The True History of the Kelly Gang is Peter Carey’s masterpiece. It represents the apex of his career-long concern to explode Australians’ self-identity.
Much of Carey’s early career was devoted to penetrating Australians’ culturally dependant relationship with America. This began with short stories such as American Dreams and culminated with the novel Tristan Smith. However he is also fascinated by the British Imperial period, exploring the colonial experience in Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs.
So it is unsurprising that Carey has finally turned his vast imaginative skills to perhaps Australia’s most culturally significant character – Ned Kelly.
Yet, as Carey explains, Kelly’s armour may be Australia’s most enduring icon, but Australians have reflected little on the motivations of the man himself.
“All pictures we carry of Ned Kelly – the iron helmet, the bearded bushranger, actually hide his nature from us. We all think we know the man, the story. But it felt to me that we knew nothing. The life of our most famous citizen was completely unimagined,” Carey says.
Carey succeeds in drawing the reader into Kelly’s heart, through the novels central conceit. The narrative is a series of letters written to Ned’s (fictional) daughter.
Carey has an extraordinary ear for first person narrative, and his reconstruction of the voice of a poor 19th century Irish-Australian farmer is utterly convincing. Carey – who grew up at Bacchus Marsh in rural Victoria - turns Kelly’s lack of education to his advantaged, using Ned’s writing to subvert the reader’s expectation of punctuation and tense. At crucial times in the novel he uses the absence of punctuation to expose the raw charisma that pulsates from Kelly’s imagination. Many times I was so completely hypnotised by Carey’s Kelly that I had to remind myself that I was reading Carey’s words and not Ned’s. In True History, Carey has used his craft well to crystallise the anti-authoritarian motivations of man like Kelly. The reader absorbs this Kelly because it comes through osmosis rather than foregrounded by didactic claims.
The genius of Carey’s efforts is clear when compared to Christopher Koch’s similarly structured Out of Ireland. Koch – who is also a gifted writer –struggles to drive the narrative forward using the conceit of a series of love letters from an upper-class Irish revolutionary transported as a convict to Tasmania. At times Koch’s use of this device – especially the ‘discovery’ of replies - seems contrived and used simply to impart information to the reader. In contrast, Carey cleverly presents Kelly’s ‘letters’ in eight simple sections. Each of these eight ‘parcels’ is introduced by a dismembered ‘editorial’ voice – which increasingly imposes its own moral judgements as the novel progresses.
‘Truth’ and ‘justice’ in a post-modern context
Carey’s novel is an instructive examination of the nature of truth and justice in our contemporary post-modern context.
As the intentional irony in the title suggests, a central theme of the novel is the nature of truth. Carey’s notion of writing a ‘true history’ is characteristically post-modern. This is because the way the novel has been constructed from particular ‘biased’ perspectives is foregrounded.
There are at least three entirely separate voices in the novel. Firstly, there is Ned Kelly’s narrative. Secondly there is the ‘main’ editor, identified as ‘SC’ who writes the prefix and suffix. Thirdly, there is the initial editor who collates the sections and is identified by ‘SC’ as Thomas Curnow, the Glenrowan schoolteacher who sabotaged the Kelly Gang’s final police ambush.
The use of these ‘voices’ not only highlights that this ‘true history’ is actually a fiction written by Peter Carey, but raises question in the readers mind about the reliability of text. It has been said that the victors write history. But in this case Carey, does not present us with an unadulterated version of Kelly’s opinions, but one that has been filtered by the very man who betrayed him.
Peter Carey has long been interested in the embellishment of memory by invention and lies, which is particularly clear in his novel Illywhacker.
In True History, Carey turns his attention to myths - the ‘beautiful lies’ a community tells about itself to fix the bonding glue of meaning. Not only does Carey look at Australia’s iconic obsession with Ned Kelly but he looks beyond him to the myths of Ireland that informed Kelly’s behaviour. Carey seems to asking, “Are these lies built on lies?” and “If so, does it matter?”
From the opening page Carey makes it clear that the truth of Kelly’s account is integral to the notion of justice. Ned insists his account, ‘will contain no single lie may I burn in hell if I speak false’ because he wants his daughter to ‘finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age’.
It is interesting that Carey links the question of ‘justice’ to truth. Post-modern philosophers, such as the American Richard Rorty, claim it is impossible to find ‘truth’ outside our immediate context. Meaning is found, he claims, within the relational networks of a community.
“Our identification with our community – our society, our political tradition, our intellectual heritage – is heightened when we see community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found,” Rorty has written.
In Rorty’s paradigm, the moral framework which guides how people behave within a community can only be asserted by the mutual agreement of that community. Morality is relative to a certain time and a certain place. It can not be imposed from outside, in the way that Christians would claim that the Bible’s teaching can be applied. For Rorty, the question of truth is irrelevant. What matters is that a certain moral framework works for that community.
“What matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging against the dark, not our hope of getting things right,” Rorty says.
However Carey’s exploration of the Kelly story seems to bring into question the optimism thinkers like Rorty place in post-modern relative morality. Discrete communities co-exist in the same geographic space. Indeed’ part of the tragedy of Ned Kelly, is the way in which he was caught between the Anglo-Australian establishment and the poor Irish-Australian farmers on their marginal selections. The myths, stories and interpretations the Irish settlers brought with them and translated into the Australian context clashed with those of the English settlers. Kelly stands at the apex of two opposed views of what is just. For the Anglo establishment, Kelly is a ‘cop killer’ who must be hung to meet the just demands of the law. For the Irish selectors, Kelly was the victim of a corrupt and oppressive system and he was justified in standing against it.
The problem is that these two versions of justice for Kelly are irreconcilable. ‘Society’ and ‘community’ are not pseudonyms as Rorty infers. Relying on each ‘community’ to assert its own ‘truth’ is no guarantee of utopia. Indeed it is more likely a recipe for decent into tribalism.
In The True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey leaves us with a question. If we absorb the post-modern paradigm with its dismissal of truth, then where does this leave questions of justice? If morality is relative, then we have no grounds to convince our oppressors that they are ‘wrong’. Justice can be nothing more than the exercise of power not of truth. It is not surprising therefore, that post-modern guru Jacques Derrida recently made a remarkable step backwards from relativism announcing that the only thing that could not be deconstructed was justice.
For Christian readers this should be an instructive insight into how to relate to a post-modern world. Around the Church is a community adrift saying, ‘there seem to be something wrong with the world…’ But our communities are unsure how to make even the first steps towards fixing it. It is here that the gospels provide both guidance and an answer through the life and resurrection of Christ.
True History scratches at the heart of a nation grappling for its identity in a post-modern quagmire. The values which Australia hold most dear – egalitarianism and a ‘fair go for all’ – sink quickly when meaning becomes sodden by semiotic games. As this book shows there cannot be any justice without a sense of truth – a truth which transcends the individual and is absolute.
