Rethinking Ned Kelly

I've recently finished reading The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. In the past I have been wary of fictional works that glorify the Kelly Gang as heroes of the common man. Let's not forget that despite the romanticism, Ned and Dan Kelly, Joe Byrne, and Steve Hart were criminals. For the most part, I have been turned off this interpretation of Kelly by the unthinking idolatry of bright-eyed teenagers who get carried away with folk tales, seemingly forgetting that banks were robbed, cattle duffed, and people killed. Even Robert Drewe's Our Sunshine, which is a fantastic read itself, failed to convince me. Carey's work, although at times slips into an overly-apologetic interpretation of the actions of Kelly, has made me reassess my view.

I often forget that during the late nineteenth century, much of the colony of Victoria was frontier country. The strong civil law and government that is in place in the now state of Victoria was fledgling and, particularly in the rural areas of the High Country where the history of the Kelly Gang takes place, was dependent on the individuals who were employed to enforce them, i.e the police. Additionally, the power-holders of this outpost of the Western world were large-scale private landholders, known as squatters. The name squatter harks back to the manner in which many of them acquired their land; that is, before a regimented system of land allocation was implemented, they wandered out into the bush and claimed the land for themselves by putting up fences. For the most part, these men were not poor men- some had reserves of wealth and those who were able to retain their land had strong connections to the governments of the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. That is not to say that life was without its hardships; building a cattle station in rural Victoria was beset by dangers including the indignant indigenous population, drought, and escaped criminals. However, once entrenched, their close connections with government and loose civil structure allowed corruption to flourish and the squatters began to take the form of a landed gentry. In contrast were the poorer free settlers and descendents of convicts. In a Land Act of the time (which name I have forgotten) they were allowed to select and purchase Crown Land, thus becoming known as selectors. However, much of the rich soil was already owned by the squatters and this particular Land Act required the selectors to grow a certain amount of grain in areas that were not suited to doing so. This is eerily similar to the disastrous grain policy that Mao Zedong implemented in 1950s China. A great many of these poorer residents were of Irish descent and therefore a conflict between the squatters and the selectors began to take on the flavour of the Irish troubles of the same century. What Carey's novel has managed to achieve is to illustrate how the conflict between the two groups, the corruption of the power-holders and the difficulties of the poorer classes helped shape the lives of Kelly and the development of the colony as a whole. It is quite marvellous.

Apart from kindling an interest in Victorian history, the book also got me thinking about how sheltered the modern urban life is. There are so many layers between our lifestyle and the most base level of existence. We have a number of systems set in place that create and protect our society, cutting us off from the survivalist nature of early humans. Many of us would not be able to survive without specialist butchers, machines, the code of laws etc. that we take for granted today. This was no more evident than it was in The True History of the Kelly Gang, wherein the ordinary people did everything for themselves, hunting, farming, building, etc. skills that very few modern people have mastered as a collection.

Similarly, in the modern world there are still frontier nations that lack these structures such as East Timor and Papua New Guinea. The difficulty that these nations have had in setting up these required civil institutions demonstrate the hard work and genius of men like Sir Redmond Barry who were required to enforce the law and ensure the survival of these institutions. This is where other works fall down. In Carey's work a judge is written as apologising for the sentence that he is required to give by law and one feels that he is doing so because despite the individual suffering of the receiver of the sentence, it is necessary for the good of the colony.

Despite my initial apprehension, The True History of the Kelly Gang has become one of my favourite reads.