Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang: Ethical Dimensions in the Re-evaluation of Australia’s Mythic Hero1
Abstract
Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang negotiates the multiple and contradictory meanings that Ned Kelly’s historical record brings about. The figure of Ned Kelly brings to the fore the ethical dimensions of revisiting and questioning one of the best-known myths of the nation.
Full text
- 1 The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the M.C.Y.T. (Ministeri (...)
History is not complete unless it takes into account what men believe to be true in times of crisis as well as the objective truth.
(Noorul Hasan)
1One of the most pressing concerns of Peter Carey’s novel is brought to the fore by the words uttered by Thomas Curnow, the schoolteacher that brings about Ned Kelly’s final arrest and execution by alerting the police to the sabotaged railway line:
- 2 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, Faber and Faber (London/New York, 2002 [2000]), p. 419
What is it about we Australians, eh? he demanded. 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?2
- 3 Lloyd, Rosemary, ‘Figuring Ned: Nolan’s Kelly, Carey’s Kelly and the Masking of Identity’, Word and (...)
- 4 Graham Huggan, ‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly’, Austral (...)
- 5 John Ryan, ‘Ned Kelly: The Flight of the Legend’, Australian Literary Studies, 3-2 (1967), pp. 98-1 (...)
2What was it that turned the figure of Ned Kelly into ‘one of Australia’s most provocative and most multivalent icons, and Kelly’s story [into] one of the most often retold, in song, plays, novels, paintings, and movies, even road signs?’3 As Graham Huggan has put it,4 the story of the Irish Australian bushranger Ned Kelly has become fundamental, not only for the selective retelling of history as folk legend, but also for the ideological processes whereby social memory contributes to the elaboration of a nation’s founding cultural myths. As is well known, the 1880s, the Australian radical nationalist decade par excellence, allowed Ned Kelly’s story to become one of a number of more or less compatible legends, the best-known of which being those of the ‘noble bushranger’ and the ‘noble convict’. Whatever their differences, all of these figures were victims of an unfair penal code, romanticised and morally ambivalent outlaws who eventually embodied the defence of libertarian ideals against a repressive colonial system. To this, John Ryan remarks,5 might be added some other Irish nationalist legends, together with the well-known ‘bush legend’ itself, with its virtues of endurance and self-help, and its celebration of unconditional mateship.
- 6 As is stated in George Turnbull Dick’s Bushranging Bibliography, Adam (Glenbrook, N.S.W., 1992), mo (...)
- 7 Northrop Frye, ‘The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language’, in Robert D. Denha (...)
- 8 Andreas Gaile, ‘Re-mythologizing an Australian Legend: Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang(...)
3Although these legends have often been reinterpreted and put to the test, the Kelly story is still alive in Australia’s collective memory and artistic and academic establishment, which brings to the fore the profitability of myths as commodities circulating in an increasingly globalised world and, last but not least, the important role played by popular culture in the configuration of cultural and social memory.6 If, according to Northrop Frye, ‘a myth is a narrative that suggests two inconsistent responses: first, ‘this is what is said to have happened’, and second, ‘this almost certainly is not what happened, at least in precisely the way described’,7 then the term ‘myth’, Andreas Gaile argues, is most appropriate when discussing the figure of Ned Kelly, because it is the attempt to negotiate its problematic ambivalent meanings that has mainly occupied Australians ever since the outlaw’s death.8
- 9 Huggan, p. 144.
4Peter Carey is no exception. Like many other voluntarily exiled Australian writers, New York-based Carey feels the need to revise and reassess one of Australia’s most powerful national narratives and, by so doing, offer a postcolonial, and therefore critical, reading of one of his home country’s ‘most enduring and yet paradoxically amnesiac cultural myths’.9 In re-creating Kelly’s emblematic life, Carey’s novel negotiates the multiple, dense and contradictory meanings that the historical record of this legendary figure inevitably brings about. True History of the Kelly Gang seems to be almost as interested in analysing why the figure of Ned Kelly matters so much to Australia, what he says about what the Australians have been and want to believe about themselves, as it is in revising and/ or revisiting one of the most outstanding myths of the Australian nation. To quote Bruce Woodcock’s words,
- 10 Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, Manchester UP (Manchester/New York, 2003), p. 142.
by both celebrating and demythologising Kelly, the novel asks what Kelly’s status as national icon says about the identity of the Australian settler culture. Ned’s attempt to tell his daughter his version of the truth ... parallels contemporary Australia’s attempt to do the same, and with the same problematic contradictions.10
5Ned Kelly is depicted as a hero with a thousand faces: orphan, Oedipus, exemplary brother, horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank robber, police-killer. The particular vision of Australia’s beloved Robin Hood offered by Carey, an outspoken expert on purging Australian history from its most flagrant lies and untruths, somehow allows for a better understanding of the so many inconsistencies that lie at the core of any nationalist/cultural construct.
