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Carey
begins with a quote from William Faulkner, 'The past is
not dead. It is not even past.' He then proceeds, in a
brilliant feat of imaginative ventriloquism to invent
a voice from Kelly to speak to us from that past. Carey's
Kelly is, of course, a literary creation, and as a novelist,
Carey can accomplish what historians cannot — re
imagining Kelly and, in the process, re-animating his
life in the present. This is not Kelly speaking, but it
might be.
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From
the outset, Carey makes it clear that he is bringing his
own imagination to history in exploring the legend of
our most famous folk hero. He does take account of the
current historical evidence (as shown by the impressive
list of sources Carey acknowledges at the end of the text),
seamlessly grafting his fictional additions onto the existing
documentary records and notably influenced by the tone
of the Jerilderie Letter, the text of which Carey has
said he once typed out and carried around with him for
some years. But the power and mesmerising charm of True
History arises not from Carey's fidelity to facts
but rather from the convincing voice, emotional depth
and coherent set of motivations he posits for Kelly.
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As
in the Jerilderie Letter, Kelly argues his innocence,
maintaining that the wrongs he had committed were acts
of self-defence against an unjust society that sought
to crush him and all like him, the poor and especially
the Irish poor. He calls to account the barbarisms and
alienating effects of the convict system, and how this
divorced generations from their pasts and their heritage,
'That is the agony of the Great Transportation, that our
parents would rather forget what come before so we currency
lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles
on the moon'.
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With
little formal schooling, Kelly, having begun bushranging
at age fourteen, must write in an uneducated voice which
means fresh, sometimes colourful language and only minimal
punctuation. He apologizes for his unlettered style, 'I
never learned my parsing', and edits out the strongest
of his language, resorting instead to the liberal use
of 'effing' and 'essing' and the generic 'adjectival'
(for 'bloody') as in 'Kelly you are adjectival mad he
cried slamming his fist onto the splintered table I will
not effing do it I'm damned if I will I've gone too deep
already'. The run-together sentences and errors of spelling,
grammar and punctuation are, however, handled with consummate
ability by Carey and Kelly's unconventional prose is immediately
engaging.
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