Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Andrea Kohoutková

Postcolonial Critique in Selected Novels by Peter Carey

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D.

2018

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………… Author’s signature

Table of Contents:

Introduction ...... 1 1 Historical Events Depicted in Carey’s Novels ...... 9 2 Features of Postcolonial Literature and Criticism ...... 19 3 Illywhacker ...... 24 4 Oscar and Lucinda ...... 32 5 Jack Maggs ...... 42 6 True History of the Kelly Gang ...... 50 7 A Long Way from Home ...... 56 Conclusion ...... 66 Works Cited ...... 70 English Summary ...... 74 Czech Summary ...... 75

Introduction

Claire Armitstead, literary editor of The Guardian, asked the Australian writer Peter

Carey, one of Australia’s best-known authors, in an interview about his new book A Long

Way from Home (2017) (according to Armitstead Carey’s first attempt to address

Australian legacy of colonialism) at a special Guardian Live Event in London why had he never dealt with Australia’s colonial past before. Carey responded that the issue of colonialism had always been in a way a part of his work. However, he stated that he was strongly influenced by a press conference that took place in Canberra in the middle of

1980s where one of the Aboriginal participants criticized white authors writing about the

Aboriginal experience and appealed to them to abandon this practice. It was not until he was 60 that he came to terms with this complicated topic and decided to write openly about it. In this diploma thesis which deals with Peter Carey and his works I want to show that even though his earlier novels, Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack

Maggs (1997), and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), do not express such a direct and crushing critique of colonialism and settlement of Australia as his last novel, the elements of postcolonialist critique are an essential part of each of them. In those novels,

Carey challenges the traditionalist history of Australia. That is the history told and recorded from the point of view of the white and mostly British colonizers of Australia that typically glorifies successful settlements of European immigrants, their culture, traditions, and values brought into a new environment, and completely omits the experience of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and the convicts forcibly relocated into new foreign and hostile continent. Carey revises and rewrites this traditionalist history with his own fictional version of history in which he tries to rectify the untruths, misinterpretations and omissions that are the integral part of the former one.

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The diploma thesis provides an overview of the theoretical background to Carey’s novels as well as detailed analyses of individual novels to demonstrate how they are influenced by Carey’s own vision of Australian history. It also compares Carey’s earlier novels with his newest book A Long Way from Home. The first chapter is devoted to Peter

Carey himself, it contains information about Carey’s life and work. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the writer, to provide basic facts about Carey’s social background, his roots, education and family life. Such an introduction is particularly important because in his novels Carey often uses locations, towns, situations and characters that he is closely familiar with – he knows them from his personal life. The second chapter provides a brief summary of political and cultural background of Carey’s novels; it introduces Australia’s history of a settler colony and explains the difference between Australian experience and the experience of other settler colonies. It is necessary to mention that this chapter does not represent an exhaustive overview of Australian history, rather, it focuses only on historical events that play a significant role in Carey’s novels. The last theoretical chapter contains information about postcolonialism: what postcolonialism is, what do postcolonial writers want to achieve and how.

The more extensive part of the thesis consists of detailed analyses of the five novels with an emphasis on political criticism Carey expresses in each of his books, the criticism of imperialism, British colonialism and neocolonialism. Each of these chapters contains a brief summary of the novel in question and an in-depth analysis of the work, highlighting the passages that can be linked to the colonial past of Australia and that express some kind of critique, or reveal a hidden history of Carey’s home country.

The concluding chapter is dedicated to the comparison of the five novels and focuses on the recurring themes and topics that present an integral part of each of the

2 novels and that altogether make up the image of Australia as a postcolonial country facing the legacies and burdens of its colonial past.

As it was already mentioned, Peter Carey is one of the best-known, most popular, and most critically acclaimed Australian authors. Therefore, there have been already published numerous books about his work. The most important and helpful secondary sources that I used for the first part of this diploma thesis regarding the life and work of

Peter Carey were two books written and edited by Andreas Gaile, a German scholar with a long-standing interest in Peter Carey, Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey and Rewriting History: Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia,

Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s Peter Carey: A Literary Companion, and Dancing on Hot

Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction by Anthony J. Hassall. Much interesting information associated with the questions of colonialism and postcolonialism was gathered from the well-known book The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen

Tiffin. The collections of essays The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided

Horizons edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti and Text, Theory, Space: Land,

Literature and History in South Africa and Australia edited by Kate Darian-Smith, Liz

Gunner and Sarah Nuttall explained some of the approaches and opinions of authors living in some of the countries with colonial and postcolonial experience. I also used some of Peter Carey’s opinions and ideas that he shared with the public in the course of a number of interesting interviews that were published on YouTube and different podcasts.

The materials and sources for the deeper analyses of the novels were collected from

Anthony J. Hassall’s Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction (1984) which presents a thematical study of Carey’s work, Bruce Woodcock’s Peter Carey (2003) and

Shahram Sistani’s Peter Carey’s Fiction: A Critical Study (2011).

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Peter Philip Carey is Australian novelist, the winner of many international and

Australian fiction awards, including two Booker Prizes for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and

True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) and two Commonwealth Writers Prizes for Jack

Maggs (1998) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001). Andreas Gaile claims in his work Rewriting History: Peter Carey’s Fictional Biography of Australia that Carey can be seen as “a darling of literary criticism”, “one of the icons of the New Literatures in

English”, and “one of the most highly-decorated writers in English” (7). In their book

Crabtracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English, Collier et al. explain that “by now ‘postcolonial’ and ‘new’ literatures are more often than not used simultaneously” and that “the terms developed out of the concept of ‘Commonwealth’ and therefore emphasize the political and cultural inheritance of British imperialism”

(86). In compliance with this statement, Gaile then sees Carey as one of the most important authors of former Commonwealth literature who discuss or criticize British colonialism and its legacy.

Carey (1943–) was born in southeastern Australia into a middle-class family of

English, Irish, and Welsh descent. His social and cultural background and the relationships in the wider Carey family, especially the strong bond between him and his grandparents, often mirror in his works. Indeed, Snodgrass claims that the relationship to his grandparents “is central to his life and as important as birth parents” (5). Their own immigrant experience is incorporated into some of Carey’s novels; for example, Carey remembers his grandfather, a teacher from Camperdown, as still thinking of England as of his home – a sentiment that is shared by Lucinda Leplastrier’s mother in Oscar and

Lucinda and the main character in Jack Maggs (Snodgrass 5). The life of Carey’s family revolved around cars and his relatives did not develop any interest in literature. In the interview with Radhika Jones for Paris Review Interviews Carey states that:

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When I finally began to publish, my father never read my work. He’d say, Oh,

that’s your mother’s sort of thing. But my mother found the books rather upsetting.

I figure she read just enough to know that she didn’t want to go there. I don’t think

my brother read my books, but he may have started recently. My sister was the

only one who read me. (n. pag.)

Carey’s parents were car dealers and their income allowed him to attend a private

Anglican school in Geelong (between the years 1954 and 1960) together with children of prominent Australians. Snodgrass characterizes the Geelong Grammar School as “a place where teachers and pupils spoke in pastiche English home-county accents, as if repressing their true Australian selves” (7). The atmosphere in the school was snobbish and almost colonial: “There was this weird sense of Australia’s place in the colonial pecking order.

These Australians were acting like 19th century British snobs, looking down on

Americans as vulgar colonials” (Snodgrass 7). In the interview with Radhika Jones Carey states that although he “never felt being exiled or sent away” the boarding-school experience is very probably the reason why many of the characters in his books are orphans.

In 1961, Peter Carey began to study at Monash University in Melbourne, however, he had to terminate because of a serious car accident. This was the moment when writing became an essential part of his life. He was nineteen years old and started to work for an advertising agency in Melbourne. In his scholarly study Peter Carey Bruce Woodcock points out that: “Ironically, it was through working in advertising that he received his education in literature and writing” (3). He soon became familiar with writers like

William Faulkner, James Joyce or Jack Kerouac, and started to admire the works of

Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ezra Pound

(Snodgrass 9). In 1967, Carey left Australia, travelled through Italy, Greece, France,

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Spain, Ireland and Iran, and spent a significant amount of time in London. In 1970, he returned to Australia and reassumed his work in the advertising agency and at the same time he returned back to writing short stories. Throughout those years he wrote several unpublished novels (Contacts, The Futility Machine, Wog, Adventures Aboard the Marie

Celeste). The year of 1974 can be seen as the year of his first success, because after many unsuccessful attempts Peter Carey’s first collection of stories The Fat Man in History, was published by University of Queensland Press, followed by War Crimes (1979). His political opinions were to a great extent influenced by his move to an alternative community in southern Queensland and by the Vietnam war in which Australia played an important role as America’s ally. Since then, many of his novels were published in

Australia and many other countries: Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which was awarded the

Booker Prize and the Talking Book of the Year.

In 1989, Peter Carey, together with his wife Alison Summers, left Australia and moved to Greenwich Village in New York where he started to work as a lecturer of creative writing at the New York University. It was in New York where he finished The

Tax Inspector (1989) and wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Collected

Stories (1994), The Big Bazoohley (1995), A Letter to Our Son (1995) and Jack Maggs

(1997), which was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Miles Franklin

Award. The year 2001 brought Carey another worldwide success, as his novel True

History of the Kelly Gang won many awards, among others it was shortlisted for the Miles

Franklin Award and brought him his second Commonwealth Booker Prize. In the new millennium Carey published several books: My Life as a Fake (2003), Wrong about Japan

(2004), Theft: A Love Story (2006), His Illegal Self (2008), Parrot and Olivier in America

(2009), The Chemistry of Tears (2012), Amnesia (2014) and his newest novel A Long

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Way from Home (2017). Carey still lives in New York and continues in his career of a successful novelist and even after such a long time of living abroad he still considers himself Australian.

Carey does not want to be labeled as a postcolonial writer as also Andreas Gaile points out: “the writer himself is disinclined to be positioned in the postcolonial corner of the literary spectrum” (Rewriting History 23). However, Carey’s books do contain implicit and explicit critique of the colonial past of Australia. Woodcock and Gaile both question this status of postcolonial author on the grounds of Carey’s origin: “Carey himself is a hybrid, a criollo, born of European parents transplanted in the Southern

Hemisphere” (Woodcock 2). And this claim is supported by Gaile when he states that:

There are, however, also a number of reservations against treating Carey as a

postcolonial writer. These are to do with Carey being a white Australian of

European origin, which suggests a certain complicity with both the former

colonizers from Britain and those Australians who have acted as colonizers within

the country. (Gaile, Rewriting History 24)

Woodcock elaborates on the aforementioned hybridity when he claims that not only

Carey’s origin is hybrid but also his literary works are often hybrids because they are crossing genres, blurring the lines between “the popular and the serious, the high and low” (12) and “they also juggle with supposedly fixed categories or polarities such as male and female, capitalist and hippy, colonial and post-colonial, showing up the contradictory spaces between experiences, blurring any clear-cut oppositions” (12). The novels that take place in his home country of Australia often depict its dark and unspoken history, the stories that every Australian knows or heard sometimes, but they do not want to talk about (especially in the case of the massacres of Aboriginal people). In the interview with Claire Armitstead for the Guardian Books Podcast, where Carey mentions

7 how he was influenced by the speech of one of the Aboriginal participants of a conference in Canberra, he also explains that he came to terms with this topic and decided to write openly about it quite recently. And despite the fact that he has been living in New York for 28 years, he still feels the obligation to write about Australia’s past and Australian race issues. The result of this determination is present in Carey’s latest novel A Long Way from Home (2017) in which the famous car race Redex Reliability Trial serves as a background for the examination of crimes that Australian settlers committed on the

Indigenous population. The fact that Carey in this novel, as well as in his previous books, has continued to address social injustices, racism, and dark aspects of Australian history, makes him, in my opinion, a postcolonial writer.

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1 Historical Events Depicted in Carey’s Novels

This chapter provides a concise overview of the geographical and historical facts about

Australia. Following paragraphs contain some basic facts about the Australian continent and its inhabitants and information regarding the most important events of Australia’s history; they focus on events and historical milestones associated specifically with British colonialism and imperialism in Australia. The five novels written by Carey and selected for analysis in this thesis cover five different time periods of Australian history. The story of Jack Maggs deals with the convict history and the way how Australia, as a new settler colony, related to Britain – its mother country. The narration begins in the year 1837, however, it often sinks into a deeper past of Jack Maggs’s life, his childhood, adolescence, his imprisonment and subsequent transportation to New South Wales and his eventual successful and happy life in Australia. Oscar and Lucinda concerns the issue of exploration, Christianization, early settlement of Australia and the contact between the settlers and Indigenous people during the 1860s. True History of the Kelly Gang narrates the story of the bushranger and criminal Ned Kelly and his Irish Catholic family struggling under the ruling English Anglican class in the second half of the 19th century, the time of Robertson Land Acts (1861) that allowed to sell agricultural land to settlers and the time of gold rushes. Illywhacker follows with the life story of Herbert Badgery, covering (according to the narrator) the longest time period – since the end of the 19th century through the Great Depression and World War II till 1980s. Carey’s latest work A

Long Way from Home narrates the story of Willie Bachhuber and Irene Bobs, it is set in the 1950s and deals with Australia’s white policy, removal of Aboriginal children, and the life of Indigenous people in state camps. Therefore, this chapter focuses especially on the abovementioned eras, foregrounding the events that are also described in Carey’s works.