- 11 Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, Routledge (London/New York, 2001), pp. 100-3.
6As Bill Ashcroft argues,11 in a post-colonial context there is only a difference of degree between ‘History’ and ‘Imperial History’, and the term ‘History’ is, more often than not, to be taken as the history of ‘Civilisation’. Yet, the colonised can react towards the imperial function of history in different ways. They may acquiesce with its historical narrative, that is, they may cling to the idea of colony as an outpost of civilisation. On the contrary, they may reject history altogether, and by extension all kinds of Eurocentric discourse. They may also interject a different vision into the discipline of history. In other words, although the basic premises of historical narrative are accepted, a contrary narrative, which claims to give a more immediate or ‘truer’ version of post-colonial life, is embedded into the historical record. The insertion of contesting narratives is an important strategy in the process of discursive resistance. However, since it is only within the spaces opened up by History that the colonised try to reveal the complexity and hybridity of post-colonial reality, their contestation operates in the fringes of, rather than in opposition to, history. Finally, they may interpolate history in a way that discloses its assumptions and inconsistencies. Interpolation is not so much ‘re-writing’, that is, inserting the marginal stories that have been left out, but ‘writing back’. To put it differently, the model for this is ‘counter-discourse’, which is not a separate oppositional discourse but a tactic that operates from the fissures and contradictions of discourse itself.
- 12 Lloyd, p. 272.
- 13 Woodcock, pp. 145-6.
- 14 Gaile, pp. 38-39.
7When it comes to analysing Carey’s novel, one hesitates between insertion or interpolation. As Rosemary Lloyd argues, the very title, True History of the Kelly Gang, ‘with its apparently pleonastic and wryly ironic comment on the claims of history to represent truth, and its echo of the naive broadsheet language in which the stories were first told, explicitly and boldly invites comparison with the countless other tellings of the tale’.12 Moreover, as Bruce Woodcock points out, the title’s assertive lack of the definite article also echoes the ‘authentic’ eye-witness narratives and memoirs that became so common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of those accounts were a mixture of fact and fiction, and the ‘true story’ thus became one more element in the development of the modern novel. By blending the picaresque with the autobiographical Bildungsroman, Carey’s novel not only re-writes a national icon but also re-writes the founding elements of the English novel tradition.13 The knowledge of all this may lead the reader to reach different conclusions. On the one hand, it might be ingenuously assumed that this is a ‘truer’ record of experiences previously omitted from imperial history that is now offered to make up for the former lack (insertion). On the other hand, Andreas Gaile argues,14 it is clear that Carey, like many postcolonial writers, is obsessed with remembering, revisiting and recreating the past, while paradoxically bearing the postmodernist mark of scepticism about rendering the past objectively. The novel’s efforts to lay claim to real events and authenticate Kelly’s adventures are outstanding: a geographic map is inserted (the same tactic was used in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, to give but two well-known examples); the reader is also presented with a narrative frame with introductory words by an apparently reliable and objective narrator, who comments on each of the thirteen parcels he has compiled and on their condition and size; the novel even gives the accession numbers of the manuscript in Melbourne Public Library, (V.L. 10453) (p. 4). However, there is no manuscript like this in Melbourne Public Library. In fact, there is no Melbourne Public Library. Although a library of that name existed in Kelly’s time, it was eventually replaced by what is nowadays known as the State Library of Victoria.
8To make matters worse, Kelly’s attempts at giving his own version of his life are constantly undermined by those who have absolute control over the means of communication. Thomas Curnow, the treacherous schoolteacher, refuses to publish the manuscript Kelly entrusted into his hands, and keeps it as a trophy instead. Similarly, the editors of several newspapers refuse to print Nelly’s letter of justification, and instead comment on his lack of education. Kelly’s reaction speaks for itself:
all the editors had been shown my letter to Cameron but NOT ONE WOULD PRINT MY ACTUAL WORDS instead they was like snotty narrow shouldered schoolteachers each one giving their opinion on my prose & character. Throwing their garbage to the ground I were v. angry to be called a CLEVER ILLITERATE PERSON. (p. 368)
- 15 Gaile, p. 38.
