True History of the Kelly Gang

Kelly’s Voice

The formal decision that makes True History of the Kelly Gang what it is — and what it could not have been otherwise — is the choice to give Ned Kelly his own voice throughout. The novel is structured as a single extended letter from Kelly to his unborn daughter, written in fragments as he moves through the final period of his life as a fugitive. This voice is not standard English. It runs in long, breathless sentences, with idiosyncratic punctuation and the rhythms of someone who has educated himself against the grain, who has absorbed the cadences of the Bible and the language of official documents and recombined them into something that is entirely and recognisably his own.

Carey based this voice partly on Kelly’s own written documents — particularly his “Jerilderie Letter,” a long manifesto Kelly dictated to a hostage and which is one of the most remarkable documents in Australian history. But True History is not a transcription. It is a ventriloquism, and an extraordinarily skilled one. The voice Carey constructs is plausible as Kelly’s without being reducible to the historical record, capable of sustaining 384 pages of interior narration without losing its distinctive rhythmic and syntactic personality.

What this voice accomplishes that conventional third-person narration could not is a particular kind of justice. Kelly’s story has been told many times, always from the outside — always as the story of an outlaw, a phenomenon, a problem for colonial order to solve. Writing from inside Kelly’s consciousness gives the novel access to Kelly’s own understanding of why he did what he did, and that understanding is the novel’s central moral argument: that what looks like criminality from the outside looks, from the inside, like a completely rational response to a situation that left no other options available.

Colonial Australia

The world Kelly grows up in is a world in which being Irish Catholic and poor in Victoria in the 1850s is not simply a disadvantage but a structural condition of persecution. The Kelly family has been targeted by police — not individually, not because of anything specific Ned has done, but because of who they are and where they come from. The novel tracks this persecution with controlled, specific anger: the arbitrary arrests, the harassment that functions as a form of social control, the ways in which the legal system in colonial Victoria operates not as a neutral arbiter but as a mechanism for managing the Irish Catholic poor.

Carey is not making a simple argument that Kelly was innocent — he was not, and the novel does not pretend otherwise. What it is arguing is that innocence and guilt are not the correct categories for understanding what happened. Kelly’s outlaw career was not a deviation from a life that might otherwise have been law-abiding; it was the product of a system in which law-abidingness was not available to someone in his position. The police harassment of his family, the false accusations, the imprisonment of his mother — these are not background to the story of how Kelly became an outlaw. They are the story.

This argument is made through accumulation rather than assertion. Carey does not editorialize about colonial injustice; he renders it, scene by scene, in Kelly’s own voice, and allows the rendered experience to make its own case. The effect is that by the time Kelly takes up arms against the police, the reader has been inside his reasoning long enough to understand, if not necessarily endorse, the logic that brought him there.

The Armour and the Legend

The iron armour that Ned Kelly and his gang forged from ploughshares in the months before the siege at Glenrowan is one of Australian cultural mythology’s most durable images. It has been painted, sculpted, filmed, and reproduced in a hundred forms; Sidney Nolan’s Kelly paintings, which use the distinctive slit-fronted helmet as their central visual element, are among the most recognised works of Australian art. Carey’s novel enters this mythology not as a historian documenting a curious fact but as a novelist trying to understand what the armour means.

In the novel, the armour is made under conditions of extreme duress — Kelly and his gang are being hunted, their options are narrowing, and the decision to forge armour from farm equipment is both pragmatic (it will stop bullets) and something more than pragmatic. It is a statement. It is a transformation of the material of ordinary rural poverty — the ploughshare, the agricultural implement, the equipment of the pastoral life that the colonial economy has offered the Irish Catholic poor — into something that can resist the power that has pursued them. The armour is Kelly taking what the system has given him and returning it in a different form.

What Carey is doing by writing from inside the Kelly legend rather than about it is making a claim about national mythology: that the myths a culture tells about itself are not innocent, that they encode contested histories, and that writing from inside the perspective of the myth’s central figure rather than observing him from outside is itself a political act. The Kelly legend in Australia has always been contested — is he a hero or a criminal, a freedom fighter or a murderer? — and True History does not resolve this contest. It inhabits it, giving the reader access to the experience of being the person around whom the legend has formed, long before the legend existed.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — One of the great acts of historical ventriloquism in contemporary fiction, a novel that makes the most famous outlaw in Australian history speak for himself with a voice that is at once fully invented and completely convincing.