True History of the Kelly Gang

• Sarah Krasnostein’s On Peter Carey is the 12th instalment of Black Inc.’s highly readable series, Writers on Writers.
• The series is nicely conceived, as it pitches Australian writers not just against each other, but across a generational divide.
• Review: On Peter Carey: Writers on Writers – Sarah Krasnostein (Black Inc.) The covers of the books, innocently enough, place a small photograph of the commissioned writer above (“on”) an equally sized photograph of their subject.
• This element of intimacy called forth by the preposition “on” is what invests this series with its frisson of partiality.
• In effect, it has fallen to them to write a eulogy, even though many of their subjects are very much alive.

Mythopoeic connection

• She is not quite sure why, but perhaps it is because Carey’s star has waned somewhat in the new millennium.
• In 2000, True History of the Kelly Gang won Carey his second Booker Prize, putting him in the company of Margaret Atwood, J.M.
• While touching on the other novels at various moments, Krasnostein focuses her attention on True History of the Kelly Gang, a book which does seem destined to endure, not just for its technical brilliance, but for the mythopoeic connection to Ned Kelly.
• Krasnostein underlines the crucial mediating influence of Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, which Carey had first seen in the 1960s.

Literary pilgrimages

• Oscar and Lucinda was a display case for his literary ventriloquism.
• In another scene, infused with a surprising transcendence, Krasnostein ventures out to see the car dealership that Carey’s parents once owned in Bacchus Marsh.
• This mode of literary biography was made famous by Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), in which authors are lovingly reanimated as a series of fragments, traces and imagined encounters.
• Krasnostein’s position here, engaged in a literary minuet with Carey, typifies the series and is consistent with the turn to the personal essay in recent decades.
• Ned Kelly, Sidney Nolan, Peter Carey and Sarah Krasnostein are surely not all the same figure beneath their backyard armour.
• But Krasnostein’s limpid associations, which gesture towards the contours of Australia’s repetitions, offer a welcome, evocative and compelling re-reading of Carey’s art.