Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang
November 10th, 2004
books
Has anyone found this gem of a writer yet? On reading I’m not terribly adventurous. I frequently depend on the media to feed me names that I might wish to read. Upon seeing a new name on the shelves, I would put both the writer through a test run. If I could to finish a quarter or half of of his book and obtained a good impression of it, that book would be bought and eventually the other novels by the same person.
I came upon Jack Maggs at a university bookshop years ago but did not buy the book: at that time, I was enamoured of Graham Greene. Wringing hands in Kinokuniya, because I am fast running out of Atwoods to read, I found Carey’s new paperback ‘My Life As A Fake’ displayed prominantly on the shelves. I was actually looking for a hardback he has written on his travels in Sydney of which I read half of it standing up in the bookshop. As it was expensive – forty for a really slim volume – I thought twice before I decided on buying. I couldn’t find it and picked up My Life As A Fake. A week later, Oscar and Lucinda, then I found a three book special that I bought. Of the three, I just finished True History of the Kelly Gang.
I love this book most of the three I’ve read. It was Sunday and I had planned to get some office work done. When I opened the page to the first chapter, I shivered and goosebumped all over. It was adjectival good and I knew I would get no work done at all that day.
By dawn at least half of the members of the Kelly gang were badly wounded and it was then that the creature appeared from behind police lines. It was nothing human, that much was evident. It had no head but a very long thick neck and an immense chest and it walked with a slow ungainly gait directly into the hail of bullets. Shot after shot was fired without effect and the figure continued to advance on the police, stopping every now and then to move its headless neck slowly and mechanically around.
I am the b—-y Monitor, my boys.
The police had modern Martini-Henry rifles yet the bullets bounced off the creature’s skin. It responded to this attack, sometimes with a pistol shot, but more often by hammering the butt of its revolver against its neck, the blows ringing with the clearness and distinctiveness of a blacksmith’s hammer in the morning air.
You shoot children, you f—–g dogs. You can’t shoot me.
As the figure moved towards a dip in the ground near to some white dead timber, the police intensified their attack. Still the figure remained erect, continuing the queer hammering on its neck. Now it paused and as its mechanical turret rotated to the left the creature’s attention was taken by a small round figure in a tweed hat standing quietly beside a tree. The creature raised its pistol and shot, and the man in the tweed hat cooly kneeled before it. He then raised his shotgun and fired two shots in quick succession.
My legs, you mongrel.
The figure reeled and staggered like a drunken man and in a few moments fell near the dead timber. Moments later a crude steel helmet like a bucket was ripped from the shoulders of a fallen man. It was Ned Kelly, a wild beast bought to bay. He was shivering and ghastly white, his face and hands were smeared with blood, his chest and loins were clad in solid steel-plate armour one quarter of an inch thick.
Meanwhile the man responsible for this event had drawn his curtains and was affecting to have no interest in either the gunshots or the cries of the wounded.
At dark a party of police escorted him and his wife directly from his cottage to the Special Train and so he neither witnessed nor took part in the wholesale souveniring of armour and guns and hair and cartridges that occurred at Glenrowan on June 28th 1880. And yet this man also had a keepsake of the Kelly Outrage, and on the evening of the 28th, thirteen parcels of stained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kelly’s distinctive hand, were transported to Melbourne inside a metal trunk.
Undated, unsigned, handwritten account in the collection of the Melbourne Public Library. (V.L. 10453)
