True History Of Kelly Gang Essay

It began with the socialist doctrine. You know this doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the

social organization and nothing more and nothing more; no other causes admitted!...

Crime and Punishment: Part3, Chapter 3.(227)

In modern socio-anthropology and social anthropology the world view is continuously changing. Everything is being seen from the scientific point of view. So concept of ‘crime’ is also changing. Crime is now seen not only as a normal feature and integral part of society but it can be seen as reflection of state of societal health. Social scientists are, therefore, concerned about the interrelationship between

socio-economic forces on the one side and the immense magnitude and style of criminal behaviour on the other side. Therefore history of crime and criminality is now carving its space in modern temporal dimension as an essential fabric in the social history of a community. In colonial and pre-colonial ages gone past the defiant section of community was easily dubbed as ‘criminal’ when they tried to raise their individual identities. But modern neo-historical and cultural study deconstructs the traditional concept of community and crime. My paper would analyse True History of Kelly Gang and look into the way how the defiant section of colonial community tries to protect their own space by protesting against the prejudiced concept of crime.
True History of Kelly Gang has conventionally been read as a text where themes of corruption, violence and lawlessness are probingly sought after.

Study has been done surrounding economic, political and social politics of Australia. But if one delves into the text properly, one can easily see author’s attempt to rediscover the voice of the so-called criminal famously known as ‘bushranger’ in Australia. Most of the bushrangers were of Irish origin. They were forcibly transported as convicts for a long time. They took refuge in the Australian bush to save them from the authorities. Therefore, they had to abandon the social rights and privileges. Late 19th century was the golden period of the bushranger. In Australian native history they have been placed in high esteem. Peter Carey has taken Ned Kelly as the hero of his novel True History of Kelly Gang. Ned Kelly was a famous bushranger and remains throughout ages a cultural icon, inspiring innumerable works in the art world and is the subject of biographies than any other Australian perhaps. He has been placed beside Robin Hood, Rob Roy etc. Still his alienated behaviour has taken the form of crimes of violence and anti-social behaviour. He has taken resort to vandalism, gang violence, brawling etc to protest against the authorities’ injustice. This protest is exposed throughout Ned’s Jeraldine letter of self-exploration. It is an extraordinary document of the passionate voice of a man who is trying to explain his deeds

and thereby try to retain the reputation. Peter Carey himself thinks, “I have always had a passion to write this, to make a sort of poetry from the uneducated voice, to give a speech to the speechless.”(Reawakening Ned, 7) So we may easily assume that Carey has reinvented the voice of the marginalised by portraying a man driven to crime through injustice and persecution. Peter revaluates Kelly as a national icon but he has, however, demythologised Kelly. His version of the Kelly story is meditation of the identity crisis of Irish convicts and immigrants who are pitted against odd situation. He has been seen as “the lone man against the odds, the cheeky lad in a society still close enough to its convict roots to admire someone who gave the short stick to authority”( An Irish History of Civilization, 173).

This novel True History of Kelly Gang is described from Ned Kelly’s point of view.

Here the word ‘true’ is very significant in Kelly text as no history is true but a proper assessment of certain past events. So in writing history ‘ideology’ remains in force from behind as Althusser suggests. In Australian history Ned Kelly has been presented in different roles. The historians took facts only from his life and changed those facts in accordance with their ideology. Therefore, one may get various versions of his life. Peter Carey likes to play with well-known facts. In the author’s note to Jack Maggs, a palimpsest on Dickens’ Great Expectations Peter Carey writes: “The author willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends.” In this novel he tries to make fiction out of the facts from Kelly’s life but he highlights his personal point of view. Possibly he tries to experiment with a new literary technique. So he inserts fragments of Jeraldine letter into his fiction and relates Kelly’s life to make it more reliable, authentic. Carey is also concerned with the true facts which lie buried for many years. But like other Australians he wants to know the truth, expose the truth. Stuart Wavell discerns, “One of the conditions of being an Australian right now is having the notion that we’ve been brought up with lies and denial about all sorts of things. As a nation we are totally obsessed with finding out what really did happen”. So Carey

