Kelly himself is painfully aware of what that means for him and his culture: they are a people with no cultural memory, adrift, rootless, and left without any meaningful future. The past has long been dead or silenced for the transported, as if the memory of what was left behind is too painful to talk about. In these letters, he attempts to explain why he first became an outlaw-because he had no choice, he says-and provide her with a true history because, he explains, he knows "what it is to be raised on lies and silences." His own father was an Irish convict, shipped along with his mother to Australia during the Great Transportation.
In True History of the Kelly Gang, Kelly is writing a series of letters to his unborn daughter. It is the fictional first-person account of Ned Kelly, the notorious nineteenth-century bushranger and outlaw who is as well-known to Australians, and as fascinating to them, as Jesse James is to Americans or Robin Hood is to the English. True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) is no different.
Since the publication in 1974 of The Fat Man in History, Australian novelist and short story writer Peter Carey has often played with the literal truth, blurring the line between history and fiction and combining fact with fable.
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