On Peter Carey by Sarah Krasnostein

Author:Sarah Krasnostein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

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Carey’s ‘ventriloquism’ is often mentioned,51 but when it comes to voice he’s more superb than the lyrebird – he’s a bowerbird. Collecting, collaging. What might have been the hardest aspect of writing True History – replicating and sustaining Kelly’s voice – came naturally. As Carey has explained, the sound of his schoolyard is in that language. The vernacular of both True History and the Jerilderie Letter reads quaintly to a great swathe of the book’s readers. But elements of it persist in many neighbourhoods and environments: the lower courts, the commission flats, the underfunded schools in underfunded rural and regional towns. Places no Grammarian usually goes. Despite these continuities, in the end, as Ramona Koval observed, Kelly was ‘a revolutionary without a revolution’. No uprising occurred; a royal remains our head of state. True History goes some way towards illuminating why that is unsurprising.

Dangerous hypocrisy – the barbarity bubbling beneath the cool surfaces of civility – is a constant in the worlds built by Carey. In True History, it presents as a social order bent around propitiating those in charge of, and favoured by, the colonial administration. ‘And here is the thing about them men,’ Carey’s Kelly explains. ‘They knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic moment of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye.’

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In a 2013 issue of Quadrant, Peter Ryan reviewed Ian MacFarlane’s The Kelly Gang Unmasked, writing with a noteworthy animus.

With MacFarlane … we have the necessary armamentarium to set to flight the current gushing fictions of the Left. (‘Kelly Deniers’, we shall probably be called.) Meanwhile they now speak of Ned’s ‘martyrdom’ – yes, actually using that word. This necessary piece of basic national house-cleaning should come before all the now-looming frivolities of sacking the Queen, starting a republic, twiddling with the Constitution and inventing a new flag.

Then the tone shifted:

One quiet afternoon, over a brandy, the writer Cyril Pearl and I chatted to regal Mrs Davenport, presiding barmaid at the Hotel Windsor’s grand saloon bar. She confided to us that she was the grand-daughter of Mounted Constable P.C. Gascoigne, one of the most active of the Kelly hunters, who had exchanged more than one angry shot with the Gang. She had inherited some of his reports, which she offered to bring in for us to read. Next day she handed us a well-worn brown leather ‘sabretache’, that rolled-up carry-case which hangs from the near (left) side of a cavalryman’s saddle. ‘Take it home for a few days, and read it at your leisure,’ she said. And away we walked with a sheaf of reports, quillpenned on the final Ned Kelly battlefront, rolled in an old sabretache certainly imbued with the smoke of Glenrowan.

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