know that his quest should have been for legislative reform that created a mechanism to report on police and judicial corruption.

Author: Peter Carey
Title: True History of the Kelly Gang
Jacket design by Chip Kidd, jacket painting: Landscape (detail) 1947 by Sidney Nolan
Maps and other images not credited.
Publisher: Borzoi Books, Knopf, 2000
ISBN: 9780375410840, hbk 1st edition, 352 pages
Source: Personal library.