true history of the kelly gang by peter carey

Carey’s Ned is kind and brave, coerced into violence by the violence of the cruel colonial system he had the misfortune of being born into. In many ways Carey’s historical fiction sticks to the script of the Ned Kelly legend. What kind of man was Kelly? Who did he love? Who did he hate? Why did he pursue a life of crime? As Carey did not have primary sources that could answer these questions, he invented them. It’s an art form that allows us to speculate on aspects of history that are otherwise are unknowable. But there are still plenty of gaps that story-tellers like Carey want to fill and this is the beauty of historical fiction. The documentary life history of Ned Kelly is a great one and it is complete in the sense that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Soon afterwards, in 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged until dead in the Melbourne Gaol. Kelly was finally shot by police after an epic shoot-out in the town of Glenrowan, where his Gang had kept the entire town population hostage in a pub. For a long time the elusive Kelly Gang avoided the police in a drawn-out game of catch me if you can. Upon his release from gaol, Kelly and his Gang gained notoriety for murdering three policemen and then robbing a series of coaches and banks. He became a petty thief while still a lad, appearing before a judge more than once for stealing livestock before his sixteenth birthday, and serving three years in prison before turning twenty. Ned was born in 1854 in the colony of Victoria to impoverished Irish convicts. The primary sources can tell us a lot about Ned Kelly and his Gang. Historians can also ponder the Kelly Gang’s famous suits of iron armour, and Ned’s eerie death mask, both of which are on display in public museums in Victoria.

Based on such documents, Carey makes Ned’s own voice clearly heard. The real Ned Kelly also left the long “Jerilderie letter,” a sort of manifesto that he dictated during a bank robbery to justify his life of crime. The Kelly Gang’s criminal exploits left a sizable paper trail for historians to read and interpret, including criminal records, newspaper reports and wanted posters offering prizes for Gang members dead or alive. To write this novel Carey climbed into the bushranger’s worn-out boots, mounted his stolen horse, and bounded gallantly into the land of historical fiction bravely going where many have gone before.Ĭertainly Carey’s not-so- True History is based on historical evidence. It has an intentionally old feel as though it had been discovered by a historian in the archive.

The novel is written as though it were an authentic autobiography, written by the bushranger on paper printed with the “National Bank of Australia” letterhead, dated 1878.

The True History of the Kelly Gang is not a “true history” at all, but rather an imagined autobiography of Australia’s greatest folk-hero, the bushranger Ned Kelly and his band of Irish-Australian outlaws. The title of Carey’s best-seller is misleading.

True history of the kelly gang by peter carey