A Book Review

I've just finished reading this book. I bought it for Katy when it won the Booker Prize a few years ago but she did not want to read it. I started it when I was discharged from hospital in early Decemeber. I'd usually finish a book like this in a week but we've had so much to do I've discovered reading a couple of pages before the lights go out in my head.

I highly recommend it to you.

The True History of the Kelly Gang

Peter Carey

A wonderful book. Carey has taken Ned Kelly’s voice, full of passion and energy, and breathed life into a story that forms part of Australian mythology and legend. This voice is raw and semi literate. It ignores all punctuation – except for the full stop and is littered with abbreviations. And yet Kelly’s voice is at times, richly poetic, full of humour, starkly realistic and emotional.

The novel – a memoir, written in the first person chronicles the main – largely accurate events of Ned Kelly’s life aged thirteen to his death aged twenty-six.

The first part of the book concerns life in the Kelly home. We see the intense relationship between Ned and his mother and the young Ned struggling with his father and later after his imprisonment and death Ned’s conflicts with the lovers and suitors of his mother Ellen Kelly. Here is Ned full of energy and love for his family trying to be a man, trying to make a real honest life and home for his many brothers and sisters by farming Eleven Mile Creek.

However the emotional intensity and stress of life sharing leadership of the home with his mother’s lover’s forces him out of the home and he is apprenticed to one of his mother’s admirers, Harry Power. He is a highwayman, a bushranger and teaches Ned a different way to live. It is this relationship that sets the tone of Ned’s life.

In this second part of the book Ned is drawn further and further away from home and the ties with his mother seem to be loosening. He is a wanted man now and is on the run from the police. He meets and falls in love with a young Irish girl, Mary Hearn. And she becomes pregnant with the daughter he will never meet but to whom these chronicles are addressed. We see him killing one of his mother’s lover’s and eventually Harry Power is caught and imprisoned.

Throughout Ned has dealings with the police. And we see their brutal and corrupt behaviour. It is hard to be objective about the character of Ned. However the people he helps and his friends are extremely loyal to him. He is loved and admired by many ordinary people.
For the book is also about a way of life. That of the poor Irish – those victims of transportation and the British Empire.

The final section of the book concerns the small group of young men that surrounded Ned. He is their ‘captain’ . Mary Hearn leaves him and travels to America to safety and a new life. The police hunt him and his gang. They want him and the gang dead. It ends with the final shoot out at a hotel where dressed in home made armor he is shot in the legs and later hanged.

A strong, vivid account of Ned Kelly’s life. An Australian Robin Hood.