True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

How I wished for a better man a Captain to advise me.  My own father died when I were 12 yr. old the only boss I ever had were Harry Power and once I seen his feet of clay I left him far behind or so I thought.  Yet as this dismal cloudy day wore on I finally understood I were still the apprentice and Harry were the master I were still following his rutted track.  It were on account of him I knew this were a blind gully and that were the best spur to get me to the humpback ridge.  Your Ignorance he called me when teaching me the secrets of the Strathbogies the Warbies & the Wombat Ranges.  If you know the country he said then you will be a wild colonial boy forever.

Ned Kelly is, for Australians, something like Billy the Kid.  Or perhaps Billy the Kid and Jesse James and all those guys wrapped up together, without any Earps on the other side to balance out the mystique of lawlessness and robbery.  At the same time that the American frontier was becoming the Wild West, Ned Kelly was becoming Australia's most famous bushranger: robbing coaches and trains and banks, killing cops, taking hostages, and becoming a folk hero.  Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang takes the form of Kelly composing his own account of what led him to bushranging, complete with dialect and busted grammar.  "I wished only to be citizen," Kelly writes, "I had tried to speak but the mongrels stole my tongue when I asked for justice they give me none."

Carey's version of Kelly is of a generous and humble man, with a deep love and loyalty for his family, who becomes a criminal by compulsion, rather than appetite.  His mother, desperate for money, sells him into indentured servitude to the famous bushranger Harry Power when he's young, and although Ned hates Power and the business of robbing, it's Power's instruction that still serves him a decade later.  His association with Power makes him a known quantity to the local police, and their endless harassment of him is what drives him to robbery.  He kills a couple of cops who are out to kill him for a crime he didn't commit, and from then on his fate is decided: he's a bushranger whether he wants to be one or not.  His tenacity and determination, and his ability to devil corrupt institutional forces, make him a popular figure among many locals, but he's stymied in his attempts to tell his own story by writing letters to politicians and newspapers.  Ned Kelly and his gang are on everybody's lips, but he himself is left voiceless.

One thing that Carey emphasizes is that the fight between Kelly and the cops follows the ancient lines of English-Irish, Protestant-Catholic conflict.  There's something absurd about the wholesale translation of this conflict to the colony, where the geographical forces that pit the English and Irish against each other are absent.  Its manifestations are relics, torn from their site-specific context, like the dresses worn by some of Kelly's gang, which allude to similar tactics by Irish rebels but here serve no practical purpose.  Ned lacks the ancestral memory of the crossdressers in his gang; he doesn't even know for most of the novel while they're wearing dresses, but he more than anyone bears the psychic trauma of these old grudges.

Carey's Kelly becomes a tragic figure: a boy who only wanted to make his mother's homestead a functioning farm, but who ends up an outlaw.  He was a legend, but he wanted to be a man.  The novel is frequently comic, also--all those women's dresses--but a little too long and meandering for my taste.  Kelly's diction, while ingeniously rendered, made the characters blur together for me.  Maybe Carey's Australian audience, with comparatively more knowledge and context, has an easier time.