Mythology, History, and Truth: Teaching Peter Carey’s <em>True History of the Kelly Gang</em>

Abstract

Why Teach True History of the Kelly Gang?There are many valid reasons why one might assign True History of the Kelly Gang. The novel lends itself to a variety of pedagogical purposes and approaches, and its combination of accessibility and complexity allows it to be read successfully in courses from first-year introductory classes to graduate seminars. The content of the novel provides students with insight into the colonial period in Australia, including the formation of dominant Australian cultural ideals, such as the importance of anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism, and the championing of the underdog (these cultural ideals are certainly not limited to the colonial period, and the novel revises the colonial period from a contemporary perspective).The fact that True History of the Kelly Gang has been a popular as well as critically acclaimed contemporary historical novel enables valuable examinations of the role of historical novels and the reasons why contemporary Australian novelists choose to examine and rewrite historical narratives. In my extensive experience teaching Carey's novel at four universities in the United States over the past decade, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, most students find the novel engaging, challenging, and entertaining; read Carey's Kelly as a sympathetic character; and enjoy the adventure, romance, and conflicts within the text. Carey's use of an historical figure as a narrator and protagonist and, moreover, one who was a bushranger, folk hero, and subsequently a national hero to many Australians, tends to capture the students' attention. From a pedagogical perspective, it is certainly not necessary for students to enjoy assigned texts, but enthusiastic engagement with a novel certainly makes students more willing to accept intellectual challenges.The undeniable importance of True History of the Kelly Gang within Australian culture reflects the novel's canonical and representative status as a work of Australian literature. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize in 2001, position- ing it as one of the preeminent English-language novels at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That this was Carey's second Booker Prize, moreover, elevated him to an elite position among contemporary Anglophone writers, with an international reputation matched only by a few other authors, such as J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan. In 2003, the Australian Society of Authors polled their three thousand members in order to ascertain the Top Forty Australian Books. True History of the Kelly Gang was voted number sixteen on the list, despite having been published just three years earlier, appearing higher in the poll than such classics as Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot, Joseph Furphy's Such is Life, and Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural LifeTrue History of the Kelly Gang has been both a commercial and critical success, and its impact on Australian culture has been far greater than most literary novels, even those that have also been awarded prestigious prizes within Australia, such as the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, the Queensland Premier's Literary Award, and The Age Book of the Year Award, all of which Carey won for True History of the Kelly Gang. In my 2007 article on the novel, I argued that the extraordinary success of Carey's novel returned the Kelly narrative to the center of Australian popular culture and created a commercial and cultural environment that enabled the production of further revisions of the Kelly narrative.The immense popularity of Carey's novel is evidenced by the fact that it was an Australian and international bestseller even before it won the Booker Prize in 2001. By August 2002, True History of the Kelly Gang had sold 250,000 copies in Australia alone, a remarkable figure in a nation where the average print run for a novel is between three and five thousand copies (Nile 90, 107). …