Kelly Gang strikes again
May 2001
source: exread.com

In 1906, he became the hero of the first feature length movie ever made. In 1970, he was played by Mick Jagger in a movie so lousy it is rarely shown today. Soon he will be played (subject to contract negotiations) by Brad Pitt. In 1980, Australians issued a stamp in his honour, exactly one hundred years after they hanged him, and this month he appears on an Irish stamp.

He is Ned Kelly, bushranger folk hero of Australians, for whom he is Robin Hood, Nat Turner, Jesse James and Louis Riel all rolled into one. Kelly first captured the imagination of the world in the late 1940's, when Sidney Nolan told his story in a series of striking cartoonish paintings, many featuring Kelly in his famous buckethead armour. But to Australians, Ned Kelly was already celebrated in song and drama as the hero whose short life captured the pain and injustice that festered in the souls of ordinary Australians.

When, in 1783, the thirteen American colonies, led by George Washington, gained their freedom, they left the British with no convenient place to dumptheir criminals. The British government looked around for some other distant dumping ground, and came up with Australia. In 1788, a British ship landed the first 736 convicts at Botany Bay, not far from modern Sidney. For the next eighty years, Britain shipped out the waste products of its iniquitous economic system in which a few thousand privileged people (the Darcys and Knightleys of Jane Austen’s world) rode on the backs of millions of cruelly exploited men, women, and children.

In such a society, where the law exists to ensure that the starving masses keep their sticky fingers off the property of the privileged few, theft is in the eye of the beholder. The sanctity of property means little or nothing to those born, bred and trapped in poverty. They intuitively understand Proudhon’s great truth — that ownership of property, if the books were balanced fairly, is more often than not, theft. To the starving poor, "liberating" property from the privileged classes, who set all the rules to suit themselves, is not theft, but simply a kind of rough justice.

So when we talk of the criminals transported to Australia from 1788 on, we are talking of desperate people victimized by an astonishingly brutal and unjust society (which, for example, hanged children of thirteen or fourteen for shoplifting). For many, theft, poaching and prostitution were the only alternatives to death by starvation. Many of those shipped out were not criminals at all by our standards. Men who tried to organize trade unions, or who opposed the squire’s encroachment on their land, or who sought the right to vote, found themselves before magistrates who belonged to the propertied classes and considered transportation to the penal colony the perfect treatment for all radical agitators.

And then there were the Irish, the victims of six hundred years of English colonialists who stole their land, sucked the wealth out of their island, quashed their civil rights, and spat upon their religion. All this punctuated by regular massacres of their people. Colonialism is always a form of bloodsucking, and that inflicted on this island race by the English and the Scots (the Ulster Protestants of today) is one of the longest and most deplorable in modern history. Many of those exiled to Australia were Irish burning with a hatred for their oppressors. Ned Kelly's father, born in Tipperary, was transported in 1841 for stealing two pigs. After he served his seven years on Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), he crossed to Victoria, where he met and married Ellen Quinn, the eighteen year old daughter of a free settler. They had eight children. Ned was born in 1854. Clearly, the Kelly-Quinn clan had no respect for their English oppressors or their laws, or for the policemen who frequently used those laws to victimize the weak.

Almost inevitably, Ned grew up to be a highwayman and horse thief. His life became one long feud with the police. In his early twenties he became the leader of the Kelly Gang of bushrangers. Eventually, he killed three policemen.

Hostility between Ned and the police came to a climax in 1880, when Ned and his gang were involved in a mass hostage-taking incident and a shootout with the police. To the astonishment of the police, Ned suddenly appeared out of the dusk in a suit of armour he had made. Finally shot in the legs, he was captured. The other three gang members were already dead. Ned was tried and hanged. He was twenty-five years old. Afterwards, as if to illustrate the arrogance and disdain of the English ruling class towards the Irish in particular and the lower classes in general, Ned’s skull was used as a paperweight by a civil servant.

Now Peter Carey, one of Australia’s best novelists (Oscar and Lucinda), has written a novel in which Ned tells his story. Hailed by critics, True History of the Kelly Gang has received a mixed reception from the thousands of people for whom Ned is a symbol too important for a novelist to take liberties with. I share such misgivings.

While I accept the artist’s right to shape his material as he sees fit, as a lover of history I find the distortion of the past frequently makes me uneasy or indignant. And one trembles for the future when one realizes that the only "history" many people experience after leaving school is through distortive movies and TV shows. "Based on a true story" is right up there with "I did not have sex with that woman" as one of the great duplicities in this, the Golden Age of Duplicity. Nevertheless, I looked forward to reading Carey’s version of Kelly’s life. As it turned out, I hated it. Partly, it was the yin and yang queasiness I experience with "Is this true? Is that invention?"

I soon realized that what I really wanted was more Ned and less Carey. What I wanted wasn’t Carey’s novel, but Ian Jones’s straight biography, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, which Carey used as his main reference. Now it isn’t fair to blame an author because he is not writing about what you want him to write about. However, I don’t think the matter would have arisen if the novel were not so excruciating tiresome to read. (I don’t, for example, care if “Lawrence of Arabia” is an accurate picture of Lawrence or of Palestine in 1918. The movie is so bloody good it overwhelms any doubts or reservations.)

The real Ned Kelly dropped out of school when he was twelve. When, a year before his execution, Ned wrote an 8,000 word manifesto, his writing skills were naturally less than polished [actually Joe Byrne wrote the Jerilderie Letter which Ned dictated to him]. Carey has elected to mimic Ned’s semi-literate prose.

Unfortunately, Carey’s Ned is terribly prone to run-on sentences. (Strangely enough, Ned seems to have mastered paragraphing with a skill worthy of a Booker Prize winner. Go figure.)

The novel opens thus: I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false. And so it goes. Three hundred and fifty pages of this kind of stuff can grind a reader down. Reading it became a wearisome slog. Teachers of grade six English should be particularly careful of curling up with this opus after a tough day in the educational salt mines. They may think they have died and gone to Remedial English Hell. The cure is to put Carey aside, lie down, and read a few pages of Henry James. Teachers determined to plough on to the bitter end should first review what their contracts have to say about mental health and Longterm Disability. This sucker could push all but the toughest over the edge into early retirement.