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F. G. Clarke states in his work The History of Australia that “Australia is a paradoxical land. It is a modern, industrialized, and technologically advanced nation on a continent that is largely unpopulated” (1). Australia, though most of its land uninhabited, is an urbanized and rich country, while the Aboriginal population live in poor conditions, many of them still in remote areas. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world and as Clarke mentions “the national cultural stereotype of the rugged and bush-based Australian male is increasingly unrepresentative” and this myth is now more often replaced with “an urban counterpart or a beach-based legend” (3).

Australia’s colonial legacy, “the celebration of Anglo/Celtic masculine values” (3), also vanishes slowly in the course of time. The fact is that contemporary Australia is one of the most multicultural countries in the world. According to the web IndexMundi, the ethnics groups of Australia in 2017 were as follows: English 25.9%, Australian 25.4%,

Irish 7.5%, Scottish 6.4%, Italian 3.3%, German 3.2%, Chinese 3.1%, Indian 1.4%, Greek

1.4%, Dutch 1.2%, other 15.8% (includes Australian aboriginal .5%), unspecified 5.4%

(this data represent self-identified ancestry, and it is important to mention that more than one third of respondents reported two ancestries).

Even though, there are many (especially older) books about Australian history which emphasize the origin of the country as that of the day the First Fleet of British colonizers arrived at Botany Bay in 1788. The actual history of the continent and its native inhabitants is much longer. The continent of Australia is believed to have been inhabited by Aboriginal people for at least 40,000 years, some scientists even suggest that the original occupiers of Australia arrived well over 60,000 years ago. The very first inhabitants of Australian continent probably came from east Asia through the islands of

New Guinea at the time when the sea levels were a lot lower than they are today, and

New Guinea and Tasmania were still part of Australian continent (Macintyre 8-10). First

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Australians should not be considered one compact nation, because they lived in probably hundreds of clan and tribal communities with diverse and distant languages similar to

“several hundred independent republics” (Clarke 11). Traditional Aboriginal life was based on hunting and gathering – men hunted larger animals and fished while women provided the tribe with seeds, roots and fruits. The way of Aboriginal life was largely nomadic, the people were dependent on available food resources and used fire-stick farming. These practices of bush burning with the aim “to expand grasslands and to attract grass-eating animals” were part of Aboriginal ecosystem management. The environment they lived in was harsh and dangerous, however, the Indigenous people were able not only to survive there but were actually able to manage it and thrive on it (Clarke 14-6).

Religious beliefs and mutual relationships between the indigenous people and the land they inhabited were one of the most significant parts of their culture. According to Clarke the Aborigines believed that the plants and animals living within their territory presented

“spiritual entities of great antiquity that overshadowed the land and preserved and protected it” (13). Those spirit ancestors were physically expressed by the land and its physical features and were also supposed to be the progenitors of the Aboriginals, this all created a firm and mutually dependent relationship. The people did not possess or own the land in any means recognizes by European laws, they used the land and maintained it to keep their relationship with their spirits. (13) These approaches to the land are an important constituent of a complex Aboriginal philosophy that many of the Indigenous tribes call Dreaming or Dreamtime. This philosophy is based on the relationships between all people (or all living creatures) and all things.

The spiritual relationship between the Aboriginal people and their land has remained misunderstood by the British colonizers and other settlers for almost two hundred years. The Aboriginal way of managing the land was incomprehensible and

11 almost invisible for them and according to the customs and laws of Great Britain (and many other European countries), Australian land was not agriculturally cultivated and thus considered to be terra nullius (a land that was not owned by any nation or individuals). This assumption allowed British explorers to claim the land for the British

Empire (Clarke 18-20). This invasion decimated the Indigenous populations of Australia, they were driven from their homelands, killed in the fights with the white colonizers when defending the frontiers and killed by diseases brought by the Europeans. “Estimates of

Aboriginal populations in 1788 range between 750,000 and 3 million, but in any case had fallen to only 50,000 by 1900” (Darian-Smith et al. 12). The issue of forcible resettlement of Aboriginal people and their relationship to the land, animals and plants together with their unhappy life in state camps is depicted in Carey’s latest novel A Long Way from

Home.

When in January 1788 “a fleet of eight ships, the Sirius, the Supply, the Alexander, the Charlotte, the Scarborough, the Friendship, the Prince of Wales, and the Lady

Penrhyn, together with three store ships” (Cathcart and Clark 3) under the command of

Captain Arthur Phillip arrived at Botany Bay in New South Wales, where they set up a new penal colony, a new historical era began. It is important to point out why the British actually needed a penal colony. The reason was quite simple, it had to do with the boom of population in the Great Britain during the 18th century. Overpopulation caused that many people lived in poverty, committed crimes related to poverty and the British prisons became eventually overcrowded. The British came up with an idea of transporting the convicted people to the British colonies in North America (especially to Georgia and

Maryland), however, the situation changed after the American Revolutionary War (1775-

1783) when America became an independent state (Neal 3-5). This unexpected sequence of events forced the British to search for a new place where they could send their

12 prisoners. Thereafter they found a suitable location in Australia, built up the first penal colony in southeast Australia and started to send their convicts there (Cathart and Clark

6-9).

In their book History of Australia, Cathart and Clark highlight the importance of national identity of convicts: “whereas in England and Scotland the thieves predominated, of 2086 transported from Ireland between 1791 and 1803, about 600 were convicted for riot and sedition” (9). This statement strongly suggests that later there were not only religious disparities between the English and Irish convicts and settlers but also feelings of injustice and the need to revolt against the Crown and British Empire. During the Castle

Hill rebellion in 1804 the convicts (mostly the Irish ones) rebelled against the British colonial authority and wanted to get back to Ireland, but the uprising was suppressed and its leaders were executed. The animosity between the poor Irish settlers and the English snobs and policemen plays a significant role in True History of the Kelly Gang, where

Carey depicts the struggle of the Irish who dream of their own farmlands and independent lives but who have to endure unfair treatment from the side of the English “ruling” class.

The “relations between the Protestant ascendancy and Irish Catholicism” (Cathcart and

Clark 34) presented, together with the problematic relationship between white settlers and

First Australians, a test of humanity. It is also very important to mention that “convicts sentenced to death and then sent to the colonies as exiles were regarded as legally dead”

(Clarke 22) and could never return back to Britain. If they returned back there their original sentence came into force – and that is also the case of Peter Carey’s ex-convict

Jack Maggs who ignores this risk and comes back to London to visit his “son”, Henry

Phipps.

With the rising numbers of immigrants (other than convicts), the system was constantly criticized by British politicians and eventually proved to be unsustainable. In

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1840, this situation led to the abolishment of the former system, convicts were now transported only to Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island, “a new probation system was introduced, that was designed to ensure equality of punishment” and “convicts could gain a steadily increasing degree of freedom by good behavior until they were released into the workforce as wage laborers” (Clarke 51).

The next interesting and important chapter of Australian history also associated with cultural and ethnic clashes started with the discovery of gold. The Victorian gold- rush of 1850s attracted many new immigrants to Australia and among them the Chinese came in large quantities. Their noticeably different way of life, culture, medicine, appearance, incomprehensible language and industriousness made them an easy target of racism, oppression and hatred expressed by the Anglo-Australians who blamed them for many misfortunes, especially for the unemployment of white Australians. A wave of anti-

Chinese disturbances in the goldfields of New South Wales, known as Lambing Flat

Riots, occurred in 1860 and 1861. White goldminers attacked the Chinese workers and injured many people. Such violent incidents repeated once in a while and consequently led the Chinese immigrants to the decision to abandon their fields (Clarke 66-8). The character of Goon Tse Ying describes these unfortunate events in Carey’s Illywhacker from the point of view of a small Chinese boy. The Lambing Flat Riots “led the New

South Wales government to pass the Chinese Immigration Act in November 1861”

(Encyclopedia Britannica), which limited very strictly the number of the people of

Chinese ancestry coming to this colony. In 1901, when the Commonwealth of Australia was established, Australian government introduced Immigration Restriction Act – widely known as White Australia Policy – an anti-Asian immigration measure that should secure a pure white civilized state of Australia and which withstood as a pillar of Australian domestic and foreign politics till the half of 20th century (Jupp 7-10).

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Another significant era of Australia’s history depicted in Peter Carey’s novels selected for the analysis in this diploma thesis are the 1920s and 1930s. The 1920s presented “an era of domestic change” (Clarke 118), the soldiers who fought in the World

War I on the side of the British Empire returned back home. The cars and airplanes started to play a major role in Australian transport. Peter Carey’s grandfather Robert Graham

Carey delivered the first Australian airmail (Snodgrass 5) and that is probably why aviation in general plays a significant role in Illywhacker. The 1920s and 1930s not only brought the new technology, music and fashion styles, but also the misery and hardship of the Great Depression. Illywhacker also deals with the issue of emerging globalization, when the main protagonist Herbert Badgery incessantly warns other characters that

Australia is becoming too much dependent on investments and products from America,

Britain and in the last chapters of the book also from Japan.

Contemporary Australia is a multicultural country however, it is still not free of systemic racism and as Elder states, “in 1998 Australia became the first western democratic nation to receive an ‘urgent action’ notice [from the United Nations’

Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination] in response to concerns about systemic racism” (145). As the post-WWII political and economic “map” of the world was redrawn, the British Empire started to fall apart, many of its colonies gained independence and Great Britain shifted its interests on Western Europe and the

United States. In this scenario, Australia was in a way forced to change its foreign politics and cooperate with Asian states economically and also started to support immigration from non-European states. In their book From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a

Changing World, Aleinikoff and Klusmayer confirm that: “Until the 1960s, official policy was to base national identity on British heritage and to deal with diversity through

15 assimilation” (35). They also claim that in the 1970s Australia abandoned the policy of assimilation and introduced multiculturalism (35).

The unresolved and troublesome relationship between the descendants of white settlers and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia presents a burning question even today.

Clarke states that the descendants of Indigenous people are still negatively influenced by the invasion of European settlers in 1788. They live in poor living conditions and suffer from illnesses linked with their way of life that had been imposed on them. The white colonists took their land and until 1993 there was no official will to give them any compensations. He then concludes that “much has been achieved, but much remains to be done” (5).

The 20th century introduced a new horrific policy associated with the issue of

Indigenous people. With the rising numbers of immigrants and their settlements across the continent, the contact between the white and Aboriginal inhabitants was more frequent and sexual relationships between people of mixed races were sometimes formed.

The children born from such relationships became ostracized in Australian society that wished to remain white and “civilized” and believed the Aboriginals to be an inferior and

“dying race” (van Krieken 126). All Australian states introduced a policy of removing mixed-blood Aboriginal children from their Aboriginal families. Aboriginal parents lost the common law rights over their own children and Australian state took over the role of legal guardian of such children. They were placed in the care of state or church agencies and sometimes even individuals. The aim of this social engineering program was to breed out “the colour of both body and mind” (van Krieken 127). These racist practices remained in existence till 1960s and it took another 20 years till the legitimacy of

Aboriginal child removal policy was questioned and criticized by the wider white

Australian society. The main character of Carey’s latest novel A Long Way from Home,

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Willie Bachhuber, is such a “child”, an Aboriginal with a light skin, who believes to be the son of a German pastor. During his journey to northern Australia, Willie finds out the truth of his origin, he meets his Aboriginal family living in a state camp in Quamby

Downs and hears the story how he was “stolen” from his mother.

All the mentioned eras play a significant role in Carey’s novels analyzed in this thesis. Carey introduces settlers attempting to adapt to the new country, explorers who want to map and document the new land, children of convicts struggling with prejudice and social injustice, ex-convicts craving England – their home country and children removed from their biological families experiencing the feelings of displacement. Carey’s characters are often orphans or people who were not raised by their own parents, he also sees Australia as a land of orphans and he explains this vision in the interview with

Radhika Jones for the Paris Review:

Well, it took me ages to figure that out. I thought the orphans were there because

it’s just easier – you don’t have to invent a complicated family history. But I think

in retrospect that it’s not a failure of imagination. I’m writing a book now about

an orphan. But it’s also the story of Australia, which is a country of orphans. I

have the good fortune that my own personal trauma matches my country’s great

historical trauma. Our first fleet was cast out from “home”. Nobody really wanted

to be there. Convicts, soldiers were all going to starve or survive together. Later,

the state created orphans among the aboriginal population through racial policies,

stealing indigenous kids from their communities and trying to breed out their

blackness. (n. pag.)

Indeed, Carey’s newest novel expresses a fierce critique of the enforced removal of

Aboriginal children and depicts their lives after such a horrible experience. The main character of the novel; while Willie Bachhuber, was raised by a kind white German

17 family, other children were not that lucky and were raised and “educated” by the

Australian state and its institutions.

