Interviewed by Cathy Border at the Brisbane Irish Club on 18 October 2000 Cathy: Here at the wonderful Irish Club, there could be no better place to do this, could there? Guinness in hand we're set for the night. We're going to hear from one of our most celebrated writers and also one of our finest actors this evening. We're lucky to be here because I assure you demand has far outstripped supply of tickets so count yourselves very lucky to be here. True History of the Kelly Gang is Peter Carey's new book. Now this evening we'll chat to Peter. Bryan Brown will also join us to bring a passage of True History to life. Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs, the list goes on for Peter Carey. I'm sure I don't need to tell you here this evening. He's won every major literary prize in Australia and the 1988 Booker Prize. Bryan Brown, one of our finest actors, with critically acclaimed performances in film and television. Breaker Morant, A Town Like Alice, The Thorn Birds, and I'm sure last night you saw him emceeing the paraolympics ceremony. And did a fantastic job. To begin our evening please join me in a warm welcome to Peter Carey. Peter has been dying for a sip of Guinness so I'm going to let him do that before we do anything else.[applause] Carey: Actually with this applause I was just thinking Guiness and literature are such a great combination. Thank you. Cathy: And the nice thing is over at the side Peter was looking around the room and there are lots of familiar faces to him this evening, so that's nice, isn't it? Carey: Yeah, Mum, Dad ... [laughter] Cathy: Let's get straight into it. For many years you have been captivated by Ned Kelly. Why was now the right time to do it? (Click here to listen to Peter's answer in Real Audio). Carey: Well, in about 1962 I first read this letter that Ned Kelly wrote called the Jerilderie letter - well he didn't call it that of course, but Jerliderie was the place where he attempted to get it published. And gave it to somebody who promised to print it and never did. And it's just a - I'm sure many of you have read this letter - it's just a fantastic voice. This is a uh not fantastically well-educated man, but very smart and very angry and very funny, and he's sort of like a - well just recently, re-reading I started to think about Paul Keating - you know in a way I think Ned takes that Irish invective to an even higher order. I was very touched by this letter, quite apart from its anger. Reading it in 1962 I was so impressed by this letter which was originally in his handwriting I think about 58 pages that I sat down and typed it up so I would have it, thinking I would - such is the arrogance of young writers - thinking I would do something with it one day. And as my life progressed I lost the letter and there I was somewhere in the middle of the 1990s in New York taking my New York friends to see Sidney Nolan's paintings of the uh, the Kelly paintings, that first series that he did near the end of the war, and it looked so good, and but of course like where people in Ireland and people in Britain know a little bit about the Kelly story, people in New York know nothing, so I had to tell them the story and I'd take them and I'd tell it again and again and as I told the story I sort of rediscovered it for myself and uh having to explain it was a good test and I thought God I'd really just like to write this as a novel and there was only one way that I really wanted to approach it, I really to write it in this voice which I'd found in the Jerilderie letter, which was sort of like finding his DNA, you know it's sort of like "there it is - this is how he was", and you could make him speak from beyond the grave. Well actually then I get into writing and the Jerilderie letter in fact is public rhetoric and a novel really doesn't work like that. You need to say a few more personal things that Ned needed to say in that letter. So inevitably the voice changed in a way but it was still driven by that that discovery of character that comes from reading that letter in 1962 or 3, I don't know, but around that time. Cathy: Well I think Ned comes to life in ever such a powerful way, but give us an insight into the amount of research that went into this for you because I know in the acknowledgments you say you felt as though you almost drowned at stages with it. Carey: Well I almost drowned because my basic way of progressing with a novel is to imagine more and more which means you're going wider and wider and all the things that are underimagined or not imagined you start to do and of course that's something that's always served me very well. But at a certain point in this very rich and complicated story it's really necessary to start going in rather than going out and so some simplifications have to take place. So it wasn't really the research that nearly drowned me, but if you really want to think about this story that we all think that we all know so really really well and you just start to think about it from the point of view of any of the characters that you might know about in the story, and start to think about it dramatically it is the most complex big everexpanding web of drama, uh so it's that aspect of the story and my way of thinking about it that nearly drowned me, and it nearly did. The research, well, I think that people who write things set in the past are often asked the question about research and if we've succeeded in doing our tricky business then people will always think, you know, that we've spent years in libraries and the best answer to that question I've ever heard was EL Doctorow who said, "less than you'd think". [Laughter] And I think that's sort of true. You know, being an obsessive sort of character I read all the time in the period and read silly books, nineteenth century books about horse medicine, and all that sort of thing, but less than you'd think. I mean I think when you've immersed yourself in the subject you do know that you get to a place