A divisive figure
Is swept along by a big, bold biography of the 19th-century outlaw Ned Kelly, which may attract critics
GRAHAM SEAL Ned Kelly by Peter FitzSimons Peter FitzSimons writes Australian popular history – a lot of it. He concentrates on topics of mythic interest to mainstream Australian notions of national identity, and has written blockbusters on Gallipoli and several iconic Australian heroes. His latest title is a biography of the contradictory bushranger, Ned Kelly.
Even today, the Kelly saga is controversial, the focus of an extensive industry endlessly recycling the tragic tale. In his introduction, the author explains his need to do it all again: because it is “a huge and quintessentially Australian story”.
The tale of a bushman’s defiance of authority involves a deep-seated perception of injustice within the small farmer community of north-eastern Victoria. It is an epic of inept and oppressive policing, conflicts of class and ethnicity as well as the problem that lies at the base of every historicaal Robin Hood tradition: access to the land and its resources. The traumatic violence that erupted from this local situation turned Ned Kelly into a local hero, then a folk hero and ultimately a national hero – at least to some. To others he was, and remains, just a murdering thug. The ways in which this difference of opinion, and the drama of the historical period in which Kelly lived, tie in to notions of Australian national identity makes the subject irresistible to a popular historian who wears hish national identity on his sleeve (heh is currently chair of the Australian Republican Movement).
FitzSimons invokes no less a historian than Leopold von Ranke in supporting his approach in telling “how it essentially was”. In the end, not surprisingly, he comes down on Ned’s side, as many historians have, although some recent research partly rehabilitates the police.
FitzSimons has a formula for his hugely successful books. He interviews relevant experts (here, a number of eminent Kelly scholars) then whips the results into a highly readable narrative – “recreating the whole story”, as he puts it. He employs invented dialogue and recreated primarysource quotations, as well as imputed emotions and motivations. Not surprisingly, this makes him unpopular with some academic historians who feel he is inventing, rather than interpreting, the past. His work is regularly attacked on these grounds by historians who argue that he is fostering rather than dissecting the mythologies in which his subjects are drenched. Whether it’s history as defined by professional historians depends on your point of view on such grand matters as what ‘ history’ is and who owns it. On the other hand, FitzSimons is not an academacademic; he is a writer of popular non-fictio on with an eye for detail and character and a sharp sense of what appeals to readers. HereH he brings Kelly’s ne ever-ending story up to date. Hee does not tell us anything ne ew about the man and the po otency of his legend, but he de elivers a comprehensive packagep with characteristic vervev and drive.