9The same thing happens to his Jerilderie Letter, one of the few surviving documents by Ned Kelly. Significantly enough, this historical letter had been in private ownership ever since it was written. It was only after the publication of Carey’s novel that the State Library of Victoria claimed to be in possession of the document, something they had previously denied. In Carey’s novel, the printer of the Jerilderie Gazette refuses to print his letter out for Kelly and instead hands it over to the police. Kelly does not lose heart and resorts to writing his autobiography so as to gain his daughter’s affection by doing away with many misconceptions about his history and persona. The novel strives to lay claim to objectivity and overcome the limitations imposed by its choice of first-person narrative by inserting other voices. Some ‘authentic’ newspaper reports are included, and the novel also informs of the efforts made by Mary Hearn, Kelly’s fictitious lover, to make all pertinent corrections on their margins. Yet, this attempt at polyphony is not always successful. For instance, at the beginning of Parcel 8 we read that ‘pages describing the shooting of Constable Fitzpatrick are much revised by a second hand reliably presumed to be that of Joe Byrne’ (p. 221). However, the text offers no evidence to corroborate this revision. Kelly may write his own story, but the (frustrated) insertion of different, at times even conflicting, viewpoints into his narrative, only contributes to bringing to the fore the arbitrariness of all kinds of official/historical discourses. Moreover, the blurring of the boundaries between oral and written, fictional and non-fictional points to the uneasy balance resulting from the juxtaposition of competing versions of the past. Is it possible to speak of interpolation then? The publication of Kelly’s autobiography, however dubious its truthfulness may also be, does away with the ‘completeness’ of official historical discourses. Moreover this autobiography reveals how limited and arbitrary the monolithic perspective of the historical mode can be. Although it is true that, to take Gaile’s words again, ‘Gayatri Spivak’s cognition that the subaltern cannot speak is exemplified well in Kelly’s futile attempts to break through the barrier of colonial snobs,15 it is also clear that, in the end, yet another unofficial version of the past is given, which undeniably makes for the undermining of unitary historical/imperialist discourse. True History of the Kelly Gang could thus be given as an example of interpolation.
10The fact that Carey’s novel is written in the autobiographical mode should also be given some attention. As is well known, deconstructivist theories, especially those put forward by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, have ultimately contributed to questioning all kinds of conventional beliefs, those concerning the notions of literature and classical literary genres being no exception. The effects of deconstructive theories can be appreciated in a large amount of contemporary fiction, which basically relies on the conviction that the world cannot be directly represented; all we can represent is the multifarious and discordant discourses of that world. We cannot escape the limitations imposed on us by language, but we desperately feel the need to produce discourses, if only to make sense out of our own existence. The same contradictory views are to be taken in consideration when dealing with autobiography, the genre that has traditionally been most directly related to personal testimony and social history. In his seminal paper ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Paul de Man asserted:
- 16 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN 94, (1979), pp. 921-922.
Autobiography, then, is not a genre or mode, but a figure of reading... all texts are autobiographical... [yet] none of them is or can be. The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self-knowledge – it does not – but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalisation... of all textual systems.16
11Autobiography can no longer be regarded as an objective account of reality as produced by a ‘unified’ self. Autobiography becomes, not an essentialist form of history, but rather one more partial, and thus incomplete and imperfect, linguistic account of one’s particular reality. To take Jerome Bruner’s words in ‘The Autobiographical Process’,
- 17 Jerome Bruner, ‘The Autobiographical Process’, in R. Folkenflik, ed., The Culture of Autobiography: (...)
Perceiving and remembering are themselves constructions and reconstructions. What is ‘laid down’ in memory is not some aboriginal encounter with the ‘real world’, but is already highly schematized. There is no mental reference shelf of our aboriginal ‘real world’ encounters, any more than there is an aboriginal real world ‘out there’ made available to us by means of them.17
- 18 David McCooney, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, Cambridge UP (Melbourne, 1996), (...)
12The theory of recent years has done away with the naive conviction that one can accurately and objectively remember or reproduce what happened time ago ‘as it actually was’. It is impossible to give an unproblematic and aseptic account of the past. All one can do is to recreate it, while clinging to the illusion that one is being totally faithful to what really occurred. This being so, why is it that autobiography has acquired such popularity and importance nowadays, particularly in Australian literature? In his book Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, David McCooney tries to account for this phenomenon. As this critic sees it,18 if it is assumed that narrative is inherently fictional, then, in order to understand the condition of autobiography, narrative should be considered from a completely different perspective. Instead of taking it for granted that narrative falsifies experience, it should be considered whether or not ‘experience’ is inherently narratological. As McCooney argues, all events and actions without exception are configured by their connection with the past and future. Therefore, time is not a series of meaningless moments, but is articulated. Its structure complies with the most basic narrative axiom in so far as it shows a beginning, middle and end. Accordingly, when trying to make sense of the world through the changing perspective of the present, we are always telling ourselves stories. McCooney labels this struggle for integration as the ‘narrative life’.