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2 Features of Postcolonial Literature and Criticism

In order to understand the ways in which Carey’s novels, at least some of them, may be perceived as postcolonial it is useful to identify what postcolonialism is and what it presents. Therefore, this chapter tries to explain the terms associated with postcolonialism, postcolonial literature and criticism.

The unambiguous definition of postcolonialism presents a problematic issue for contemporary scholars, as they cannot come to an agreement on many terms regarding postcolonialism, including its beginning, the people who are regarded as postcolonial subjects and also countries that can be “labeled” as postcolonial (Loomba 9-12).

However, Loomba claims that the temporal and spatial determination is not that important and that: “It has been suggested that it is more helpful to think of postcolonialism not just as coming literally after colonialism and signifying its demise, but more flexibly as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism” (16). She also suggests that the white Australian settlers should be included as postcolonial subjects, because they “feel estranged from Britain (or France)” (14). This Loomba’s last suggestion corresponds with the white main characters of Carey’s novels Jack Maggs,

Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang who experience the feeling of estrangement, even after their (temporary) return to their home country (in the case of

Jack Maggs and Lucinda Leplastrier).

C. L. Innes explains in her book The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial

Literatures in English that the origin of postcolonial literary studies is closely connected with the boom of creative writing of the 1950s and the 1960s and which coincides with the time when many states in Africa, South East Asia and the Caribbean moved their status from colonial to postcolonial (3). And Graham Huggan adds that the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in the last decade of the 20th century helped to

19 expand and intensify critiques of postcolonialism (1). The definition of postcolonial literature and postcolonial studies poses similar issue as the definition of postcolonialism itself. According to Ashcroft et al., postcolonial literature is literature affected by imperialism and colonization that has been written from the moment of colonialization until the present day and the postcolonial literatures “emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” (2). Elleke Boehmer narrows this statement, in her essay

“Postcolonial Aesthetic”, and claims that the term “postcolonial” is taken “to designate writing in opposition to empire and its oppressions” (n. pag.). The relationship between the centre (Empire) and the periphery (colonies) seems to be the basic characteristics of postcolonial literatures, the most significant theme. And this comparison of centre and periphery and their mutual relationship are according to Bart Moore-Gilbert crucial also in postcolonial criticism. He defines postcolonial criticism as a “more or less distinct set of reading practices” which are especially preoccupied with “analysis of cultural forms which mediate, challenge or reflect upon…relations of domination and subordination”

(12). The five novels by Carey that are selected for the analysis in this diploma thesis, indeed deal with this issue, in Jack Maggs Carey depicts the relationship between Britain and its penal colony, Oscar and Lucinda presents the image of wild and dangerous

Australia in comparison to the image of developed and civilized Britain, True History of the Kelly Gang is about the life of subordinate Irish settlers living under the rule of the

English ruling class, Illywhacker indicates Australia’s rising dependency on the United states, and finally A Long Way From Home details the relationship between the

Indigenous colonized people and the superior descendants of the white colonists.

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Postcolonial literatures include wide range of texts written by authors who live in former colonies or who have emigrated from them. The common features of postcolonial literatures originating from different parts of the world have three common goals: to reclaim space and place, to assert cultural integrity and to revise history.

Place and displacement are, according to Ashcroft et al., “major concerns of all post-colonial societies” (23). As colonialism always treated the local place (the colony, the colonized country) as the secondary place in relation to the metropolitan centre, the postcolonial works, according to Barker et al., try to re-constitute those places and they explain local geographies and histories (11). Reclaiming space and place means that the postcolonial literatures try to restore the former connection between the colonized

Indigenous peoples and “their” places or land through description, narration and dramatization, because as Ashcroft et al. put it: “A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or ‘voluntary’ removal of indentured labour” (9). They also define exile as one of the common topics of the literatures of settler colonies, the characters often experience issues of “finding and defining ‘home’” and “physical and emotional confrontations with the ‘new’ land” (26).

The postcolonial literature also asserts or defends the richness and validity of colonized cultures, it attempts to restore the practices and traditions of Indigenous peoples that were as such the subject of systematic degradation under the colonial rule. And language also plays a significant role. Ashcroft et al. claim that the control over language is one of the main features of imperial oppression. The Empire “installs a ‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language as the norm and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities” (7). Carey often plays with the language in his novels. In A Long Way from

Home, the Indigenous people cannot speak their tribal language in public, they speak

21 pidgin, and the main character is advised to not speak with them in other language than proper English. In True History of the Kelly Gang, the story is narrated in an Irish dialect with many omitted vulgar words (replaced by the word effing or adjectival) and without proper punctuation. Oscar and Lucinda contains one chapter narrated by an Aboriginal person, who speaks standard English, however, uses very short and simple sentences.

Postcolonial literature tells the history from the perspective of Indigenous, marginalized or oppressed people and this way it revises the history of the predominant culture. It gives those people back their voice and allows them to be heard. Postcolonial authors fight and resist the racist stereotypes, inaccuracies, generalizations and primitivist fantasies created by the colonizer powers both intentionally and unintentionally and propagated through politics, education and law. The constructed opposite values, like civilization and humanity versus savagery, native and primitive, were established through propaganda (Ashcroft et al. 3). Generally said, the Indigenous people were depicted as objects, animals, primitives and pagans who do not have souls or feelings, who were not equal to the white men from Europe. The aim of postcolonial writers is to remedy this injustice, to introduce the legitimate picture of the indigenous people.

However, Hermine Krassnitzer in her work Aspects of Narration in Peter Carey’s

Novels: Deconstructing Colonialism marks that:

Postcolonial writers are painfully aware that their colonial past with all its binary

discourses of colonized and colonizers, exploited and exploiters, suppressed and

oppressors are still present in their contemporary world and that their present

discourses cannot escape the language of colonization. (60-1)

And that is also the case of A Long Way from Home, Carey’s latest novel, which is set in the 1950s and describes the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism still apparent in

22 present era – for example, the illnesses of the Indigenous people, their life in the camps, their lack of education.

Following chapters of this diploma thesis contain in-depth analyses of individual novels written by Peter Carey. The first chapter deals with Illywhacker, a six hundred pages long chronicle of the Badgery family covering (according to the narrator) an extremely long time period – since the end of the 19th century through the Great

Depression and World War II till 1980s. Next chapters are dedicated to Oscar and

Lucinda, a novel that deals with the issue of exploration and Christianization of Australia and the contact between the British and Indigenous people during the 1860s, and Jack

Maggs, Carey’s version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, which begins in the year 1837, however, Maggs’s memories of his childhood, adolescence, his imprisonment and subsequent transportation to New South Wales go deeper into the past and the depiction of his eventual successful and happy life in Australia stops in the year 1860.

The analysis of True History of the Kelly Gang, one of Carey’s most appreciated works which narrates the story of the bushranger and criminal Ned Kelly and his Irish Catholic family struggling under the ruling English Anglican class in the second half of the 19th century comes as fourth. The last chapter is dedicated to A Long Way from Home which takes place in the 1950s.

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3 Illywhacker

Illywhacker, the novel Carey completed in 1985, brought him international success and fame and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, awarded The Age Book of the Year Award,

NBC Award for Australian Literature, Victorian Premier’s Award and others.

The extraordinariness of the novel lies in the time span that it covers and in the narrative style contrasting the lies and truths of an individual and a nation. It examines

Australian history of the19th and 20th centuries within an “epic framework” (Woodcock

53) and “the colonial fog that clouds Australian perception of historical truth” (Snodgrass

121). The main protagonist of the novel and the first-person narrator Herbert Badgery is the illywhacker – the professional trickster, the conman and the fraud; he tells the story of his long and unusual life, consisting of unbelievable number of different story threads, more or less significant characters that crossed his path and picturesque descriptions of landscapes, towns, people and animals. The novel can be seen as his memoirs, a magical depiction of his romantic adventures and dreams paralleled with the story of his mother country through the references to many events that shaped the history of Australia and played an important role in the relations between different social and ethnic groups.

Badgery sees himself as an Australian nationalist, an aviator and an orphan raised by a

Chinese. He doses his stories little by little, jumps back and forth in the timeline, introduces significant and insignificant characters and events, he digresses from the main story and then he returns back to it. This way he constructs an epic framework for his tale, as was mentioned above by Woodcock.

The story unfolds in the year 1919, when Herbert meets the family of Jack

McGrath. He falls in love with Jack’s teenage daughter Phoebe, a young wannabe poet, and befriends Molly and especially Jack with whom he plans to manufacture Australian airplanes. After a meeting with possible business associates Jack dies and Herbert marries

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Phoebe. Their unhappy marriage ends when Phoebe takes Herbert’s plane and abandons

Herbert and their two little children. After this unexpected event Herbert meets Leah

Goldstein, an extraordinary woman who becomes his lover and close friend. Herbert’s narration is full of lies (some of them are, however, corrected by Leah), surprises and unbelievable tales. For example, Herbert and his son Charles share an obsession with building dwellings and cages. Herbert builds houses for his family and cages for birds, but Charles creates a pet emporium. This emporium, originally intended for animals, is in the end inhabited by Charles’s wife Emma, Herbert’s friend Leah and Herbert himself.

Herbert’s grandson Hissao, who wants to become an architect, attempts to rebuild the emporium to suit his needs and ideas, but then he sells it to the Japanese. This presents one of the underlying themes of the novel; the dependence on neocolonial empires of the

USA and Japan owning and buying Australian industries encloses the whole novel.

One of the most important and recurring motives of the novel are lies and liars.

Carey connects the lies of an individual (the narrator) directly with the lies of the

Australian nation. The novel opens with the well-known comment about Australia that

Mark Twain wrote in his work Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

(sometimes titled More Tramps Abroad) in 1897:

Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and

strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes

the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but

like the most beautiful lies; and all of the fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones.

It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and

incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.

This comment characterizes the novel accurately; lies, untruths, inconsistencies, contradictions and liars play a significant role in Illywhacker. In his work Peter Carey’s

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Fiction: A Critical Study, Shahram R. Sistani explains that: “Lies and lying are significant in Illywhacker in two related ways – as a characteristic of the narrator, Herbert Badgery, and as a part of the analysis of Australia’s self-construction” (28). Lies accompany

Australia since the very beginning and Carey states that “one of the conditions of being an Australian right now is having the notion that we’ve been brought up with lies and denial about all sort of things” (Woodcock 142). There is also another reason why Carey comes up with the character of a trickster. Andreas Gaile has a very logical explanation for the lying and untrustworthy narrator of Illywhacker:

Carey knew that he wanted to write a book about three generations of an

Australian family. Normally this would have meant that he would have lost his

first-generation narrator half way through the book. With the liar-device Carey

could easily bypass his generational problem and have a first-person narrator all

the way through. Lying thus became a structural necessity to the whole artefact of

Australian history as told by his illywhacker. (Rewriting History 46)

In the character of Herbert Badgery Peter Carey created an untrustworthy and unreliable narrator. Herbert, from the very beginning, presents himself to the reader as a liar: “I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar” (Carey 11). Nevertheless, he is not such a liar he claims to be. While he recounts his own lies regarding his life and the people within it, he continually contests the lies Australian history consists of (Hassall 83). Moreover, many of his personal untruths are discredited and exposed later in the text. For example, at the outset of the novel he informs the reader that he is a very old man, in fact that he is

“a hundred and thirty-nine years old” (Carey 11). However, a few pages later he claims that in 1919 he was 33 years old. An attentive reader surely counts that if this would be true, Badgery should have been born in the year 1886 and should be telling us his story in the year 2025 (and not 1985). But the reader was warned, he shall not trust the narrator.

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Herbert occasionally lies when he interacts with other characters, his explanation of this behavior, however, is simple and sad: “Everyone loved me when I appeared in a cloak and swirled and laughed and told them lies. They applauded. They wanted my friendship.

But when I took off my cloak, they did not like me. They clucked their tongues and turned away” (Carey 79). The reality, Herbert’s true character and the truth in general are not interesting for other people. And that is the reason why he tells his own versions of stories, he invents the beautiful lies to be admired and loved. Through playing different roles he keeps the affection of the people he likes; for his wife Phoebe he is a confident aviator and dreamer, for her father Jack he is a potential entrepreneur, aircraft constructor and business partner; Herbert cannot step out of his world of lies because he does not want to lose Jack’s friendship and Phoebe’s affection.

Despite the fact, that he is a liar, Herbert Badgery also narrates the story of his own country, as “he parallels the official history of the country with prodigious lies”

(Sistani 11). He uses the fair voice of Leah Goldstein to reveal the hidden version of the history of Australia: “The land is stolen. The whole country is stolen. The whole nation is based on a lie which is that it was not already occupied when the British came here. If it is anybody’s place it is the blacks’” (Carey 307). Leah confronts Herbert with her truths since their first encounter, when Herbert lies about his employment as a goldminer, she points out that gold is the curse of Australia, that the Australians think they do not have to work like ordinary men and women, that they think they just need luck. She claims that gold corrupted them: “It has been the same with land. Men who spent their lives suffering from ruling classes went out and stole land from its real owners. Hey, presto, I’m a boss.

