![]() Through Ned's laconic observations, Carey creates a textured picture of Australian society when the British ruling class despised the Irish, and both the police and the justice system were thoroughly corrupt. Conveyed in run-on sentences, with sparse punctuation and quirky grammar enriched by pungent vernacular and the polite use of euphemisms for what Kelly calls ""rough expressions"" (""It were eff this and ess that"" ""It were too adjectival hot""), Kelly's voice is mesmerizing as he relates the events that earned him a reputation as a horse thief and murderer. ![]() The unschooled Kelly narrates through a series of letters he writes to the baby daughter he will never see. No reader will be left unmoved by this dramatic tale of an instinctively good-hearted young man whose destiny, in Carey's revisionist point of view, was determined by heredity on one side and official bigotry and corruption on the other whose criminal deeds were motivated by gallantry and desperation and whose exploits in eluding the police for almost two years transfixed a nation and made him a popular hero. Carey's inspired ""history"" of Kelly from his destitute youth until his death at age 26 is as genuine as a diamond in the rough. ![]() ![]() Every Australian grows up hearing the legend of outlaw Ned Kelly, whose exploits are memorialized in the old Melbourne Gaol, where he and his comrades were imprisoned before their execution in 1880. ![]()
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