- 19 Hall, Stuart, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions (...)
13The main aim of autobiography is, according to this critic, to make connections of the disparate towards the unified. Subjectivity becomes a process, and the subject becomes a unifying entity. Life itself can be meaningful, but meaning is constantly changing. To put it differently, the past does not exist as such, but rather a series of pasts are made to account through time. On the other hand, McCooney goes on to affirm, contrary to what one might think, autobiography is not that solipsistic or narcissistic, since it also proves the inter-relatedness of individuals’ narratives. Through other people’s narratives one comes better to understand one’s own narrative life and, while one retains one’s own narrative, it inevitably intersects with those of others. It is very important to distinguish between a more or less coherent narrative life and the unitary self. As Stuart Hall, to mention but one well-known example, has claimed, a ‘self’ is not a unified, monolithic, knowable identity, but rather becomes, that is, it is plural, a number of ‘selves’.19 Our lives are configured socially as well as temporally. We have different stories that we embody. Yet, McCooney argues, it is the capability of the person to embody various ‘styles’ within one narrative that in fact makes the person individual, and ‘intentions carried out’ are the points from which it is possible to create a narrative out of manifold episodes. It is therefore less confusing to talk about the individual than the self, as the self can be plural, but the individual cannot be. If a meaningful narrative is possible, then the self is not contingent but part of a greater narrative embodied in the individual character. One’s individual narrative is always related to and dependent on the narratives of others, which fully justifies the importance and pertinence of autobiography as a genre. To quote McCooney’s words,
- 20 McCooney, p. 25.
If narrative is to stand for an individual – that is, a distinguishable body which remains individual through space and time – then it follows that individuals are responsible for their narratives, and thus may be called to account. Autobiographies, then, are social documents. It is this social aspect, as well as its historical condition (the condition that allows it to be called to account), which allows an understanding of the importance of autobiography.20
- 21 In Van Ikin, ‘Answers to Seventeen Questions: An Interview with Peter Carey’, Science Fiction: A Re (...)
- 22 Lloyd, p. 278.
- 23 Ibid.
14What provides the impulse for the writing of fictive autobiographies like True History of the Kelly Gang is, among other things, the conviction that literature can disclose truths that cannot be grasped from traditional history. As Carey once affirmed, ‘when my stories are good it is because they reflect the truth of the real world,21 whatever ‘truth’ or ‘the real world’ may be. Kelly’s autobiography manages to give voice to what had remained silenced for decades, to make visible what had been for so long relegated to sheer invisibility. Consequently, Kelly’s autobiography becomes much more than a mere individual, and therefore disconnected, narrative. As Rosemary Lloyd has put it, ‘Carey’s history of the Kelly gang has the potential to transform itself into a paradigm for all stories of the dispossessed: slaves, convicts and the Aboriginal people of the lost generation’.22 The Ned Kelly in Carey’s novel therefore becomes ‘something more powerful and more global than merely the expatriate Irish wild colonial boy’;23 he incarnates the power of the subaltern to speak, and by so doing, write themselves into existence, write back to History.
- 24 Graham Huggan, Peter Carey, OUP (Oxford, 1996), p. 85.
- 25 In Eleanor Wachtel, ‘We Really Can Make Ourselves Up: An Interview with Peter Carey’, Australian an (...)
15Carey’s novel brings to the fore some of Australia’s most outstanding national myths in order to put them to the test. I subscribe to Huggan’s opinion that ‘Carey’s work is arguably less concerned with reinventing Australia than with altering the mythic constructs that underpinned previous inventions’. Generally speaking, Carey’s works serve to defamiliarise familiar images of Australia so as to disclose, ‘via a return of the repressed, the nation’s ghosts’.24 To begin with, Ned Kelly, like many characters in Carey’s fiction, can be said to be an orphan. His father, with whom he never seemed to be able to communicate, dies when he is only twelve. Being the oldest son, he has to leave school and work on the small plot of land acquired by his mother, who will be far too busy looking after her other children and subsequent lovers, who happen to be younger and younger, much to Ned’s disapproval. The reason for the abundance of orphans in Carey’s works, and in Australian literature in general, has been given by Carey himself: ‘It is... objectively true that Australia is a country made by people who were cast-off, exiled, orphaned. We suffered for a long time from that sense of exile, our separation from the roots of our culture’.25 It is this ever-present experience of exile that brings to the fore the polarity of familiarity and strangeness that is such an important part of Australian culture. The resulting lack of confidence could also be said to account for the sensation of failure that seems to preside over most Australian cultural productions. To quote Carey’s words again,
- 26 In Wachtel, p. 103.