There has been no history here,” she said” (Carey 229). Leah contradicts the terra nullius doctrine of the British colonizers, which remained according to Banner “the law in

Australia throughout colonial period, and indeed right up to 1992” (95). Later she

27 continues: “I cannot stay still anywhere. It is not a country where you can rest. It is a black man’s country: sharp stones, rocks, sticks, bull ants, flies. We can only move around it like tourists” (Carey 323). Carey follows this pattern, where Herbert tells the lies and

Leah corrects them, also in consequent chapters, for example when Herbert writes his prison memoirs Gaol Bird, which is according to him “a pack of lies” (Carey 409) and which record Leah sets straight again with her letter.

Prison, or goal, as Carey calls this type of “facility”, presents another significant and recurring motive of the novel. Many depictions remind of imprisonment, topic related to the penal colony which Australia once was. The houses Herbert builds for his families are often seen as prisons by their occupants; Phoebe, for example, considers the house

Herbert built for them as a contemporary dwelling, because she dreams about big cities like Paris – but instead she has to live in a provincial Australian small town. Carey toys with the depictions of trapped animals and people throughout the novel, Herbert’s snake is in a hessian bag, the parrots he acquires for Phoebe live in cages, and the pet shop emporium of Herbert’s son Charles consists of cages inhabited by animals and people.

All these images invoke feelings of oppression and imprisonment and accent the lack of freedom; this all is suggesting that Australia itself started as a prison. As Sistani puts it:

“The image of caging animals and birds is an effective symbol of colonization” (67). The prominent role of cages, aviaries and aquariums demonstrates how people build different kinds of prisons for themselves and others and the way they are able to live within them.

This legacy of a country that started as a prison – a penal colony – is also confirmed by

Hassell’s statement that “Australia has never escaped from its narrative of imprisonment”

(85). Indeed, the topic of imprisonment presents an element Carey also employs in Jack

Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang and A Long Way from Home.

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Australian dependence on the United states and later on Japan insinuates another important issue Carey tries to deal with in Illywhacker. From the very beginning, Herbert

Badgery presents himself as a convinced Australian nationalist who, however, earns money by selling American cars, the Fords. He tries to justify and explain himself: “The

Ford had been a tumour in my life. I had fought battles with it in the way another man might fight battles with alcohol or tobacco. I had walked away from it and returned to it”

(Carey 75). Herbert repeatedly claims that Australia should not be dependent on the

United states, instead it should focus on its own products and start to build Australian cars and airplanes. In other words, he rejects the neocolonial dependency and envisions an independent and flourishing state of Australia. He wants to build an aircraft factory that would construct first Australian airplanes, he wants to use stolen plans though; and he defends himself: “Of course, I had stolen the damn plans… There was only one reason

Bradfield could not make his B3 – British interests didn’t want him to” (119). Herbert’s

Australian aircraft company would build Australian airplanes based on British plans, he supports the idea of independent Australian car industry, but he sells American goods.

Herbert’s actions do not mirror his thoughts, he uses Australian dependency on the United states when it is convenient for him. Herbert and his son Charles disapprove, at least verbally disapprove, of Australian dependency on America, the next generation of

Australians and the Badgery family, however, is confronted with a new neocolonial force

– Japan.

Carey uses several significant historical events in this novel that help reveal the

“true” history of Australia. The historical defeat of striking shearers by the squatters on the 15th June 1895 serves as the background of little Herbert’s revenge against his father’s beating and ill-treatment (Carey 39-41). Eureka Rebellion, initiated in 1854 by gold miners in Ballarat, was a revolt against the colonial rule of the Great Britain; and Carey

29 mentions it because Molly McGrath’s Irish father “had had his leg broken by policemen at the Eureka Stockade” (Carey 95). The mentioned events are described from the point of view of the marginalized and oppressed: the miners, the Irish, or the Chinese. Gaile points out that Carey is “taking side with historic losers” and that he has “warmhearted sympathy with those sinned against” (22). Carey gives voice to those “historic losers” and allows them to tell their side of the story. The dark events of Australian history are then recounted for example by Goon Tse Ying, the surrogate father of Herbert Badgery.

Herbert describes Goon Tse Ying as a “man driven by a desire to prove himself civilized to the English he despised” (Carey 210). On the other hand, Goon calls Australia “this terrible country” and young Herbert “little Englishman” (Carey 212), he has his reasons though. Goon teaches Herbert how to make himself invisible, an art that Goon acquired during racist attacks at Lambing Flat. According to Goon, the English did not like the

Chinese and they sold them their old mines, however, when the Chinese made money from the mines, they came with other obstacles and eventually with violence. “But the

Englishmen thought it was all their country and all their gold and they played their band and came out to get us” (Carey 215). Goon’s story shows the issue of racism and the problematic relationship between the white settlers of the British origin and the newly incoming Chinese immigrants.

Illywhacker, Peter Carey’s 600-page long chronicle of three generations of the

Badgery family, “highlights one of the writer’s most long-standing interests: that of challenging conceptions of absolute truth” (Gaile, Rewriting History 70). The lies and truths of individuals and nation play the most significant role in this novel, they are used to create a better and more suitable image of the character of Herbert Badgery and his home country, Australia. Carey questions the terra nullius claim of the British colonizers through the character of Leah, who is convinced that this claim is a lie, the author also

30 expresses his thoughts regarding the Australian dependency on remote powers (especially the United States and Japan) and employs the motive of imprisonment, referring to the former penal colony.

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4 Oscar and Lucinda

Peter Carey wrote Oscar and Lucinda – the novel that won him his first prestigious

Booker Prize – in 1988. Oscar and Lucinda is a historical narrative, set in the 19th century, and tells the story of two young people, Oscar Hopkins, a young Anglican priest from

England, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian girl who inherits a substantial amount of money from her parents, Australian farmers. The basic plot of this novel is presented by the evolving relationship between Oscar and Lucinda who meet on an ocean liner for the first time. Oscar is travelling from Victorian England, specifically from southern England where he lived with his father Theophilus, a Plymouth Brethen, and later with the Strattons, an Anglican Reverend and his wife, to New South Wales where he earned a scholarship and where he hopes to become a local priest and possibly get an opportunity to spread his Christian faith. Lucinda, on the other hand, is returning to her home and her glasswork factory in Sydney. Victorian England and Australia (or New

South Wales, to be specific) are two different worlds; England symbolizes the Empire, the power, the culture, the political and religious center of Anglican church, while

Australia, on the other hand, presents a wild and unknown territory inhabited by convicts and Indigenous people. The two central characters of the story, who are absolutely different individuals at first sight, turn out to have quite a lot in common: both are pure and at the same time corrupt personalities, both of them are social misfits and could be described as gamblers. They are both isolated outsiders searching for their own place in a society which does not understand them. And the first thing that brings them closer together are cards.

The epic story of their friendship and love begins on a cruise liner. Until this moment their lives are depicted separately, the first chapters of the book are dedicated to

Oscar and his struggles with his belief and therefore also with his religious father; the

32 later chapters deal also with his pathological gambling. His appearance, faith, and fear of water make him a solitary and odd person. Lucinda’s story is set in New South Wales, where she lives at the farm of her parents. After their deaths she has to sell the farm and decides to move to Sydney where she buys a glasswork factory. The young heiress gives a strange impression as an owner of a factory full of male employees. Finding friends is not an easy task for Lucinda, however, eventually she meets and befriends a group of people who play cards with the same enthusiasm as Lucinda does. The tragic role of cards and gambling generally accompanies her throughout the novel, and when she meets Oscar after a longer time again and begins to visit him late at nights to play cards, the impact of their irresponsible actions is immense and terrible, especially for Oscar. The Bishop expels Oscar from the Church. Lucinda feels responsible for her friend’s unfortunate fate and takes him to her home where their complicated relationship develops into a deeper and sexual relationship. They, however, do not completely abandon their gambling manners and they bet their entire fortunes on a nonsensical and absurd idea or venture – to build a glass church and transport it to Boat Harbour. This arduous task comes between the young lovers and at the end becomes fatal for Oscar.

Hassall claims in his work Dancing on Hot Macadam that: “The narrative, which begins and ends with the church, broadens into a social panorama depicting the conflict between Christianity and evolution in England, and the process of colonization in

Australia” (132). Shahram S. Sistani describes the narrative style of the novel in his book

Peter Carey’s Fiction: A Critical Study: “The narrative mode of Oscar and Lucinda is basically the mode of a realistic Victorian novel, but in its resistance to cultural imperialism it subtly but consistently subverts this imperial narrative mode” (40). The story is told by Oscar Hopkins’s great-grandson, who introduces himself as an

33 untrustworthy narrator. In the very beginning of the novel, he warns the reader to not trust the history (and explains also the reason):

I learned long ago to distrust local history. Darkwood, for instance, they will tell

you at the Historical Society, is called Darkwood because of the darkness of the

foliage, but it was not so long ago you could hear people call it Darkies’ Point,

and not so long before that when Horace Clarke’s grandfather went up there with

his mates — all the old families should record this when they are arguing about

who controls this shire – and pushed an entire tribe of aboriginal men and women

and children off the edge. (Carey 2)

This is the second page of the book and Carey already draws attention to the more subtle topic of his novel, which is his critique of European colonialism, especially the brutality with which white settlers treated the Aboriginal people not only to get their land and natural resources but also to spread their religion and demonstrate their supremacy. The

Darkwood story is a typical example of re-writing history: the mass murder of many

Aboriginal families that originally gave name to the place (Darkie’s Point) is suppressed and later replaced with a more acceptable place name Darkwood, allegedly associated with the darkness of the wood. The true history is forgotten, only the history conveniently adjusted by the settlers seems to have survived. However, the narrator reveals the truth through Kumbaingiri Billy’s tale which is later in the novel to be understood as Billy’s description of Mr. Jeffris’s expedition’s arrival. Throughout the novel, the narrator also plays with the facts, for example, he insinuates that Lucinda is his great-grandmother but later he reveals that Oscar was married to Miriam Chadwick who gave birth to his only child. The end of the novel is unexpected and cruel as Oscar drowns in the glass church floating in the river. Bruce Woodcock in a chapter dedicated to Oscar and Lucinda in his scholarly study Peter Carey points out that “Oscar and Lucinda shares with Carey’s other

34 works a dislocating abrupt quality, most noticeable in the sudden turn-around of the ending and Oscar’s death, which on first reading comes for many readers with the unexpectedness of a catastrophe” (86). Woodcock also mentions Carey’s postcolonial approach to the 19th century Australia:

The book continues a number of areas of investigation from Illywhacker,

including the dangers of obsessive dreams or idealisms and the hidden imperial

history of white Australia’s colonization of Aboriginal land, a theme which may

seem tangential in the finished novel, but which was at the heart of Carey’s

original idea for the book. (73)

The crucial role in the novel is played by the glass church, to be precise, the novel begins and ends with the church (the first chapter of the novel is titled “The Church”, and the narrator explains the importance of the glass church to his family). To a certain degree, this church represents the pure affection between Oscar and Lucinda. When the gentle and fragile Oscar transports the church through the desert and undiscovered territory to

Boat Harbour he wants to demonstrate his feelings to Lucinda. However, there is more that can be revealed. The story of the glass church also represents the exploitation by

Australian colony, since in order to obtain the land for the church, Aboriginal people have to die once again. In addition, the church poses as a symbol of Christianity and may be seen as closely connected with missionaries and their eagerness to spread the one and only “true” faith. Hassall claims that:

The story of the Gleniffer church is thus a parable of the attempt to impose

nineteenth-century English Christianity on the new colony, and of the declined

and, in the late twentieth century, the eventual displacement of that church from

the territory it colonized one hundred and fifty years earlier (133).

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Peter Carey confirms this idea in an interview with Geoff Pevere at the Toronto Reference

Library in which he states that when he started writing the book he imagined “a box full of Christian stories, in fact a church, floating through a landscape filled with Indigenous stories” and that he was thinking how “the Christian stories killed the Indigenous stories”

(n. pag.).

The conflict of cultures is observed also by Bruce Woodcock who claims that:

“The peaceful pastoral image of the church thus hides and commemorates a holy war”

(73). The glass church, originally a pure and noble intention eventually becomes a symbol of colonialism, exploration and subsequent destruction and doom for the Aboriginal people. Oscar does not want to convert the Aboriginal people to his faith, he thinks that such an effort would be a waste of time: “The most remarkable fact about these ‘chaps’ was their total absence of religious belief” (Carey 235). Oscar is not aware of the strong spirituality of the Indigenous people, he has no opportunity to learn about their “religion”.

His church is built from glass and the material is of essential importance. Lucinda thinks of glass as a precious and pure material and considers the idea of building a church from glass to be a noble thought. However, this opinion is not shared by the Aboriginals: “They saw the glass was sharp. This was the first thing they noticed – that it cuts. Cuts trees.

Cuts the skin of the tribes” (Carey 477). The native people see it as a weapon, a tool of destruction. The dreadful combination of the material and its purpose remains however hidden to them. Carey uses the glass church and the religion of the European settlers to demonstrate the differences between the Indigenous people and the colonists and also to highlight the settlers’ attempts to spread Christianity among the natives who are perceived as savage and simple creatures living in the wilderness and uncharted areas of Australian continent.

