The Bushranger's Voice: Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (1879)

Abstract

There is an umbilical cord of outlaw folkloric tradition that joins Rolf Boldrewood's 1880s bushranger novel Robbery Under Arms and Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey has done again what Boldrewood so innovatively achieved: the invention, or reinvention, of the bushranger's voice. But the more tantalising manifestation of the common outlaw tradition, for Carey, was the real-life bushranger Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (1879). The relationship between the Letter and Carey's novel interrupts an easy postmodern take on his work: this interruption is the subject of the essay. It teases out the paradox of the novel's being simultaneously both postmodern-quotational and, in the old-fashioned sense, an act of imaginative engagement with a significant past, a historical tale in fact.

Unsettling Australia: Disturbing White Settler Homemaking in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang

“…In a skillful ventriloquism of the historical Jerilderie letter, dictated by Ned Kelly in 1879, Carey gives his version of Kelly a vivid and unique, yet highly unreliable voice and calls into question, in his provocative doubling of "true" and "history", the 'truth' of Australianness, whiteness, or victimhood (see Kern-Stähler 2003; see also Pons 2001, pp. 64-65;Eggert 2007). For my interest in the ambivalences of settler homemaking, this novel is specifically relevant for three main reasons.…”