We certainly find the notion of ‘success’ problematic. If you want to look at the things we celebrate, from Gallipoli (that military adventure where everyone got killed and no one won) through to Ned Kelly (a bush-ranger who was hanged) to Burke and Willis (the explorers who got lost and died) you’ll see that the one thing Australians believe in is defeat.26
- 27 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush. Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge (...)
16True History of the Kelly Gang conveys a most discomforting picture of Australia at that time. Australia is not, as nationalist historians wanted to make people believe, ‘Australia felix’ or ‘the workingman’s paradise’, that is, the absolute paradise of freedom where values such as liberty, equality, fraternity and democratic humanism are possible, in contrast with old Europe, by then associated with corruption, crisis and constrictions. Carey’s characters struggle for survival. Their fight is not only against nature, against ‘an arid, fly-blown, barren land, unlikely to sustain or nourish human habitation’,27 but also and most important of all, against relentless squatters and despotic colonial authorities. Social injustices lie at the core of this novel. Kelly is portrayed as victim of a ruthless and implacable system:
And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye. (p. 359-60)
17Kelly’s Australia is a hierarchical and class-ridden society, based on rigid oppositions such as ‘poor vs. rich’, ‘despotic authorities vs. helpless common people’ and, most importantly, ‘English vs. Irish’. Although many members of the police are Irish men, who mindlessly carry out the decrees of their English masters against their own people, it is undeniable that the English take the worst part. The novel offers numerous instances of notorious despotism and state-induced perjury: ‘The entire colony cd. see this were unfair we was being ruled by warders there were no more justice than in the days of yore’ (p. 365); ‘The Queen of England should beware her prisons give a man a potent sense of justice’ (p. 341). The British Empire stands for injustice and corruption, which leads many common men to sympathise with Kelly:
The British Empire had supplied me with no shortage of candidates there was men who had had their leases denied for no other crime than being our friends men forced to plant wheat then ruined by the rust men mangled upon the triangle of Van Diemen’s Land men with sons in gaol men who witnessed their hard won land taken up by squatters men perjured against and falsely gaoled men weary of constant impounding on & on each day without relent. (p. 393)
- 28 It must be noted, however, that the novel does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying things tha (...)
- 29 Although running the risk of producing a far-fetched interpretation, I would like to suggest that t (...)
18In a novel in which the Aborigines are practically absent, the Irish minority seems to stand for the fight of the dispossessed against the overwhelming forces of History.28 The allusions to ancestral Irish legends, and in particular to the spectral CHILD that replaced a boy who was taken away in the middle of the night never to return (pp. 136-8), or to the haunting appearances of the Banshee or Death Messenger, who ‘c[a]me on board the cursed convict ships’ to remain with them for good (p. 108),29 only corroborate the terrible destiny that awaits them, no matter what they do. On the one hand, they feel the desperate need to nourish themselves on the stories of the rebel Irish martyrs, as when Steve Hart starts enumerating the names of his heroes ‘like a girl living in Romances and Histories always thinking of a braver better time’ (p. 236). On the other hand, they know there is nothing those legendary heroes can do to help them out of their present ordeal. Moreover, their attempts at emulating them, as when Kelly decides to fabricate the iron armour that will turn him into another invincible hero like Great Cuchulainn (p. 389), will only lead them to their final destruction. A similar irony can be perceived in Kelly’s naive admiration for Shakespeare’s historical play Henry V (pp. 406-8), which enforces the very English imperial ideals against which Kelly so desperately tries to fight, and in the fact that the number of parcels into which the novel is divided happens to be thirteen, with all the negative/fatalistic connotations that this number is often thought to have. It is also perceptible in the letter he writes to induce his neighbours to insurrection (pp. 394-5), which paradoxically announces all the disgraces that will soon happen to him.
19Stranded in the empty space between a tradition they have already left and with which they are vaguely acquainted and a country and mode of life that denies them the right of entry, Kelly and his friends are anomalies, in-betweens, strangers who strive to find an identity of their own. This is the tragedy of those who are condemned to live in exile and who must deny and hide their cultural selves in order to survive or, to quote Kelly’s words, ‘the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget what come before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon’ (p. 334).
- 30 Schaffer, p. 8.
- 31 Woodcock, p. 154.
- 32 Schaffer, p. 62.