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The presence of Aboriginal people is visible since the first pages, and Carey often indicates their marginalization in Australian society, for example when the narrator describes the surroundings of the farm of Lucinda’s parents and mentions the trails of activities of the native people: “you could see the scars the blacks had made cutting barks for canoes and other implements”, later he concludes his description with the statement:

“it was Black-fellow territory” (76); or when Lucinda alters her doll’s face she creates

“Dolly who was – as if by magic – a different person, a native of a land where maps were not yet drawn (79); or when Mr. Jeffris indicates that the expedition will have to cross the

“nigger’s kingdoms” (420). Those are mere references, often lacking explanation, they simply indicate that there are some Aboriginal people there. However, Carey assigns significant importance to them when Lucinda’s parents die, and she inherits the farm and the land on which it was built. She refuses the inheritance, saying that “the money was stolen from the land. The land was stolen from the blacks” (Carey 124). Through the character of Lucinda Leplastrier, Carey expresses his view on the dispossession of

Aboriginal land, as Lucinda recognizes Aboriginal primary relationship to the land and acknowledges their belongings. She decides to leave the farm life and moves to Sydney where she meets new friends, however, she does not share their lifestyle, interests or opinions. Carey uses Sydney as the colonial centre, for example, his description of Mr. d’Abbs’s house decorations involves “a crude pen rendering showing blacks attacking a settler’s cabin” (157) and one of Mr. d’Abbs’s friends, Mrs. Burrows, is depicted as “one of those who claimed no white man should be hanged for shooting blacks in self-defence”

(159). Lucinda grew up on a farm, she was used to meet or at least distantly see the

Aboriginal people, and Mrs. Burrows’s opinions make her feel uncomfortable. Carey juxtaposes the image of the civilized colonial centre and its inhabitants and their visions

(pictures and opinions) of the periphery, the wild country of brutal savages. Most of

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Lucinda’s new friends have never met an Aboriginal person but they are convinced of their brutality and wildness as it is depicted in the pictures and books of the colonial propaganda. Lucinda, on the other hand, has a personal experience with the Aboriginals and does not agree with her friends.

Carey gives voice to the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia and introduces their feelings and emotions in one chapter, titled “Glass Cuts”, which is written from the point of view of the natives. This chapter narrates the first encounter between the native tribe and the white colonizers represented by Mr. Jeffris’s expedition: “Our people had not seen white men before. We thought they were spirits. They came through the tea-trees, dragging their boxes and shouting” (Carey 475). From the very beginning, native people are depicted as not fully understanding the settlers, not only in terms of their language, but also in terms of their behavior and motives. They are watching the settlers cutting trees and wonder: “They did not cut down the trees for sugar bag. There was no sugar bag in the trees they chopped… We saw the dead trees” (Carey 475). The white people are intruders, they do not respect the nature and its laws, they destroy it without an obvious and reasonable reason. And what more, the lives of native people do not have any value for them, they do not hesitate to rape or murder them. Oscar is mentioned by a tribesman in the context of religion: “It was in these camps the young fellows learned about Jesus.

This was the first time they ever heard of such a thing. They were told the story of Jesus nailed to the cross. They were told by the Reverend Mr. Hopkins” (Carey 476). After all,

Oscar Hopkins becomes a missionary spreading the one true faith, which is later depicted as having a strong influence on some Aboriginal people in the community, for example on Kumbaingiri Billy’s aunt: “When she saw this glass church built, she became a

Christian. This was the day Jesus first came to Bellinger. She saw Jesus, Mary, Joseph,

Paul, and Jonah – all that mob she never knew before” (Carey 496). Kumbaingiri Billy

38 criticizes Oscar’s behavior: “He christened her Mary, for Magdalene. It was a damn silly name for a Kumbaingiri and if you want my opinion, Bob, it was ignorant to talk to us

Kooris in that way” (Carey 496). The point is that Oscar not only converts Kumbaingiri

Billy’s aunt to Christianity, ignoring her own belief, but he also takes away her Aboriginal name which perhaps has a certain meaning in the Kumbaingiri language and culture and replaces it with an English name which is important to himself.

The depiction of religion and the native people present only one element in

Carey’s postcolonial approach to Australian history. Carey insinuates the differences between the colony and the empire throughout the novel, Oscar, for example, writes in the letter to his father:

I am homesick for hedges and birds with pretty melody, for the lovely chalky blue

sky of England. This colony seems so hard and new, all newly broken ground,

much clay and sandstone, but nothing yet to make the soil friable. The birds are

bright but raucous. Everything is lacking in gentility and care, and society as a

whole (although better dressed than anyone in England could imagine) seems little

concerned with the common good, only individual benefit. (Carey 328)

Naturally, he associates the superior qualities to England as the colonial centre and the inferior ones to Australia, the colony. Carey draws the attention to the contrast between

Europe – the good old world with the good French cognac, the London Illustrated News, the Dutch lamp – and Australia, the savage and not yet fully explored land, with colonizers, convicts, Aboriginals, violence, and death – when he picturesquely describes the home of Mr. d’Abbs (157). During Oscar’s dreadful journey to Boat Harbour it becomes obvious that Sydney is only a small civilized part of the colony, while most of it is still undiscovered and uncharted, marked by Mr. Jeffris as “nigger’s kingdoms”

(420). Boat Harbour especially stands in Sydney, as it is “portrayed as a hell, an outpost

39 of darkness, where the dirty work of the Empire proceeds apace, and both the Aborigines and the Christian clergy are treated with contemptuous brutality” (Hassall 134).

Mr. Jeffris helps Oscar to secure the transportation of the glass church, but his own mission is completely different. As an explorer, he wants to discover new places and plot them on maps. Kate Darian-Smith et al. remind of the importance of maps by pointing out that “British colonial maps, with their ‘edges and blank spaces’ filled with cannibals, mermaids and monsters, are vivid reminders of the contradictions of colonial discourse.

Maps embody both knowledge and possession but also a sense of the tenuousness” (5).

This suggests that the land was not empty, and the colonizers were aware of this fact.

Darian-Smith later adds:

The act of naming, and the names themselves, either blatantly ignored or

subverted and incorporated pre-existing Aboriginal names and histories of the

land. Thus, competing or overlapping histories are either presenced or silenced

through the cultural power of maps and place names. (5)

Maps symbolize exploration and possession of land. The expedition described in Oscar and Lucinda ends tragically, people die, beliefs are shattered, and the goals are not achieved. Andreas Gaile comments on the issue of exploration in Carey’s novel: “Oscar and Lucinda confirmed the postcolonial designation of Carey’s writings. Carey here followed the devastating tracks laid by the European explorers on their expeditions through unmapped areas of the land” (Rewriting History 26).

To sum up, Oscar and Lucinda offers a historical narrative, a tragic romance between two young people originating from different worlds, however, connected by a similar fate. Isolated and misunderstood, both gamblers and social misfits, their story develops in the foreground of a more complex story – the history of colonization and exploration of Australia. This story is narrated through the eyes of white colonizers, while

40 the other side of this history is revealed only occasionally, for example through

Kumbaingiri Billy’s storytelling or through the chapter narrated from the point of view of a member of a native tribe. Church and religion play a significant role in the colonization of the continent and during the final chapters Carey demonstrates how the process of exploration and documentation of the land negatively influenced the native people inhabiting those wild areas.

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5 Jack Maggs

Jack Maggs, published in 1997, is set in Victorian London in 1837 and contains an adventurous plot centered around the main protagonist Jack Maggs. Jack Maggs is a story about an ex-convict who illegally returns back to his mother country to meet his foster son Henry Phipps. His mission is quite simple: he wants “to explain himself to his adopted son, and to enjoy the fruits of his investment to that gentleman” (Hassall 196). Maggs is full of unrealistic illusions about London, and the people he once knew, and he gradually comes to realize that England is not his home anymore and that he is not welcomed there.

In fact, Peter Carey re-writes Charles Dickens’s famous novel Great Expectations. Jack

Maggs is Dickens’s Abel Magwitch, Henry Phipps replaces Philip “Pip” Pirrip, and the character of the writer, Tobias Oates, was inspired by Charles Dickens himself. Bruce

Woodcock compares the novel to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in the sense that it rewrites “a canonical text from the heart of English literary tradition” (122) with the aim to tell the history from the point of view of the characters that could not do it in their original stories. Carey gives voice to the character of Abel Magwitch who was a rather marginalized character in Charles Dickens’s novel and shifts the focus from Pip (the character of Henry Phipps in Jack Maggs) to Magwitch himself. Furthermore, the pivotal relationship depicted in the novel is not the one between the young gentleman and his benefactor; instead, Carey closely follows the complicated relationship between the ex- convict and the novelist Tobias Oates. Woodcock points out that Carey permanently confronts the novelist who originally “authored” (i.e. Charles Dickens) the character of

Jack Maggs and lets him (the convict) rewrite “his own creator” (123). Carey’s character of Jack Maggs is dark and dangerous (and in a way similar to Abel Magwitch), however,

Carey treats him as his own ancestor and gives him “all the love and tender sympathy that

Dickens’s first-person narrative provides his English hero Pip” (Hassall 206). Thus,

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Carey creates a narrative that is fundamentally Australian. Andreas Gaile goes even further and describes the novel as “a by now classic example of the Empire ‘writing back’” (Rewriting History 26).

Maggs finds refuge in the household of Mr. Percy Buckle where he starts to work as a footman and meets Mercy Larkin and Tobias Oates, two people who will influence his life significantly. During a dinner party in Mr. Buckle’s house, Jack experiences an attack of facial pain and Oates is willing to help him. Oates uses hypnosis to deal with the pain which he describes as Maggs’s phantom, however, he has ulterior motives. His longings for fame and success force him to steal Maggs’s memories and write a fictional story about him. According to Snodgrass “Oates deliberately misrepresents Jack’s life story as a means of marketing a Gothic caricature based on lies” (130) and writes his novel The Death of Maggs. Hassall comments on Oates’s behavior as follows:

“Experimenting with mesmerism, Oates blunders amateurishly into Maggs’s subconscious memories, pretending to liberate them from his ‘phantom’ while in fact appropriating his story for a planned novel, The Death of Maggs” (197). The ending of the story is unexpectedly optimistic. Hassall claims that Maggs “turns away from the false ideal he constructed for Phipps and accepts the true self recognized by Mercy Larkin”

(197). Together with Mercy, Maggs returns to the New South Wales and starts a family with her and his two Australian sons. In the end, he is a respectable citizen surrounded by a large and loving family of his own.

While the postcolonial literature often examines what the colonial experience inflicted on the Indigenous cultures, in Jack Maggs Peter Carey reverses the roles; he examines “the impact of the imperial experience on the English national psyche”

(Woodcock 121), because he allows Jack Maggs to return to Great Britain and to narrate his version of the story. Jack Maggs was, at the age of 15, sent to a prison in New South

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Wales on a ship with a noble name, Enterprise, reminding the reader of British power and indicating the possible pardon and redemption of the convicts. Jack served his sentence and got pardoned; however, he does not find his salvation in Australia and is still attracted to London, his idealized hometown. So, he comes home, only to find that London (and

England in general) is the hell, the tormented land (Snodgrass 77-8). Woodcock claims that “Jack Maggs juxtaposes the hidden and the visible to reveal a terrible social violence beneath the surface of the imperial ideal” (120). Carey emphasizes the way how the

English perceived Australian convicts, they could be successful in Australia, but they could not return, “what they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders”

(Woodcock 122). Despite the fact, that Jack Maggs served his sentence and earned his money legally as a successful brick manufacturer, his earnings are consistently labeled as convict gold – as something unclear and impure. When Mr. Buckley finds out that Henry

Phipps is Maggs’s son, he is astonished and exclaims: “The convict owns the house next door? Pretends to be my footman, but owns the freehold? So, Mr. Phipps… his son. Why,

I’d wager his fortune all comes from our Jack Maggs. It’s convict gold, that’s what it is”

(Carey 363). Later, when Percy Buckle states that if Jack Maggs gets arrested, the property “would be subsumed nullus contredris” and taken from Maggs (Carey 381) he references the terra nullius doctrine on the basis of which British explorers claimed the

Aboriginal lands for the British Empire. Woodcock points out that the Latin phrase nullus contredris is fraudulent and invented by Mr. Buckle to hide his inadequate knowledge of law and “recalls the doctrine of terra nullius whereby Australian Indigenous peoples were defrauded of their inheritance and land” (128).

