Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang

Table of Contents

for AlisonSummers

The past is not dead. It is not even past.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

ACCLAIM FOR PETER CAREYS

TRUE HISTORYOF THE KELLY GANG

A TIME MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Lean, pared down for speed, and wholly convincing not only as an outback adventure but also as a psychological and historical drama.... A spectacular feat of imagination.

The Boston Globe

Carey succeeds in creating an account that not only feels authentic but also passes as a serious novel and solid, old-fashioned entertainment.

San Francisco Chronicle

A remarkable achievement.

The Wall Street Journal

In this bracing narrative, Carey has given Kelly back his tongue with a style that rips like a falling tree.... Carey is a man who isnt afraid to stand in water during lightning and tell us what its like.

The Christian Science Monitor

So adroit that you never doubt its Kellys own words youre reading in the headlong, action-packed story.

Newsweek

Peter Careys Ned Kelly is somebody worth knowing and remembering, and his novel is also worth our best attention.

The Washington Post Book World

Brilliantly executed.... Careys Kelly is filled out in Browningesque depth.

The Times Literary Supplement

Hypnotic.... Prose shot through with poetry and run together in an altogether brilliant way.... A roaring challenge of a book that takes readers on a wild, unforgettable ride.

The Oregonian

Epic storytelling, outsized in its sensibilities and as often laugh out-loud funny as it is fraught with tragedy.

The Miami Herald

An entrancing chronicle of a larger-than-life folk hero.

The Denver Post

Close to letter-perfect.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Carey is a skilled and cunning writer.... The tale is packed with action and incident, and has all the garish colors of the outback itself.

The New York Review of Books

A marvelous accomplishment, certainly as engrossing as anything Carey has written.... Hes created in Kelly an endlessly fascinating character.

New York Post

By dawn at least half the members of the Kelly gang were badly woundedand it was then the creature appeared from behind police lines. It was nothinghuman, that much was evident. It had no head but a very long thickneck and an immense chest and it walked with a slow ungainly gait directlyinto a hail of bullets. Shot after shot was fired without effect and the figurecontinued to advance on the police, stopping every now and then to move itsheadless neck slowly and mechanically around.

I am the by Monitor, my boys.

The police had modern Martini-Henry rifles yet the bullets bounced offthe creatures skin. It responded to this attack, sometimes with a pistol shot,but more often by hammering the butt of its revolver against its neck, theblows ringing with the clearness and distinctiveness of a blacksmiths hammerin the morning air.

You shoot children, you fg dogs. You cant shoot me.

As the figure moved towards a dip in the ground near to some whitedead timber, the police intensified their attack. Still the figure remainederect, continuing the queer hammering on its neck. Now it paused and as itsmechanical turret rotated to the left the creatures attention was taken by asmall round figure in a tweed hat standing quietly beside a tree. The creatureraised its pistol and shot, and the man in the tweed hat coolly kneeled beforeit. 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 fewmoments fell near the dead timber. Moments later a crude steel helmet likea bucket was ripped from the shoulders of a fallen man. It was Ned Kelly, awild beast brought to bay. He was shivering and ghastly white, his face andhands were smeared with blood, his chest and loins were clad in solid steel-platearmour one quarter of an inch thick.

Meanwhile the man responsible for this event had drawn his curtainsand was affecting to have no interest in either the gunshots or the cries of thewounded.

At dark a party of police escorted him and his wife directly from hiscottage to the Special Train and so he neither witnessed nor took part inthe wholesale souveniring of armour and guns and hair and cartridges thatoccurred at Glenrowan on June 28th 1880. And yet this man also had a keep-sakeof the Kelly Outrage, and on the evening of the 28th, thirteen parcels ofstained and dog-eared papers, every one of them in Ned Kellys distinctivehand, were transported to Melbourne inside a metal trunk.

Undated, unsigned, handwritten account in the collection of
the Melbourne Public Library. (V.L. 10453)

PARCEL ONE

His Life until the Age of 12

National Bank letterhead. Almost certainly taken from the Euroa Branch of the National Bank in December 1878. There are 45 sheets of medium stock (8 10 approx.) with stabholes near the top where at one time they were crudely bound. Heavily soiled.

Contains accounts of his early relations with policeincluding an accusation of transvestism. Some recollectionsof the Quinn family and the move to the township of Avenel.A claim that his father was wrongly arrested for the theft ofMurrays heifer. A story explaining the origins of the sashpresently held by the Benalla Historical Society. Death ofJohn Kelly.

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 I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in this present age. How queer and foreign it must seem to you and all the coarse words and cruelty which I now relate are far away in ancient time.

Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemens 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.