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May 2025

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The Jerilderie letter

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https://www.nma.gov.au/explore/features/ned-kelly-jerilderie-letter

Australian author Peter Carey has said the main lnfluences on his Booker Prize-winning novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) were the Jerilderie Letter, Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings, and James Joyce.[48] Carey described Kelly’s voice in the Jerilderie Letter as that of an “avant-garde artist with hardly a comma to his name”, and in writing True History of the Kelly Gang, he aimed to recreate it. Of his first reading of the Jerilderie Letter, Carey said:

Somewhere in the middle Sixties, I first came upon the 56-page letter which Kelly attempted to have printed when the gang robbed the bank in Jerilderie in 1879. It is an extraordinary document, the passionate voice of a man who is writing to explain his life, save his life, his reputation … And all the time there is this original voice – uneducated but intelligent, funny and then angry, and with a line of Irish invective that would have made Paul Keating envious. His language came in a great, furious rush that could not but remind you of far more literary Irish writers.[49]

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The Yield a novel bound in history but in a timeless realm

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Necessity forced English upon Aboriginal people, but English still could not carry the full cultural weight of our intact native languages. It couldn’t even carry a broken one. To tell the story of the people that inhabited 500-acres of land as a metaphor for all Australia I had to break timelines into manageable eras, but I soon realised I couldn’t limit myself to a timeline; to tell the whole story, I had to tell the full story, to tell all the things.

The concept of the Dreaming emphasises the eternal nature of time and of all times existing now. This was the greatest challenge of writing The Yield — how can you show time in different layers on the same, unmoved but changing, piece of land?

I had to show time as conceptual by having no bondage to the years within Poppy’s narrative strand, exact references to dates in the Reverend’s strand — as if everything had fixity — and then show the dance of interpretation for August’s contemporary strand. I had to incorporate elements of magical realism and prop them against cold, hard facts. I was trying to build a novel bound in history but in a timeless realm.

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The Yield Tara June Winch

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/23/the-yield-by-tara-june-winch-review-reclaiming-australias-indigenous-voices?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://theaustralianlegend.wordpress.com/2021/10/23/the-yield/

https://theconversation.com/the-yield-wins-the-miles-franklin-a-powerful-story-of-violence-and-forms-of-resistance-142284

The deployment of such names contains a bitter truth, because although these are fictional places, there are locations right across Australia that unblushingly retain the evidence of racism and genocide. It is writers like Winch, and artists like Julie Gough, who draw attention to this practice and to the history that lies behind it.

History seldom remains tidily in the past, as so many writers have observed; and Poppy Albert too makes it clear: “there are a thousand battles being fought every day because people couldn’t forget something that happened before they were born”. And also, arguably, because what happened before we were born continues to have consequences.

https://writingnsw.org.au/to-say-all-the-things-tara-june-winch-on-reclaiming-language-and-writing-fiction/

We are at a crucial point in history where we must preserve stories from our elders, our language custodians, our old people before they are lost, because when the door closes on these stories and languages, it truly does slam shut on our history and culture, and the very essence of all our identities as Australians.’

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Article on True History of the Kelly Gang

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Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang: Ethical Dimensions in the Re-evaluation of Australia’s Mythic Hero1

Abstract

Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang negotiates the multiple and contradictory meanings that Ned Kelly’s historical record brings about. The figure of Ned Kelly brings to the fore the ethical dimensions of revisiting and questioning one of the best-known myths of the nation.

History is not complete unless it takes into account what men believe to be true in times of crisis as well as the objective truth.(Noorul Hasan) 

https://journals.openedition.org/ces/11449#:~:text=Like%20many%20other%20voluntarily%20exiled,enduring%20and%20yet%20paradoxically%20amnesiac