20No less problematic is Kelly’ relationship with his parents, especially with his mother, with whom he has an Oedipal love-hate relationship that inevitably brings to mind the deeply-rooted tradition of Australian misogyny, yet another recurrent theme in Australian artistic productions. As is well known, Australian culture has been constructed as an essentially masculine one. Within this domain, woman has been relegated to a marginal position where she has been given neither place nor voice. She has often been excluded as subject of representation, and has been instead spoken for to the point of becoming, to quote Shaffer’s expression, ‘the colonised sex’ in a predominantly phallocentric culture.30 Consequently, official discourses based on ideals such as masculinity and mateship have traditionally placed the white, heterosexual man of Anglo-Irish origin as the Australian type par excellence. One of the reasons for the dominant role ascribed to man lies in the special relationship that he maintains with yet another important leitmotif of the Australian tradition: the land. Much of the so-called Australian myth responds to the male desire to control and possess an alien land in order to reaffirm his position as master and conqueror. Carey’s novel also illustrates this obsession: Ned celebrates both the beauty and the harshness of the Australian landscape, to the point that, to quote Woodcock’s words again, ‘the Australian outback forms a continuum for the action, almost to the extent of becoming a character in the novel’.31 Meanwhile, the western conception of the land as something female (the so-called ‘mother earth’) places woman both outside and within the Australian bush tradition. As Shaffer remarks, she functions as a metaphoric sign for the Australian landscape: functioning as the fetishist ‘Other’, the land-as-woman is represented as the negative component that man must appropriate in order to reassert his identity. She is, in Shaffer’s words, the ‘harsh, cruel, threatening, fickle, castrating mother. She is dangerous, non-nurturing and not to be trusted’.32 Carey’s words only corroborate his awareness of all these cultural presuppositions:
- 33 In Thomas E. Tausky, ‘Getting the Corner Right: An Interview with Peter Carey’, Australian and New (...)
Australia represents itself as a very male, very Anglo-Celtic culture. Women have a tough time in Australia. And when Australian women who have lived outside of Australia go back, many of them can’t believe that they ever put up with it. It’s no accident that we’ve produced Germaine Greer.33
21On the one hand, it might be argued that misogyny is somehow mitigated in Carey’s novel: most of the Kelly women are depicted as being quite brave and independent and, most important of all, Ned feels something very special for his mother. The novel abounds in examples of Ned’s strong affection for her: ‘it were only as I held her that I knew how deep I loved her we was grown together like 2 branches of an old wisteria’ (p. 232); ‘all my life I had stood by her’ (p. 275). So ostensible is Ned’s love for his mother that, at one point in the novel, his brother Dan goes as far as to affirm ‘your ma is your donah as everybody knows’ (p. 225). Similarly, when Mary Hearn realises that Ned prefers risking his life to leaving the country and his imprisoned mother behind, she asks him ‘is it true do you really love her more than me?’ (p. 370). On the other hand, the novel invites the reader to regard Ned’s mother’s mistakes and strong sexual appetite as being mainly responsible for his final doom. It was Ned’s efforts to look after her that brought about most of his misfortunes:
When I were 10 I killed Murray’s heifer so she would have meat when our poor da died I worked beside her I were the eldest son I left school at 12 yr. of age so she might farm I went with Harry Power that she might have gold when there were no food I laboured when there were no money I stole and when the worthless Frost & King closed round her like yellow dingoes on a chained up bitch I sought to protect her. (p. 275)
- 34 In Lisa Meyer, ‘An Interview with Peter Carey’, Chicago Review 43-2 (1997), pp. 76-89, p. 89.
22To make matters worse, Ned often feels she is ‘an unnatural mother’ (p. 177). Among other things, she sells him to Harry Power; when Ned is accused of having betrayed this bushranger she believes a sister before him; and she keeps on having one lover after another against Ned’s advice and will. His relationship with Mary Hearn, however romantic and satisfying it may at times be, is also doomed from the very beginning. The father of Mary’s first child is George King, his mother’s partner. Furthermore, as soon as Mary realises Ned will not try to escape, she makes up her mind to leave him and go to California. It will be there, far away from Ned, that his daughter will be born. In making Ned Kelly trapped in an impossible love story, Carey’s novel is again relying on yet another thematic constant in Australian literature. As Carey himself affirmed, ‘I come from a culture that has very few love stories. They’re suspicious of love stories’.34
- 35 Gaile, p. 37.
- 36 Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting, OUP (Oxford, 1991 [1962]), p. 282.