Carey follows the postcolonial approach to the centre and its periphery, he juxtaposes London, the city of English ladies and gentlemen, and New South Wales, the periphery and the wild country inhabited by convicts and Aboriginals. Returning home

44 to London, feels like a dream come true for Jack who does not want to be Australian and claims: “I am a fucking Englishman, and I have English things to settle. I am not to live my life with all that vermin. I am here in London where I belong” (Carey 179). While he refers to his fellow Australians as “that vermin” and speaks of his real children as of a different race, “the race of Australians” (Carey 441), he elevates Henry Phipps because he “is an Englishman” (Carey 441). However, he discovers gradually that his memories of England were simplified and glamorized visions of a young boy who cherished them in his head to survive the brutal treatment of the convict system. In the beginning of the story, London is the bright and happy centre of the Empire and New South Wales stands for the brutal peripheral penal colony; in the end the roles switch, London presents a place where Jack Maggs experiences fear, threat and betrayal, while Australia offers him freedom, acceptance and prosperity (Hassall 204). Maggs’s glamorized visions and his longing to be accepted by Phipps prevent him from being happy and free in Australia, but

Oates, Phipps, Buckle and many other people he meets in London reveal the true face of

England, and finally allow him to return to New South Wales – the colony which gave him the opportunity his home country had been denying him since the day he was born.

The most important motives employed in the novel are the motive of imprisonment and the motive of orphans. The convicts transported to Australia during the

18th century, could be pardoned there or could work off their penalty but they could never return back to their British homes. Australia became their permanent prison, their exile.

If they had come back to Britain, their original sentence would have been reinstated

(Winter 798-804). This aspect of Dickens’s Great Expectations is commented by Edward

Said in his book Culture and Imperialism: “The prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but imperial: subjects can be taken to places like Australia, but they cannot be allowed a ‘return’ to metropolitan space” (xvii). Those subjects are (in the case

45 of Magwitch and Maggs) permanently exiled from the imperial centre to the colonial periphery (Dolin 277). According to Woodcock, Said “sees the transported convict

Magwitch as a metaphor for the relationship between England and its colonial offspring”

(122). England is a very strict parent, when the children do not obey, they must be punished. Ma Britten, Jack’s foster mother, confirms the danger of his return: “You are a dead man if they find you” (Carey 5). Snodgrass is more specific: “at the age of 38, criminal Jack Maggs insists on returning to the lands he calls home, even if repatriation results in his execution” (57). Even though Maggs is aware of the consequences of his return, the idealized picture of his home country and his longing to meet Henry Phipps are much stronger, and he risks his own life to visit England and his ‘son’.

However, there is another prison in Jack Maggs’s life – a prison that he created in his mind, an illusion of a friendly home in England, which does not allow him to be happy in Australia although he is free and successful there. Moreover, he builds a similar imprisonment for his foster son Henry Phipps, as he wants to raise Phipps as an English gentleman with the help of the money he earned in New South Wales, but he does not ask

Henry if that was what he wants. Hassall sees the life of Jack Maggs as full of different kinds of imprisonments; since his birth he was imprisoned in a life of a criminal enforced by Ma Britten and Silas Smith; later he is imprisoned literally and transported to New

South Wales and the last prison is that of his imaginative dreams of England (203-4).

Maggs is also paralyzed and haunted by his memories of the cruelty he had to endure in the prison – after Tobias Oates identifies this trauma as a phantom, he consequently abuses the sessions with Maggs in order to collect information for his novel The Death of

Maggs. All those prisons seem to vanish at the end of the novel with a significant help of

Mercy Larkin. Mercy herself is imprisoned by Mr. Percy Buckle, who offers a safe home and work to this young girl. However, he misuses her unfortunate situation by

46 manipulating her into making her his mistress. Mercy is one of Carey’s “tough, self- sustaining women who tolerate and, at time supersede the idiocies and machinations of men” (Snodgrass 93). Despite her situation, Mercy is an optimistic person who eventually opens Jack’s eyes and shows him the real face of England. Mercy returns with Jack to

Australia, where they create “a colonial home with his two sons and his and Mercy’s children” (Snodgrass 57). Mercy Larkin helps Jack to abandon the prison he created in his mind and to appreciate the opportunity offered to him by the colony.

Many of Carey’s books deal with characters who are orphans or half orphans. Jack

Maggs is no exception, in fact, the novel presents a number of orphans or abandoned children – Jack Maggs, Tobias Oates, Mercy Larkin, and Henry Phipps. Jack Maggs was casted out, punished, treated badly, and still he wanted to get back to England – to the people who did this to him. Carey compares this behavior to the behavior of abused children and thinks of Australians as of abandoned children. As Woodcock puts it: “Jack

Maggs is an orphan, betrayed and brutalized into a life of crime by an uncaring society, which, having made him a criminal, then punished him with imprisonment and transportation to Australia” (120). The family relationships and bad parenting is a metaphor for relationship between the British Empire and its colonies (Woodcock 122-

4). Jack Maggs’s surrogate mother Ma Britten (according to Woodcock this name stands for Mother Britain) and Silas Smith represent the bad parents and Jack and Sophina, who was raised together with Jack, stand for the abandoned, mistreated, and colonized. Ma

Britten and Silas Smith raise their “children” to be thieves, they abuse them for their own selfish purposes, as well as England transports its convicts to the colony to work in mines, to build the colony. After the children serve their purpose, “their parents” abandon them.

After meeting little Henry Phipps who feeds the young convict, Maggs wants to reward him with an appropriate upbringing, he wants to create an English gentleman and

47 possibly reinvent himself through him (Hassall 197). Maggs provides Henry with more than sufficient amount of money, buys him a house, secures him adequate education and regularly writes him letters signed as “father”. However, the relationship between the young man and his benefactor is not balanced, the answers written by Henry, with the help of his tutor, are lies. He accepts Maggs’s money and plays his role without restraint because he wants to maintain his comfortable life and his position of a respected young man. In fact, when Maggs informs him about his arrival, Phipps refuses to meet him, leaves the house Maggs bought him and hides in a club. Later he even tries to murder

Maggs.

Carey employs multiple narratives in the novel: the main story told by the author

– Peter Carey; Jack Maggs’s diary written with disappearing ink and mirrored writing;

Jack Maggs’s letters to Henry Phipps; the novel The Death of Maggs written by Tobias

Oates; and the records from Jack’s therapy that Oates falsifies. According to Woodcock

“the metafictional strategies of the novel are integral to the exposure of colonial delusions” (129). These narratives reveal the process of writing, not only inventing the history, the lying, but also the theft. Woodcock compares Oates to a colonizer, he colonizes Maggs and steals his life for his novel. Through the mentioned narratives Carey also stresses the relativity and unreliability of any narrative, he offers the reader “multiple viewpoints on events” (Woodcock 130). Maggs is not voiceless, marginalized and dehumanized like Dickens’s Magwitch, Carey gives him a voice. Maggs’s diary provides an account of his childhood and youth and his version of his life. Maggs records his memories because he wants to “justify himself to Henry Phipps, whom he believes to be his true heir, the person who will preserve his story” (Hassall 200). Maggs prefers Phipps to his real sons because he is an Englishman (in contrast to his Australian children), however, in the end he is bitterly disappointed since Henry Phipps keeps avoiding him.

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In addition, Maggs finds out that Phipps is not such a gentleman he would expect, he betrays Maggs many times, for example by sending him a miniature portrait of King

George IV which he passes off as his own and trying to kill Jack in order to appropriate his wealth. Another version of Maggs’s memories is presented by Tobias Oates who steals and distorts them after their sessions of mesmerism. According to Woodcock, such a narrative “calls into question the reliability of written texts as embodiments of any kind of truth” (132), because Carey lets the reader observe how Oates writes his novel, how he changes the truth to suit his purposes and reveals many occasions when Oates takes notes and later revises them. Gaile sees the novel as “another pertinent example of the creative potential of the truth/lie dichotomy and the debates it is capable of prompting”

(Rewriting History 52), and highlights that Jack Maggs “takes his history into his own hands and saves it from the lies of Tobias Oates’s fiction” (Rewriting History 52).

In Jack Maggs Carey depicts the issue of forced exile, the dehumanization of transported convicts and their longing for their mother country. Jack Maggs – the anti- hero, the thief and ex-convict, gets the opportunity to tell his story and to become a real human being with feelings, memories and miseries of his own. In the course of the novel, he becomes the hero of the story and passes the burden of anti-heroism especially on

Tobias Oates, but also on Henry Phipps and Percy Buckle. Carey also reveals the process of “fictional invention” (Woodcock 129), how the story of Maggs’s life is stolen from him and distorted by Oates to suit his needs.

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6 True History of the Kelly Gang

True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), completed by Carey in his voluntary exile in New

York, received many prominent awards, among them his second Booker Prize and

Commonwealth Writers Prize. It is another historical narrative, but this time it focuses on

Irish settlers in Australia. The central character is Ned Kelly – a 19th century bushranger who became an outlaw as well as an Australian legend. Carey based his novel on the famous Jerilderie Letter, in which the real Ned Kelly explains his actions, and, inspired by this extraordinary piece of text, he structured his novel into thirteen parcels, each of them introduced with a short description of its appearance and a short summary of its content. Carey also uses Kelly’s language, because it was precisely this detail that drew him to the story (Woodcock 139).

Ned Kelly’s language and the narration present the most significant aspects of this novel. There are several narrators employed in the novel, and Paul Eggert claims in his essay “The Bushranger’s Voice: Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter (1879)” that “we enter the novel via a number of authenticating voices” (123) and consequently he mentions three of the voices: the first voice is the voice of “the unnamed collector who is introducing the manuscript” (123) and confirms that it was written by Ned Kelly, while the second voice belongs to the archivist and “provides a physical description of each parcel and summarizes its contents as neutrally as possible” (123). The third voice belongs to Ned Kelly himself. All those voices contribute to the authenticity of the letters and the novel in general. The main narrative is written in Irish English, the text does not follow any grammar rules, it does not contain any commas within sentences, nor any quotation marks which makes it difficult to distinguish the direct speech from the rest of the text. Carey uses the colloquial language for the purpose of authenticity and trustworthiness of the letters. Since the letters

50 and their content are intended for Ned’s yet unborn daughter, the vulgar expressions are replaced with more acceptable words like “adjectival”, “effing”, “eff” or their letters are erased, like in the word b----r. For example, Ned describes how his mother visited her brother in the prison: “She cried God help us Jimmy what did we ever do to them they should torture us like this?” And then he continues: “She cried I would kill the b------s if

I were a man God help me” (Carey 9). The language is often rough and harsh and does not follow grammar rules, mirroring Kelly’s own behavior ignoring any rules and laws.

According to Woodcock the style of the narration is “characterful and true to the original”

(138), he also suggests that through the language Carey creates “a sense of narrative urgency” (138). Kelly does not have much time and wants to explain his actions to his yet unborn daughter. The last pages of the book are, however, written by a different person. The text has a different font, but, even without this graphic distinction, it is quite obvious that the narration has changed; the end of the novel is narrated by a third person

(identified only by the initials S. C.) who speaks proper English and uses sentences with punctuation. This person describes the doom of the Kelly Gang and the deaths of its members, precisely and without emotions. Bruce Woodcock claims that the final pages written in third-person narrative present a “contrast between the myth and the reality”

(155). Carey introduces another unreliable narrator or perhaps unreliable narrators and it is not obvious which part of the story is true and which is not. What if the unknown character of S. C. had also edited or censored the rest of the book? The history is challenged by Carey once again. The title of the novel True History of the Kelly Gang suggests that it contains the true history of Ned Kelly and his gang, however, Eggert warns that “history can be seen as another form of fiction” and “is inevitably inflected by point of view” (123). This issue is also discussed by Woodcock, who claims that “Ned’s story is a ‘true history’ in the sense that it follows the events of Kelly’s actual life as far

51 as they are known” (145), chronologically from his childhood, and that the “title with its assertive lack of the definite article, invokes the flavor of the authentic eye-witness narrative testimonies or memoirs” (145). Carolyn Bliss analyses Carey’s novel in her essay “Lies and Silences: Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter

Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang”, which is a part of Gaile’s Fabulating Beauty:

Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey, and claims that “the novel is not a or the true history, because it is only Ned’s true history: his sad and ultimately futile attempt to find the truth, the heart, the authenticity in his life” (219). The title of the novel without an article, the multiple narrators, the colloquial language, and the events depicted in the novel serve as tools which Carey employs in his attempt to create an impression of a real historical work, and at the same time those tools undermine this illusion and indicate that the story could be manipulated and distorted by any of the narrators.

True History of the Kelly Gang shares many common features with the previously commented novel Jack Maggs. In Jack Maggs an orphaned child fostered by criminals becomes a criminal and in True History of the Kelly Gang, Ned loses his father and his mother abandons him by “selling” him to a bushranger Harry Power “to become a highwayman and killer” (Woodcock 138). Both the novels are re-writings of older stories;

Jack Maggs re-writes Dickens’s classical fictional novel Great Expectations, True

History of the Kelly Gang re-tells a true story, and in both the novels Carey gives voice and importance to characters previously marginalized and victimized. Jack Maggs and

Ned Kelly want to introduce and explain themselves to their children through their letters.

According to Woodcock “these historical novels explore what Carey has called ‘patterns

[…] of abandonment, orphans’ in his work. They retell the stories of marginalized characters, outsiders and outlaws, fictional in Jack Maggs, fact in True History, in reinvented voices as Carey intervenes into existing texts to reimagine them” (138).

