Reading Clare Anderson’s piece this week has inspired me to return to a novel which I began reading earlier this year: Peter Carey’s True history of the Kelly Gang. Having little knowledge of Irish-Australian history, it was not transnational motivations which inspired the selection of this book, rather it was the Booker prize it was awarded in 2001.

Having been told many times to stop reading novels when they are not enjoyable, I put the book down after managing to reach about the halfway point. I found the rhythm of colloquial language and ridiculously long run-on sentence styling tiresome to navigate, on top of the confusing narrative; Ned directly addressing the reader, who is his baby daughter reading his letters to her in the future. Having read Anderson’s article on convict transportation, however, I feel inspired to give Carey’s novel another go. 

Centring around Ned Kelly, an Australian murderer and member of the infamous Kelly Gang, the novel follows our protagonist from youth to the death of his Irish convict father, and his own execution in 1880. Though a work of fiction, Carey saw it his duty to explore his Australian heritage, writing an account which would expose the history of his home soil, and further the image of Ned Kelly as an Australian icon. Despite the wrongs he committed, Ned is revered, and was placed on centre stage at the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. He is seen as a champion of the oppressed, suffering at the hands of British Colonialism from birth, and forced to rebel as a reaction to a thoroughly corrupt justice system, police persecution, and continuous threat of eviction. 

The novel addresses the lives of the transported Irish convicts and their communities, while Ned’s narrative makes clear the difficulties of navigating this treacherous landscape;

“Your grandfather [Ned’s Irish convict father] were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen’s Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun. My da had sworn an oath to evermore avoid the attentions of the law so when he saw the streets of Melbourne was crawling with policemen worse than flies he walked 28 mi. to the township of Donnybrook and then or soon thereafter he seen my mother. Ellen Quinn were 18 yr. old she were dark haired and slender the prettiest figure on a horse he ever saw but your grandma was like a snare laid out by God for Red Kelly. She were a Quinn and the police would never leave the Quinns alone.”

Peter Carey, True history of the Kelly Gang, (brisbane, 2000)

While Carey’s work does not explore in depth the transnational nature of convict transportation, it provides a personalised access to Ned’s family’s, and the families in their communities’, persecution, as they fight to avoid the authorities who are determined to convict them of one crime or another. The Irish are seen as merely, “a notch below the cattle” by colonial officials. Despite Ned’s father’s, and his own, attempts to avoid crime, they find that their place as Irishmen in Australia means they cannot escape the label of ‘criminal’. Hence we see Ned resort to crime as a means to rebel. 

While we might expect to have contempt towards Ned for the wrongs he commits, Carey uses him as a symbol for the rising up of the oppressed against their oppressors. Against his will, he is apprenticed to an outlaw, Harry Power, and as a boy he recognises the wrong in the crimes they commit. However, as he grows to understand the nature of his oppression, and the importance of countering it, despite the increasing malicious nature of his character, the audience cannot help by wish he survives. Kelly hopes that his gang has;

“showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born” 

Peter Carey, true history of the Kelly Gang, (brisbane, 2000).

When I read Anderson’s article, I was enthralled by the extraordinary rich picture painted of the network of transportation taking place in the 19th century, and the political and social motivations lurking behind the journeys and lives of the convicts. By focusing on individuals like George Morgan, or the few young women transported from Mauritius to the Australian colonies, Anderson was able to pick apart the relation between race and the broader identifications of religion, class, behaviour, and education. I hope that, by re-reading Carey’s work, and supplementing with historical material, I can gain a better picture of Irish community life in Australia, and its place as a fine thread in the large tapestry of racial, political, and social transnational interaction during colonial rule. 

True History of the Kelly Gang