23Judging from what has been said, Carey’s attempts at questioning and deconstructing some of the most outstanding foundational myths of the Australian nation have paradoxically served, more often than not, to reinforce them. As Andreas Gaile has put it, ‘Carey de-mythologizes the Kelly myth only to re-mythologize it afterwards with his instruments of a fabulator’.35 One final question remains: why this renewed interest in the figure of Ned Kelly? Several attempts, Carey’s novel being only one of them, have recently been made at keeping Kelly’s memory alive, thus contravening what Bernard Smith affirmed when referring to Nolan’s paintings in his seminal book Australian Painting, ‘man and myth, Ned Kelly maintains too lively an existence in the Australian imagination to be honestly denied’.36 It seems that the figure of Ned Kelly has been once again erected as an indispensable national myth and resource, as a must in the Australian cultural agenda. But, why Kelly? Who exactly does Kelly stand for? The words written by Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton in their introduction to the book they edited on memory and history in twentieth-century Australia may well throw some light on the question:
- 37 Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, eds., Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, OUP (...)
It is through the simplified and selective narratives of collective myths that historical events are rendered emotionally comprehensible and memorable. Mythic narratives are thus the wellspring of nationalism and they are constantly mobilised to serve differing ideological and political interests.37
- 38 Huggan (2002), p. 152.
24Memory allows us to change the past as it passes through our minds and, in changing the past, we make it more baffling and ambivalent as we make it more our own. Memory makes it possible to revisit the past so as to see it from totally different, at times even contradictory, perspectives. In other words, memory is the creative force that ensures the perpetuation and transformation of the past into the present and future. It is the faculty that ultimately discloses, not only the relativity of all ideological creeds, but also the multiplicity of interpretations that each one of us can produce when being confronted with our own life and experiences and those of the others. In the context of postcolonial criticism, memory acquires special strength and significance, for it is one of the main weapons whereby the colonised can do away with the unitary discourse of western imperial accounts. Yet, as Huggan points out, this postcolonial memory is not always celebratory.38 Two different mechanisms are often used to counter the resentment, even despair, that revisiting the past can inevitably bring about: remembrance-as-mockery, which reveals the ridiculousness and futility of (European) empires’ pretensions to a meliorist history of their own; and remembrance-as-retrieval, which makes it possible to liberate the other side of the (past) story from hegemonic, and therefore monolithic, western narratives of the imperial era.
25In writing True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey has managed to cut both ways. As the novel clearly suggests, the dark side of Australia’s colonial past must be confronted and brought to the surface so as to pave the way for a better and increasingly fluent multi-ethnic future. True History of the Kelly Gang should not therefore be regarded as a desperate attempt at defending/proclaiming a renewed version of Anglo-Celtic ‘Australianness’ in a rapidly changing multicultural Australia, that is, as yet another reactionary symptom of nationalist resistance, even fear, against the nullifying consequences of the spread of globalisation, but very much the opposite. What the novel is highlighting is the need to question all kinds of official and neo-colonial binary discourses to make room for a rather more open-minded and tolerant view of the nation and the world. What Ned Kelly’s fictive autobiography is saying is that the subaltern can, and must, speak, and that it is only through a lens that envisions, superposes and supersedes a multiplicity of pictures and stories that the ever-changing complexity and richness of a better new world can be apprehended. As Saleem Sinai, Rushdie’s well-known hero in Midnight’s Children, affirms to justify himself at the very beginning of his long and convoluted narration,
- 39 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Vintage (London, 1995 [1981]), p. 9.
… there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well.39
Notes
1 The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the M.C.Y.T. (Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología). D.G.I./ FEDER, Proyecto HUM2004-00344/FILO.
2 Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, Faber and Faber (London/New York, 2002 [2000]), p. 419.
3 Lloyd, Rosemary, ‘Figuring Ned: Nolan’s Kelly, Carey’s Kelly and the Masking of Identity’, Word and Image, 19-4 (2003), pp. 271-280, p. 271.
4 Graham Huggan, ‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly’, Australian Literary Studies, 20-3 (2002), pp. 142-154, pp. 142-44.
