Question 1

Who was Ned Kelly, and why does he matter in Australian culture?

Accepted Answer

Ned Kelly (1854–1880) was an Irish-Australian bushranger — the leader of an outlaw gang in the colony of Victoria in the 1870s — who became the most celebrated figure in Australian popular culture and a contested symbol of Australian national identity. His father was an Irish convict transported to Australia; his mother and several other members of his family were imprisoned by Victorian police during the years of his gang's activities. Kelly's gang robbed banks in the Riverina district and killed three police officers in a confrontation at Stringybark Creek in 1878 — a confrontation Kelly claimed, in a long statement known as the 'Jerilderie Letter,' was provoked by police persecution. His last stand at the siege of Glenrowan in June 1880 — in which he and his gang wore suits of homemade armour made from ploughshares — ended with three of his gang killed and Kelly himself shot in the legs and captured. He was tried for murder and hanged in Melbourne in November 1880, aged twenty-five, reportedly saying 'Such is life' before his execution. He has been memorialized by Sidney Nolan in a famous series of paintings, by Russell Crowe in an unsuccessful 2003 film, and by Heath Ledger in Gregor Jordan's 2003 film adaptation of Carey's novel.

Question 2

Why does Ned Kelly write in the way he does in the novel?

Accepted Answer

Carey bases Ned Kelly's narrative voice in the novel partly on the 'Jerilderie Letter' — a long statement that Kelly dictated in 1879, demanding that a bank manager read it aloud to his customers, which survives as the primary documentary evidence of Kelly's own voice and which shows a man of considerable rhetorical intelligence writing in a semi-literate English shaped by Irish oral culture. Carey amplifies and regularizes this voice slightly without standardizing it: Kelly's sentences in the novel are long, breathless, and unpunctuated; his grammar is idiosyncratic; his sense of his own story is operatic and self-mythologizing. The effect is a prose that feels simultaneously authentic and literary — the real man's voice made available to readers who would not otherwise be able to inhabit it. The novel's conceit is that Kelly is writing to the daughter he has never met, which gives his narrative an emotional directness and a tenderness that the historical record alone could not have sustained.

Question 3

How does Carey research historical fiction?

Accepted Answer

Carey has spoken in interviews about the research that went into True History of the Kelly Gang — the years he spent reading historical documents, police reports, newspaper accounts, and accounts of frontier colonial life in Victoria in the 1870s. The Jerilderie Letter was central; so were accounts of the physical landscape of northeast Victoria, the social conditions of the Irish settler community from which Kelly came, and the legal and police systems that he was in conflict with. Carey's approach to research is not to reproduce its findings directly but to absorb them to the point where the world of the novel feels fully inhabited from the inside — so that the reader does not notice the research as such but simply feels that they are in the presence of a man who knows his world completely. The result is a novel that is simultaneously faithful to the historical record on the matters that can be documented and inventive on the matters that cannot, particularly the interior life and emotional experience of its protagonist.

True History of the Kelly Gang Reading Order

Complete True History of the Kelly Gang Book List