subverts the traditional narrative and offers a new mode of description. To many people Kelly was stereotypical ‘social bandit’, a symptom of rural discontent, a folk hero. For Carey, Kelly is a man growing up in a socially marginalised community. But he tries to keep up the personal and familial integrity. But the authorities wanted to curb his outlook of freedom in any way. Therefore, they dubbed him ‘criminal’ and tried to put him in prison even with false pretext. Kelly raises questions about who imposes the label of ‘criminal’ and in what situations.
Issues of criminality and criminalisation are very much apparent in this text. Carey is also concerned with political issues of dispossession and injustice. Ned’s rage is led at the privileged class which gains wealth at the expense of the poor people. Yet the rich class always try to control the position, hold the social, political and economic rights for themselves. Kelly’s father came to Australia as a convict. Those convicts had to live on the outskirt of a small north-east Victorian town. They were to be seen as an entirely different race. Those Irish convicts and immigrants brought with them and passed on to their Australian-born children their conflict with the English as colonizers, thus transporting a colonial and racial hierarchy to Australia. So there was an inevitable conflict between the marginalised section and central section of Australia. Australian bush rangers who belonged to the lower strata of the social hierarchy had their own history to tell but their voice was always silenced. Still this silence may form the core issue of history. Said has justly said, “History is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written always with various silences and elisions, always with shape imposed and disfigurements.” Kelly writes his own history in order to keep his daughter well-informed of true facts of his life. His viewpoint and purpose of writing the ‘True History’ is very much apparent from the outset:
I lost my own father at 12 yr of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences
. my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word to write( True History of Kelly
Gang,11)
The novel starts with Ned’s life as a young child, how he is forced to become a man after his father dies. There are thirteen parcels. Each parcel bears the stamp of development of Kelly’s life. There are recounts of Kelly’s adventure. There is every element of a picaresque novel. Kelly had to rise against the injustice that was inflicted on them-on the Irish people like him. He understands –“injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age.”(11). He had experience of constant raids of the police. The authority left no stone unturned to curb them. Many farmers died, many women turned into widows due to the oppression of the police. Nelly with other children had to watch the limitless torture open mouthed. They were stamped as ‘criminal’. But the true fact is that they had to face the horror of the crime from the part of police. So the experiences of police raids were common and it battered children’s experience. Kelly thus writes:
The memory of the policeman’s words lay inside me like the egg of a liver fluke and while
I went about my growing up this slander wormed deeper and deeper into my heart and
there grew fat.
So from his very childhood he had the ingrained hate towards the Australian egalitarian authoritarianism. This typical anti-authoritarianism was specifically fuelled by the Irish background of many of the oppressed and disadvantaged settlers.
State-authority always wants to dominate the public. When the public belongs to the sub-altern class it unleashes torture. According to Louis Althusser, dominant section which holds the rein of authority has various ‘Repressive State Apparatus’ like the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police etc. Althusser thinks, “(Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression).”(176) The consequences of this repressive torture become threatening. In Kelly Gang we can apprehend how immense punishment the Irish convicts and their next generations had to undergo. They were always charged with theft. Even the women were not spared:
This same charge were laid against our mother and as I had left her undefended the police
took her and the baby as easy as plucking mushrooms in a cow paddock(Kelly Gang)
We see that Red Kelly’s child is ‘little demon’ to them. The authority wants to impose order, and thereby silences Red Kelly. The apparently civilised world is full of nasty mischief:
Silence! You will be like a black fellow with no home to turn to. Your wife will lie with
soldiers. You will wander the roads with sores and weeping warts.
Ned Kelly’s father Red Kelly had numerous encounters with the colonial police force resulting in his imprisonment and mysterious death. After his father’s death Ned Kelly got the knowledge of the land, hideouts and strategies for bush ranging. Though he tried to eke out an honest living, he was falsely charged with stealing a horse. But the fact is that his friend Wild Wright sold him stolen horse without his knowledge. This led to his arrest and imprisonment for three years. Here he has a glimpse of the cruelty of the state. He gradually descended into crime and cruelty in later period. The vileness and situation of the society led him into this world. Constable Alex Fitzpatrick, a local police officer tried to entice Kelly’s sister and wants to betray her. Kelly could not stand this dishonour. So Ned shoots him in the hand in self-defence. This led to his another arrest. After that Kelly was arrested several times. His request to listen to his views was thrown to the winds. Offense, be it minor or major ultimately landed him to prison; the officers perpetrated oppression on him. They got inhuman treatment from the officers. Police Commissioner Standish “answered he would gaol my mother if he so chose and all my brothers & uncles & cousins and he did not care if we should breed like rabbits for he would lockup the mothers & babies too.”(120)