5 John Ryan, ‘Ned Kelly: The Flight of the Legend’, Australian Literary Studies, 3-2 (1967), pp. 98-115, pp. 101-6.
6 As is stated in George Turnbull Dick’s Bushranging Bibliography, Adam (Glenbrook, N.S.W., 1992), more than 1,200 books have been written on Ned Kelly’s life and deeds. Moreover, as Huggan argues in ‘Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction’ (p. 143), a whole industry has been busy evaluating the Kelly Outbreak. There have been several Kelly films and television programs, such as Ned Kelly (starring Mick Jagger as Ned) or the widely acclaimed 1980 TV series The Last Outlaw. The figure of this legendary outlaw is also present, not only in high-brow representations like Sidney Nolan’s paintings but also in many popular songs, from contemporary ballads such as Midnight Oil’s ‘If Ned Kelly Were King’ and Regnum’s ‘Poor Ned’ to the recently revived Ned Kelly, the Musical. Other books and other printed works were produced, most of which were designed for mass-market consumption. Thomas Keneally’s Ned Kelly and the City of Bees (1995) is a tale for children. Monty Wedd’s comic strip Ned Kelly ran for more than two years in the mid 70s. See also the novels by Robert Drewe (Our Sunshine 1991) and Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang 2000).
7 Northrop Frye, ‘The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language’, in Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye: Myth and Metaphor. Selected Essays 1974-1988, U. of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, 1990), pp. 3-17, p. 4.
8 Andreas Gaile, ‘Re-mythologizing an Australian Legend: Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang’, Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature, 15-1/2 (2001), pp. 37-9, p. 37.
9 Huggan, p. 144.
10 Bruce Woodcock, Peter Carey, Manchester UP (Manchester/New York, 2003), p. 142.
11 Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, Routledge (London/New York, 2001), pp. 100-3.
12 Lloyd, p. 272.
13 Woodcock, pp. 145-6.
14 Gaile, pp. 38-39.
15 Gaile, p. 38.
16 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN 94, (1979), pp. 921-922.
17 Jerome Bruner, ‘The Autobiographical Process’, in R. Folkenflik, ed., The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, Stanford UP (Stanford, 1993), pp. 38-56, p. 40.
18 David McCooney, Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography, Cambridge UP (Melbourne, 1996), pp. 10-25.
19 Hall, Stuart, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, 1997 [1996]), pp. 1-17, pp. 3-4.
20 McCooney, p. 25.
21 In Van Ikin, ‘Answers to Seventeen Questions: An Interview with Peter Carey’, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, 1-1 (1977), pp. 30-39, p. 33.
22 Lloyd, p. 278.
23 Ibid.
24 Graham Huggan, Peter Carey, OUP (Oxford, 1996), p. 85.
25 In Eleanor Wachtel, ‘We Really Can Make Ourselves Up: An Interview with Peter Carey’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 9, (1993), pp. 103-105, p. 104.
26 In Wachtel, p. 103.
27 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush. Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 1990), p. 1.
28 It must be noted, however, that the novel does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying things that much. In spite of the fact that the Irish are often portrayed as victims of the English colonial authorities, they are not free of racial prejudices either. The attitude that Kelly and his friends show towards some blacks and Chinese men they run into as they travel through the colony of Victoria clearly shows that they are prey to the same discriminatory ideas that they attribute to the English.
29 Although running the risk of producing a far-fetched interpretation, I would like to suggest that the use of certain Celtic words and legends in the novel can be regarded as an example of what Bill Ashcroft calls a ‘metonymic gap’. As this critic explains (p. 75), the metonymic gap is the cultural gap resulting when appropriations of a colonial language insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language, or concepts, allusions or references that may be unknown to the reader. The inserted language stands for the colonized culture in a metonymic way, and the resistance it offers to interpretation creates a ‘gap’ between the writer’s culture and the colonial culture. The colonized is thus able to represent his/her world to the colonizer in the metropolitan language, while also highlighting a substantial difference from it.
30 Schaffer, p. 8.
31 Woodcock, p. 154.
32 Schaffer, p. 62.
33 In Thomas E. Tausky, ‘Getting the Corner Right: An Interview with Peter Carey’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 4 (1990), pp. 27-38, p. 33.
34 In Lisa Meyer, ‘An Interview with Peter Carey’, Chicago Review 43-2 (1997), pp. 76-89, p. 89.
35 Gaile, p. 37.
36 Bernard Smith and Terry Smith, Australian Painting, OUP (Oxford, 1991 [1962]), p. 282.
37 Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, eds., Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, OUP (Melbourne, 1994), p. 2.
38 Huggan (2002), p. 152.
39 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Vintage (London, 1995 [1981]), p. 9.
Top of pageReferences
Bibliographical reference
M. Dolores Herrero, “Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang: Ethical Dimensions in the Re-evaluation of Australia’s Mythic Hero”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 27.2 | 2005, 71-85.
Electronic reference
M. Dolores Herrero, “Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang: Ethical Dimensions in the Re-evaluation of Australia’s Mythic Hero”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 27.2 | 2005, Online since 02 April 2022, connection on 16 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/11449; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/120tv
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