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The motive of convicts and imprisonment, already used in Jack Maggs, can be also found in this novel. In the beginning of the story, Ned describes how his father came to

Australia, he explains how “he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen’s Land” and then he continues “I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria” (Carey 7). Ned’s father had similar fate as Jack Maggs, but his story has not a happy ending. His constant conflicts with the English colonial police resulted in his repetitive imprisonments and later in his death. Prisons, or gaols as Carey calls them, are an omnipresent element of the novel;

Kelly starts his narration with the story of his father, then he skips to another member of his family in a prison: “My 1st memory is of Mother breaking eggs into bowl and crying that Jimmy Quinn my 15 yr. old uncle were arrested by the traps” (Carey 7). And Ned’s mother eventually ends up in a prison as well, serving as a motivation for Kelly and his brother to give themselves up. The end of the novel depicts Kelly detained by the police force after the shooting at the Glenrowan hotel. The first and the last chapters of Oscar and Lucinda are dealing with the church, representing the Christianization of Australia; the first and the last lines of True History of the Kelly Gang describe the members of the

Kelly family imprisoned and without a chance for a happy life, referring to the social injustice in the former penal colony.

Carey depicts in this novel how settlers lived inside the Australian colony and focuses especially on the problematic relationship between the English and the Irish people. As Woodcock puts it, “the novel reveals a multiple colonization” (146). The

English colonized Ireland and then transported Irish convicts to the British penal colony in Australia. The system of the colony reflects the oppression of the former penal colony, maintaining the ruling class of “increasingly rich Protestant English squatters and settlers,

53 backed by a supportive police force and government” (Woodcock 147) and the class of the poor underprivileged settlers without tangible prospects for a better life. Ned Kelly expresses his frustration with this social injustice and the system of the colony by stating that “we was being ruled by warders there were no more justice than in the days of yore”

(Carey 365). Carolyn Bliss sees the novel as “the story of oppressed Irish convicts, emancipists, and currency lads cheated, harassed, robbed, and generally abused by the

Anglo power-structure” (290). As Cathart and Clarke state in their book History of

Australia, the national identity of the convicts played an important role; while most of the

English and Scottish convicts were thieves, a great number of the transported Irish were convicted for riot and sedition (9). Many of them revolted against the Crown and the

Empire and were consequently convicted and deported to Australia where their descendants had to live oppressed by the powerful English class. The family of Ned Kelly and the community of Irish settlers are constantly persecuted and bullied by the English police and Ned is depicted as a man who is slowly driven to violence and crime through this social injustice. He explains this situation to his daughter in one of the letters: “I wished only to be a citizen I had tried to speak but the mongrels stole my tongue when I asked for justice they give me none” (Carey 394). Ned also describes the differences between the rights of the poor Irish settlers and the rich English squatters: “Through his connections in government the squatter Whitty had been permitted to rent the common ground and as a result a poor man could no longer find a place to feed his stock in all the drought stricken plains” (Carey 226).

The Kelly Gang has four members; Ned Kelly and his brother Dan and their friends Joe Byrne and Steve Hart. Its origin is connected with the event during which Ned shoots and injures an English police officer in self-defense and the defense of his family.

Ned and his brother Dan are later charged with attempted murder and they run away.

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Their following actions include horse stealing, bank robberies and killing of three policemen (Eggert 120). As the novel constantly juxtaposes the poor Irish and the rich

English settlers, and the Kelly Gang steal from the rich squatters and banks, it should not be surprising that they become popular amongst the poor, weak and oppressed people.

Ned Kelly – the myth, the rebel, and Australian icon, is then the result of this popularity.

Carey, however, tries to demystify or demythologize Kelly. The reason for this is explained by Woodcock: “For Carey, the significance of the Kelly myth for contemporary

Australia is that it poses a question: ‘who are we Australians that this man should be our greatest hero? By both celebrating and demythologizing Kelly, the novel asks what

Kelly’s status as national icon says about the identity of the Australian settler culture”

(142). This issue of national identity is an important element of Carey’s novel. As Gaile points out the “successive eras of colonization have made a deep imprint in the national psyche, leaving Australian identity in a state of disorientation. Postcolonial

Australians…are therefore desperately trying to determine who they are” (Rewriting

History 219). Carey tries to explain the motivations and the deeds of Ned Kelly and his gang, he introduces a human being strongly influenced by the society that surrounds him.

In True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey focuses on the hard and problematic coexistence of Irish and English settlers in Australia and stresses the social injustice and oppression that forces the Irish to become criminals and outlaws.

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7 A Long Way from Home

Peter Carey’s latest novel A Long Way from Home is an intriguing book which has the

Redex Trial race as its main motive, however, as the story progresses, another quite different topic is revealed. Carey seems to follow a pattern already used in many of his previous novels – he depicts the story of a strong woman and a man, who seems to be weak, but he shows the strength of his character in the most important moments. The novel also revisits places already known from previous novels: Geelong, Bacchus March,

Ballarat, towns and places of Carey’s own childhood. In addition, the social environment resembles the one Carey was raised in – the main protagonists, Irene Bobs and her husband Titch, are car dealers. However, the setting and the time frame of the 1950s are only a familiar background for quite a new and disturbing approach to Australia and its postcolonial heritage.

Carey assigns the role of the narrator to two characters; first of them being Irene

Bobs, a woman from south-eastern Australia who, in a way, matures during and after her participation in the Redex Trial. She exchanges her life of a mother of two children and a wife, supporting her husband in his attempts to become a successful and independent car dealer, for an adventurous journey across Australia in a Redex car. The second narrator is their neighbor, Willem Bachhuber, a son of a German pastor, a teacher, who loves quizzes, maps, and the Oceania magazine. Willie becomes a very important member of the Bobs crew – he is the navigator. The very last chapter introduces surprisingly the voice of Willie’s son Neil.

As has been already mentioned, the central topic of this novel is the Redex Trial of 1953. Redex Trials were not exactly races in the terms of speed, they were all about the reliability and endurance of cars and their crews, and they manifested the technological progress and prosperity of post-war Australia. Georgine Clarsen states in

56 her article “The Flip Side: Women on the Redex Around Australia Reliability trials of the

1950s” that those events “offered a performative affirmation of the capacity of settler

Australians to fully possess the continent through the power of modern technologies”

(17), she also mentions that idea of such an around-Australia car race had existed since the 1930s, “particularly to celebrate the sesquicentenary of British settlement in 1938”

(18). Carey uses this event to demonstrate the still rising power of the descendants of the white settlers as the background of his newest novel. Irene and Titch want to participate in this race and when they find out that their neighbor, Willie Bachhuber, loves and understands maps they hire him as their navigator. Their journey starts in Sydney and leads them through small towns, vast uninhabited plains and larger cities around

Australian continent.

The character of Willie Bachhuber appears in the story quite inconspicuously and gradually develops into an essential and interesting persona, in fact Carey employs the character of Willie to incorporate the topic of displacement into his novel. Displacement is one of the most often used features of postcolonial literatures. Ascroft, Griffiths, and

Tiffin discuss this issue in their book The Empire Writes Back:

A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting

from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or ‘voluntary’

removal of indentured labour. Or it may have been destroyed by cultural

denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous

personality and culture by supposedly superior racial or cultural model. (9)

Willie Bachhuber is son of German immigrants and is deeply convinced that he does not belong to Australia, he thinks that his place is somewhere in Europe, specifically in

Germany. “I spent my entire life in Australia with the conviction that it was a mistake, that my correct place was elsewhere, located on a map with German names” (Carey n.

57 pag.). Willie was raised by German parents, was surrounded by German names, German maps and pictures of German castles. His feelings of otherness are underlined by the behavior of some of his pupils and their parents, for example when one of the parents attacks Willie, he states: “I’ll hang you out the window you fucking Balt” (Carey n. pag.).

Willie has a German name, he is tall and slim and has fair hair. The parent has him for a

Balt. Balts are, as Carey explains through the words of Willie Bachhuber, refugees from northern Europe, and he points out that “Australian government were selecting light skinned ‘Nordic types’ as future citizens and that they had for the sake of obfuscation, named them Balts” (Carey n. pag.). This approach of Australian government to incoming immigration is called “White Australia policy” and Carey mentions and criticizes it throughout the novel several times. Willie’s origin is however a tricky question. When he travels north, Willie finds out that the people there think he is an Aboriginal. When he wants to buy a glass of beer, he is prompted to show his documents to the bartender who sees an “Abo”, not a German, in front of him. Carey points out that the people in the southeast Australia in the 1950s had no idea how the Aboriginal people look like, or how the light skinned Aboriginal people raised by the white community could look like. This is the reason why nobody in Bacchus March ever doubted Willie’s supposed German origin. Willie himself states that: “Excepting some engravings and that postage stamp portraying One Pound Jimmy, I had never seen an Aboriginal. They were all far away in dusty history, or in hot places where they threw stones at passing cars” (Carey n. pag.).

He claims that he had never seen an Aboriginal person, with the exception of One Pound

Jimmy’s portrait on a stamp. One Pound Jimmy, whose real name was Gwoja

Tjungurrayi, was an Aboriginal man photographed by Charles Holmes, a tourism executive, and his helper sometime in the 1930s near Alice Springs. “During the following 30 years these captured images played a significant role in the definition of

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Australian Aboriginality” (Barnes 85), they presented a man from the “Stone Age”

(Barnes 86) and were taken to “promote tourism to remote regions by colonizing powers”

(Barnes 86). Most people living in the southern Australia deduced the appearance of

Aboriginals from those pictures, even though they were often not aware that they were taken for the purposes of promotion and their stylization reflected this purpose. Carey provides the reader with an example of the documents requested by the bartender (he calls them “a pass” and “a dog tag”):

General Certificate of Exemption. This document entitles the bearer, HALF

CASTE Aboriginal known as LOCHY PETERSON (1) to leave Quamby Downs

Station, (2) to walk freely through town without being arrested, (3) to enter a ship

or hotel (individual may not be served – at proprietor’s discretion). N.B: Speaking

in Native Language prohibited. (Carey n. pag.)

These documents, papers, and different kinds of written text represent bureaucratic machinery used by the white majority to demonstrate their supremacy over the Aboriginal people who were forced to use it.

Maps and their use present another important aspect engaged in postcolonial literature. Carey employs this powerful tool of white colonists also in Oscar and Lucinda where Oscar’s quest of delivering the glass church is closely connected with the creation of maps and exploring unknown territories of the Australian continent. As the plot of A

Long Way from Home is set to the 20th century, the role of maps has slightly changed, however, they still pose a significant artifact used by the white Australians. Maps are

Willie’s passion, he collects them, he knows basic facts about old maps and has a good knowledge of the new ones. And on top of that, he knows the stories hidden behind the maps and uses the knowledge in a quiz show, for example:

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He then had Bachhuber educate us: a certain Maslen map had been drawn in 1827.

It included an inland sea where, in real life, there were only blacks and desert.

There was no inland sea, not ever. Yet because the madman’s map was in the State

Library of Victoria so the inland sea existed, and our neighbor was judged to be

correct. What tosh. (Carey n. pag.)

Places plotted on maps exist, while the existence of places not listed there is denied.

Carey’s simple definition of maps criticizes the ignorance of Aboriginal places and territories, and throughout the novel Carey uses terms like “lethal patchwork” or “map of murder” (Carey n. pag.) when he refers to them. To highlight their contradictory meaning to the “whitefellahs” and “blackfellahs”, he describes an event where “two conflicting official maps” (Carey n. pag.) exist and no one is sure which one should be trusted. Carey also gives space to the opinions of the Aboriginal people. Doctor Battery, for example says: “Blackfellahs got no fence. No fence, no bloody map neither” (Carey n. pag.). Then he continues and accuses the white people with their fences and maps that they had used surveyor maps to cut his country up and to close the Aboriginal people behind fences:

“Kartiya lock the gate. Blackfellah stay out” (Carey n. pag.). The Aboriginals do not use maps, they do not need them, because they have stories to describe their land. When

Willie finds out about the Aboriginal way of “mapping” the land, he prepares a surprise for his students:

That night I set up the kerosene lamp and obliterated the state borders on my

classroom map. And then I painted out the coastline and left a perfect field of

white. Here I would have my pupils’ drawings the paths on ancestral beings from

one place to another. I would not call them maps. (Carey n. pag.)

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Willie gives his pupils and their families the opportunity to fill the “empty map” with their tales and stories, as he wants to show them that their history and their point of view are important to him.

A significant part of the novel is dedicated to the oppression of Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, and this time Carey does not hesitate to openly describe the killings, murders, removal of Aboriginal children, and the life of native people in camps and reservations during the 1950s. He mentions the discovery of Australia by European explorers, the violence constantly used against the Aboriginal people, the lost generation and the issue of alienation and displacement. Carey introduces the history from the point of view of the Australian native people and throughout the novel puts the pieces of their unfortunate fate together. Most of the events are told by Willie Bachhuber, and the order of the described events is not chronological. One of the first references is an article in the

Oceania journal of which is Willie a devoted and passionate reader. Oceania journal is an actual academic journal (established in 1930) containing research papers, articles and comments in the field of social and cultural anthropology of the peoples of Australia,

Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia and insular southeast Asia. Willie is reading his

Oceania No. 3 from March 1953, when he finds information about archaeological structures found in Melton East, about ten miles from Bacchus March, and he claims that he would expect archaeological finding in Greece or Mesopotamia, but never in Australia.