Justice and injustice are recurrent motifs in Ned Kelly’s account of his life as is the celebration of courageous resistance against an oppressive authority which has made the Kelly legend such a hallmark of mythic Australian levelling spirit. To describe the incessant injustice he has referred to the images of comic strip creatures which he took from the Australian background. The officers blackmailed Kelly’s mother and tried to molest her, seduce her. In this context we see one of the police remarking: “May your children come to the straw with feet like toads and eyes like snakes.” The comparison of the children to two of the inferior creatures at once point to the vilest treatments that the Irish convicts had to undergo. When Fitzpatrick wanted to keep Ned’s sister as a trap his anger knew no bounds and thereby became “mad as a dog and didn’t care the traps was meanwhile humming like a hive of bees not 400yd away.” (222). The image at once evokes the idea. When Mary, Kelly’s mistress hears about the murderous activities of Kelly from the newspaper, she became angry and her condition was really pathetic. Kelly evinces: “My Mary were now crying trapped inside her horror like a bird inside a church.” Police were described as ‘mongrels’ as they hound out Kelly Gang. This novel was about the beastly treatment of the marginalised people and thus this comparison is fitful in the context.
Kelly was enraged at the injustice of the law. This injustice actually pushed him towards the crime world. He found no solution. Therefore, he had to writhe in anger. The irony is that he “existed in a silent agony where my so-called CRIME could not even be whispered.” He was against the typical Victorian police. Though the police might be involved in theft, no one would charge their crime because “the thief were beyond the law he were Constable Flood of Oxley. That injustice put me in a rage nothing would ease but danger” (150). Thus authority in a way was propagating the crime unjustly. Kelly is at the crossroad of finding justice. So he wanted to compose the famous Jeraldine letter in order to bring the true facts of his life to light. But the irony is that newspapers refuse to publish the news regarding Kelly: “I soon learned all the editors had been shown my letter by Cameron but NOT ONE WOULD PRINT MY ACTUAL WORDS.”(257) Some of them blamed him as clever illiterate person. His real impulses are to belong and to speak out against injustices: He acts as powerful voice against colonial injustice. Contradictory qualities build up his personality. On one hand he is stoical, heroic, and hardworking; on the other hand he is violent, angry. Circumstances, inequality, harassment, misunderstanding led to his increasing criminalisation. So he writes various accounts and letters of his action.
The final section is really pathetic. It shows how the local schoolmaster Thomas Curnow ultimately betrays Ned. In the encounter between police and Kelly Gang, Ned was severely wounded and captured. Other members were killed. There is no mention of survivors. Possibly, these point to the fact that authority wants to suppress its heinous actions; it also wants to erase factual details. So there is the need for emergence of ‘true history’. The section called ‘The Siege at Glerowan’ ends with a proper question of Kelly Gang’s place in the context of debate of Australian National identity:
What is it about we Australians, eh? He demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not
have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might not we find someone better to admire than a horse-
thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of
ourselves?(296)
Thus here there is potent indication that the Kelly Gang should have their own individual identity. It at once raises the question of power politics which stays behind the identity formation of criminal and their action as criminality. The final part is described in third-person narrative. It deals with factual straightforward event of Kelly’s hanging. His last words are-“Such is life”. It expresses one’s supreme experience of the tragedy of life. He was a man more sinned against than sinning. He was a puppet in the hand of modern society. In this society everything is under control in the name of discipline. One who would try to circumvent the border would ultimately collapse. Famous Social Theorist Michel Foucault rightly comments,
The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of
atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was not the
effect in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power...of a power that
asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintenance order was not
entirely unconnected with the functions of war of a power...a breach of which constituted
an offence and called for vengeance.
Thus Carey presents a succinct picture of a Irishman being tortured. The Irish element in the book provides a larger framework for the presentation of oppression by authority which Ned experiences as an individual. Thus throughout the text we get a clear idea that identity politics is at work in all levels. Everything is determined who holds the power and who is swayed under that power. There is mark of ambivalence in the concept of criminality