where you know what you can make up and you can do that - Patrick McGrath is nodding, a wonderful novelist who has often written in the past - but it's true, you just get to this point where you know you can lie with some authenticity. [Laughter] Cathy: You're a good liar. Carey: That's Daddy's work done. Cathy: You mentioned the Sidney Nolan paintings, there's of course been that helmet starring in the Olympic games recently, dare I say it that perhaps infamous Mick Jagger portrayal in that movie as well - what is it about Ned that has so captivated us and after your book do you want us to not see him as a thieving murderer? (Click here to listen to Peter's answer in Real Audio). Carey: Well we never did, you see. I mean I know there are people, and for instance if you live in the town of Mansfield in Victoria and you were related to those policemen who were killed at Stringybark Creek, you're not going to feel very well disposed towards the Kellys. But I think, you know, the reason that he's there at the Olympics and the reason he's so powerful for us is because we always did understand him and we always loved him and it was our love for him that made him a big story. Even at the time when he was alive - when those policemen were killed at Stringybark Creek there was a period of time when the press reported this event as this terrible cold blooded murder and sometimes even as a sadistic murder that had taken place in the bush and there were stories that, you know, that the bodies had been mutilated and all sorts of horrible things in the press, which seems absolutely to be not true. But the minute the Kellys did there bank robbery in Euroa the press, for the most part it seems to from my reading of it, to have turned and what everybody noticed was here were people who - by then the press has realised this - were driven, were harrassed and driven to this, that there'd been huge unfairness and not only that but these guys, and Ned Kelly in particular, was a born leader, was incredibly smart and witty, and had pulled off this robbery that was so strategically beautiful and even the bank manager of Euroa and the bank manager's wife had only good things to say about Ned Kelly and that night, when for a night they held the captives - the people from the bank and Faithful Creek station captive - on the station, and you know Ned sort of addressed them like a jury and told his story and I think he convinced those people and when they left from that robbery that morning they thoughtfully provided a show of trick riding which really also impressed those who'd been robbed and captured [Laughter] and I think the thing that was happening with us and I think you can look at the things happening, similar forces at play in Gallipoli, this country began with this whole notion that there was this convict stain and this notion that no decent society could ever come of it and suddenly here were the descendants of convicts acting showing more grit, more courage, more imagination, more style, more decency than their gaolers- and they'd been treated unfairly - so this was a potent thing for us and I think we like Ned Kelly for a good reason. Cathy: Can you compare the reception that you've had among your friends and contacts in New York, overseas, of the book compared to since you've been back in Australia? Carey: Well, you know the great things about friends anywhere is that they're always supportive. [Laughter] I think that people in the United States know nothing about this story so in a sense I sort of get a free ride on the material and so all the stuff we know they don't know so if I tell that part of the story decently uh how can I mess it up, you know? So they like it, a lot. Uh they're friends, that's what they're for. But I think in my early readers amongst my friends in this country certaintly responded in a deeply passionate way to the material which was really wonderful - I mean there are a couple of people here tonight who read the manuscript early and responded to me and it was hugely encouragely so obviously this story grows out of this soil. Cathy: Take the chance to have another sip... Carey: Thank you so much. Cathy: Because Peter's going to be good enough to do a reading for us from True History of the Kelly Gang ... Just um set the scene for us, Peter, with this part of the book that you've chosen to read. (Click here to listen to Peter's introduction). Carey: This is early in the book and - one of the threads in this story which I think has always been there for us to see and maybe can be clarified a little is that one of the things about this story is that it's a relationship between a boy and his mother and one of the things that I believe and many people have believed before me is that the thing that drove him at the end and all through this story was to get his mother out of prison. And this is a boy whose father dies when he is very young, his mother has a succession of lovers, etc, and children by these lovers and so on. So it's a little bit like an Oedipal story in a way and one of the things that happens very early in the history is that Ned's father, who had been in Van Dieman's land in prison, finally gets in trouble for having killing a heifer and in my version of the story it's Ned who killed the heifer and the father who takes the heat for it, goes to prison, and when he comes out of prison he's gonna die. So this is, they're living in the little town of Avenal, where they're Irish and therefore in a minority. I'm sorry I've got to say one more thing: because this is written in the way I imagine Ned writing it on the page there are very few commas and the sentences sort of run on into each other in a way that I promise you you will find easy to read but one of the things that happens when you read it out loud is - because I have to take breath - I have to put those commas in for you, and in a way, reading it to you I'm undoing three years of hard work, but anyway ... Read and listen to the excerpt?