"Such is life." australian bushranger Ned Kelly's last words were tantalizingly opaque. Hanged in Melbourne in 1880 aged 25, his short life was easy to mythologize but harder to grasp. Reduced over the years in the public mind to his jerry-built armor and death-mask bust, Kelly became an empty vessel for Australia's wildest dreams. And in countless books, films and paintings he has been variously reimagined: as an Antipodean Robin Hood, an Irish-Australian republican, and an alien figure of rock star dimensions, with Kelly country-the area of north-eastern Victoria the outlaw and his gang held hostage in the 18 months before his Glenrowan arrest-as his Camelot.
It has taken Australia's most daring novelist, Peter Carey-whose previous book Jack Maggs reinvented Charles Dickens' Abel Magwitch-to turn Kelly inside out and rescue the outlaw from clich. Presented as a diary the bushranger writes while fleeing "the traps," True History of the Kelly Gang (University of Queensland Press; 401 pages) offers an energized confabulation of man and myth: the son of an Irish convict who manages to soar above his squalid station. Early in the book, a teenage Kelly is shown around the high country by his mentor Harry Power. Looking out across the Great Divide, the older bushranger tells the youth, "You're going to ride a horse across all that."
While previous portrayals of Kelly have confined him to the straitjacket of fact, Carey opens him up and lets his demons fly. Playing fast and loose with history, the author cloaks the Kelly gang in transvestism and opium smoking, and suggests the bushranger was driven by a dark Oedipal impulse. The way Carey tells it, Kelly's murderous violence is aimed as much at his mother Ellen's succession of suitors as at the police, who impound the family's animals and perjure themselves to imprison many of his relatives. Later, after the gang kill three policemen at Stringybark Creek and rob the Euroa Bank, his famous Jerilderie Letter seems less an attempt to clear his name than a love letter to his mother, who is in prison in Melbourne.
Indeed, it is this recasting of Kelly as a literary hero that is Carey's most audacious move. No sooner have we been introduced to the young Kelly than he is covering a page with letters of the alphabet. On the brink of becoming a fully-fledged horse thief, Kelly thrice reads Lorna Doone, and dips into Shakespeare and the Bible. As his infamy grows, so too does his desire to be published. While holding up the town of Jerilderie, Kelly takes time out from bushranging to deliver his 58-page letter to the printers. Even while under siege at the Glenrowan hotel, he is seen putting pen to paper. "Mr Kelly you give the appearance of an author," says the town's schoolteacher Thomas Curnow, who will later edit the "thirteen parcels of stained and dog-eared papers" that comprise True History.
These papers are addressed to Kelly's unnamed daughter (born to his sweetheart Mary Hearn, who escapes to California before Glenrowan) in an untiringly chipper tone. "Troubles rushed towards us like white ants hatching on a summer night," is typical of his account of life on the Kelly selection at Eleven Mile Creek, as rats, corrupt magistrates and bad blood plague the family plot. But rather than being a victim, Kelly comes across as the master of his own destiny, even as he resorts to crime: "We cd. look down from the Warby Ranges and see the plumes of dust rising off the plains and know the police was actors in a drama writ by me."
So intoxicating is Kelly's voice-without commas or sophisticated grammar, his journals are meant to be drunk neat-the reader quickly forgets that the bushranger is in fact an actor writ by Carey. For an author whose 1985 novel Illywhacker resurrected the Australian colloquialism meaning "a professional trickster," this book is Carey's most breathtaking feat so far. Where his previous novels have skirted around Australian history, True History of the Kelly Gang jumps right in and assumes the guise of truth. It's a fabulous performance.
In allowing Kelly to speak through fiction, Carey offers the bushranger yet another symbolic retrial. So what is the author's verdict? In a forgiving portrait that plays down some of Kelly's uglier traits (for instance, he was arrested for assaulting a Chinaman at the age of 14), Carey offers the defense that he was but a man: "he was not the Monitor, he was a man of skin and shattered bone with blood squelching in his boot." His is a Kelly of swagger, heat and, finally, humor. For in Carey's book, behind the mask, behind the beard, there is always a wry smile.