The Bushranger's Voice: Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (1879)

There is an umbilical cord of outlaw folkloric tradition that joins Rolf Boldrewood's 1880s bushranger novel Robbery Under Arms and Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey has done again what Boldrewood so innovatively achieved: the invention, or reinvention, of the bushranger's voice. But the more tantalising manifestation of the common outlaw tradition, for Carey, was the real-life bushranger Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter (1879). The relationship between the Letter and Carey's novel interrupts an easy postmodern take on his work: this interruption is the subject of the essay. It teases out the paradox of the novel's being simultaneously both postmodern-quotational and, in the old-fashioned sense, an act of imaginative engagement with a significant past, a historical tale in fact.