Willie’s statement suggests that there had been no history of Australia before the arrival of European explorers. Later he watches and describes the landscape of those archaeological structures:

When I began to study the proposed survey of the archaeological structure of

Melton East I had no foreknowledge, but I would soon see that same landscape

outside the window for what it had always been: a forgotten colonial battleground,

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the blood-soaked site of a violent ‘contact’ between the indigenous blacks and the

imperial whites. If it was not a state secret, it might as well have been. (Carey

n.pag.)

Willie Bachhuber’s words indicate the violent events of British colonization. With the choice of his words, “colonial battleground”, he stresses that the history of this land is anything but peaceful. Later during his lecture in the camp of Quamby Downs, Willie hears an Aboriginal story about James Cook and his discovery of Australia. The story is narrated by a small boy named Charlie, one of Willie’s pupils. The narration consists of short sentences, and while Charlie speaks in simple English, he is still able to provide a colorful depiction of the violent actions initiated by Cook and his men during their journey around Australia. Charlie imitates Cook: “Very pretty country. Any more people around here?” And continues: “He roll down guns and he been shooting there for maybe three weeks. Shooting all the people. Women get shot shot [sic], kids get knocked out.

Then he packs up his gear and gets back in his boat go up around Australia.” And then

Charlies finishes his story: “Captain Cook reckons, ‘This no more blackfellah country.

Belong to me fellow,’ he said” (Carey n. pag.).

Willie shares his knowledge about the history of places, they travel through during the Redex Trial, with the rest of the crew: “Bachhuber said families had been forced off cliff tops, gunned down, babies brained with clubs. At Goulbolba, more than three hundred people had been shot or drowned which was called a ‘dispersal’” (Carey n. pag.).

Carey refers to the area known as the Horror Stretch. Ross Gibson included this area in his book Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, where he describes it as “a place you’re warned not to go” (1) and points out that “this country is an immense, historical crime-scene” (1). Later he continues with his explanations: “In the landscape of Central

Queensland, old passions and violent secrets are lying around in a million clues and

62 traces. Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettled and unsettling”

(2). He mentions that this is, besides other things, the area of the massacre of Goulbolba, the shooting and drowning of 300 Aboriginal men, women and children at Goulbolba Hill in Central Queensland in 1876 (Gibson 66-70). When Willie speaks about this event,

Irene thinks: “This really happened? No, it was black people. It happened centuries ago.

To me it was like a horror in the Bible. It was not from our modern time” (Carey n. pag.).

However, she is reminded of those events later in the most shocking way. She finds human bones and skulls in the roots of a tree and is horrified especially when she picks up a little skull with a hole in the forehead. Irene describes this moment with great sadness:

My call of nature was just a whisper. On the crater walls, only a foot from the

surface, I saw the roots had grown around dead bones. The first crumbled in my

hands and I saw there were so many others, a graveyard, sickening. That is, these

were not animals. There were so many, they must be blacks. I extracted a human

jawbone. I retreated. I rushed back into my overalls. I was an interfering woman.

I climbed down into to excavation where I was able to lift a human skull from the

broken soil. It was just a tiny thing, as fragile and powdery as an emu egg. I was

a mother. I knew what it was to hold a tender child and I knew this must be a little

boy, and all these bones around him must be his family. He was quite clean, and

very light, and it seemed he might turn to dust if I was clumsy. So I tucked the

digging tool in my back pocket and held him in both hands, then carried him, as

carefully as if he were a bowl of water, back through the dull shrubs and grasses.

(Carey n. pag.)

This is a very impressive and poignant moment of the story. Therefore, it should not be surprising that Carey chose this exact part of the text and read it to the audience during

63 his conversation with Claire Armitstead. Irene Bobs is sure that this small skull belonged to a little Aboriginal boy, she takes the skull with her, puts it in a carton box and notifies a police officer regarding her finding. But the policeman does not want to help her in any way, he even suggests that she should consider the skull “a souvenir” and calls it a “lost and found” item.

He fetched a steel nibbed pen of the type you see in post offices and on the form

he wrote: Abo infant skull found near Funnel Creek/ Finch Haton. I did not

question how he knew the child had been Aboriginal or how he guessed the

placenames and I had no choice but to accept the piece of paper together with the

skull. He had no room to store it, so he claimed. (Carey n. pag.)

Willie and Irene do not understand this ignorance towards their finding and Irene takes the skull and puts it back in the car. She eventually wants to provide the “boy” with a proper burial.

As has been already mentioned, Peter Carey employs in his latest novel many of the features of postcolonial literature: he deals with the issue of displacement in detail; demonstrates how the white people of Australia abused maps and their advanced technology to dominate the whole Australian continent; describes the life of the

Aboriginals in the stations and camps (where they are forced to live). However, there is still one important aspect that needs to be discussed. Carey’s use of language, specifically the use of the “white” English and the “black” english (pidgin) and the languages of different native tribes. As Ashcroft et al. claim in their famous work Empire Writes Back:

“One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. The imperial education system installs a ‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities” (7). Indeed, the “pass” of the Aboriginal

Doctor Battery says that he is not allowed to speak his native language. Willie Bachhuber

64 is not allowed to use pidgin or native language during his classes in the camp of Quamby

Downs and is warned not to encourage his pupils to use the pidgin or the language of their tribes. Throughout the whole novel, Carey thoroughly distinguishes between the language of the white people and the one of the Aboriginal people.

In his latest novel, A Long Way from Home, Peter Carey addresses the issues of removal of Aboriginal children, White Australia policy, and the life of the Aboriginal people in state camps.

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Conclusion

This diploma thesis attempted to analyze the postcolonial critique expressed in the selected novels written by Peter Carey. His latest novel A Long Way from Home contains a crushing critique of postcolonialism, however this diploma thesis also attempted to prove that Carey’s previous novels, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs and

True History of the Kelly Gang, deal with the issues of British imperialism and colonialism as well and that Peter Carey can be considered a postcolonial author.

A Long Way from Home, Peter Carey’s latest novel, focuses primarily on the issue of displacement and expresses severe critique of British colonialism. The title of the novel itself indicates the distance from home; in fact, in the beginning it may seem that it is all about the distance or length of the race that leads the main characters around Australia, but later it seems to be quite obvious that it refers also to Willie’s feelings of displacement confirmed by the surprising revelation of his Aboriginal origin. The motive of displacement can be found also in Oscar and Lucinda, where two misfits try and fail to find their place in Australian society, and in Jack Maggs, where the main character still looks up at Britain as his home even though he is exiled to Australia.

In A Long Way from Home, Aboriginal people of Australia play an important role and the behavior of the white people towards them presents a subject of Carey’s critique.

Carey depicts another version of Australian history, it is the history from the point of view of the oppressed Aboriginal people. Carey shows the violent side of Australian history, not the one that was part of the official educational curriculum. Carey confessed that for many years he had some kind of block that he was not able to write about Aboriginal people and their history. Many years later, living in the United states, he no longer thinks that he is not eligible to write about those specific issues of his country. And the issues that were only sketched in those four older novels come to light in his newest book in a

66 severe, rough, brutal and detailed way. The problematic relationship between the descendants of white colonists and the Aboriginal people which is in the spotlight in A

Long Way from Home, especially the murders, oppression and unjust treatment of

Aboriginal population, is already roughly sketched in Oscar and Lucinda. In the very beginning of the novel, there is the legend told about a place called Darkwood. And there are two versions regarding the origin of the name of this place, according to the white people the name refers to the darkness of the foliage, but the Aboriginal people talk about an event during which the English pushed an entire Aboriginal family, men, women, and children off the edge to the sea. Carey does not add any explanation of this event. A Long

Way from Home contains detailed descriptions of similar events, fueled by the grim depiction of the landscape of the Horror Stretch accompanied with the explanation of events that happened there. Carey mentions the issues of colonization and the dispossession of Aboriginal people also in Illywhacker and Jack Maggs, where he questions the terra nullius doctrine, which the British colonists misused, when Leah

Goldstein states that the land is stolen from the Aboriginals and when Mr. Buckle compares it inadvertently to a theft.

Another common topic employed in A Long Way from Home and Oscar and

Lucinda are maps. In Oscar and Lucinda, Oscar’s journey to Boat Harbour through unknown, wild, and unmapped territory presents for Mr. Jeffris an opportunity to map the area and become famous and rich. This quest, however, has impact on the native people living in this area, the white people devastate their land and kill their people. In his latest novel, Carey goes further, he explains through the words of Aboriginal people, that maps do not have any meaning for them, they see them as a tool that the European settlers used to steal their country from them. On an example of an older map Carey demonstrates that

67 the colonists recognize only those places and names that are plotted on maps, empty places on maps mean that there is nothing there.

The analyses of the four older novels exposed some common and recurring motives that Carey uses throughout his books. The first of them is the unreliable narrator.

In Oscar and Lucinda, Oscar Hopkins’s great grandson is an untrustworthy narrator because he does not know the truth and the actual history. A completely different kind of unreliable narrator is presented by the figure of Herbert Badgery. Herbert lies intentionally for he wants to make himself more likeable, he craves for affection and love, but receives it only when he wears his cloak of lies. Untrustworthy narration can be found also in Jack Maggs, where Carey lets Tobias Oates distort the story of Jack Maggs’s life.

Carey uses different kinds of texts to tell the story. There is the novel Jack Maggs, the novel written by Tobias Oates The Death of Maggs and the letters written by Maggs to

Henry Phipps. The letters written by Ned Kelly for his daughter in True History of the

Kelly Gang play intentionally with the imagination, the precise descriptions of the condition and appearance of each parcel containing the letter and the dialect used throughout the novel can lead to a conclusion that this fiction is in fact a true story. Carey uses lies and unreliability of his narrators to destabilize the traditionalist history, he constantly urges the reader to not trust the history and to think about events from different points of view. As has already been said, he takes side with historical losers, Aboriginals, convicts, women, and different minorities and gives them back voice previously removed by the traditionalists. In this sense he replaces the “imperial grand récit” (the story from the imperial point of view) with “postcolonial petit récit” (the story from the point of view of the previously colonized, marginalized and voiceless) (Gaile, Rewriting History 19-

20). By giving the voice to the oppressed and marginalized Carey introduces their culture, habits, language and beliefs to the reader. This approach is even emphasized in his latest

68 novel A Long Way from Home, where the Aboriginal people get the opportunity to tell the history from their point of view, they talk about Dreaming, their ancestral beings and their relationship to the land.

All five discussed novels contain references to events directly connected to racism and colonial oppression of the native people, Irish settlers, convicts, women and other marginalized people. Carey gives them the opportunity to tell their side of the story (and history) and that makes him, in my opinion, a postcolonial writer.

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English Summary

This Master’s thesis introduces the Australian novelist Peter Carey and five of his novels:

Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack Maggs (1997), True History of the

Kelly Gang (2000) and A Long Way from Home (2017). The aim of this thesis is to analyze those five novels and find the aspects of postcolonial critique in each of them.

The first chapters of the thesis provide an overview of the theoretical background to Carey’s novels, they contain information about Carey’s life and work, a brief summary of political and cultural background of the selected novels and also explain the terms of postcolonialism and postcolonial literature.

The more extensive part of the thesis deals with the analyses of the novels with an emphasis on political criticism Carey expresses in each of his books, the criticism of imperialism, British colonialism and neocolonialism. The chapters dedicated to individual novels consist of brief summary of the novel in question and an in-depth analysis of the work, highlighting the passages that can be linked to the colonial past of

Australia and that express postcolonial critique or reveal a hidden history of Carey’s home country.

The concluding chapter compares the novels and focuses on the recurring themes and topics that present an integral part of each of the novels and that altogether make up the image of Australia as a postcolonial country facing the legacies and burdens of its colonial past.

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Czech Summary

Tato magisterská diplomová práce představuje australského spisovatele Petera Careyho a pět jeho románů, kterými jsou: Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), Jack

Maggs (1997), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) a A Long Way from Home (2017).

Tato práce má za cíl analyzovat vybrané romány a najít v nich aspekty postkoloniální kritiky.

První kapitoly této práce poskytují informace o autorovi a jeho dílech, dále pak stručný přehled týkající se politického, historického a kulturního pozadí jednotlivých románů a také se snaží vysvětlit pojmy postkolonialismus a postkoloniální literatura.

Rozsáhlejší část této diplomové práce je věnována analýzám jednotlivých románů. Důraz je kladen zejména na kritiku imperialismu, britského kolonialismu a neokolonialismu. Kapitoly věnované jednotlivým románům vždy obsahují stručný souhrn děje a hlubší analýzu díla zaměřující se zejména na pasáže související s koloniální minulostí Austrálie, na části románů obsahující kritiku kolonializmu a části, které odkrývají ještě nedávno skrytou a skrývanou historii Austrálie.

V závěrečné kapitole jsou pak tyto romány navzájem porovnávány s ohledem na témata a motivy, které se v nich opakují a které společně vytvářejí obraz Austrálie jako země, která se snaží vyrovnat se svou koloniální minulostí.

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