The Jerilderie Letter Read Free Page A

afternoon, prepared to leave, Living took the opportunity to escape. According to the interviews given the next day, he rode a fast horse to Deniliquin, taking back-routes and shortcuts, and arrived eight hours later, near midnight. Tarleton left an hour later, having first made sure that a warning was sent to the bank’s other branch in the nearby town of Urana. He took the more conventional route and rode all night, arriving in Deniliquin at 5.45 a.m., just in time to catch the train to Melbourne. After reporting to their superiors, the two bone-weary men narrated the story to a room full of journalists. The Herald ran a special 9 p.m. edition and, as rains bringing an end to the heatwave began to fall, a stunned public received news of the gang’s exploits.
    Contrary to his promise, Living did not haveNed’s letter published in Melbourne. Instead, he gave it to the police, who made a copy. This police copy disappeared from view until 1930, when it was published by the Melbourne Herald . It remained our only available version until December 2000, when the original document was donated anonymously to the State Library of Victoria, where it can now be viewed.

    The Jerilderie Letter gives the impression of a man ready to explode; indeed, it gives us a peculiar insight into the process of that explosion. The episodes and incidents that Kelly recounts are the same as those in the Cameron Letter, the same as in every lecture he ever gave. But now we have a very clear picture of the ferocity and anger that have been mounting in the past ten months of outlawry, in the constant feuding with locals and the police that had for years preceded Fitzpatrick’s disastrous visit. This builds, and builds, until bythe closing passages the letter has become a lethal thing. It shoots to kill. It occupies an imagined universe where there will be no hostages exchanged, and no survivors.
    Even now it’s hard to defy the voice. With this letter Kelly inserts himself into history, on his own terms, with his own voice. Even now, more than 120 years after the fact, that voice remains unassimilable. The document makes palpable the experience of being held prisoner overnight, being kept awake by Kelly, and being told, repeatedly, that he had done all the shooting at Stringybark Creek, that the shooting was not murder but self-defence, that Fitzpatrick was the cause of all this. We hear the living speaker in a way that no other document in our history achieves, with its own strange slang, venomous threats, frequently contradictory statements and skewed sense of history. The logic is associational rather than linear, the style both flamboyant and rough. Kelly talks as though his listeners already know all thedetails, but have failed to understand them.
    The Jerilderie Letter not only prefigures the ambition of modernist literature to make the written and spoken words indivisible, as exemplified in James Joyce’s Ulysses , but also harks back to the warrior’s fiery polemic of Homer’s Iliad , highly personal, dramatic, oratorical, and charged with competitive hostility. This is the reverberative document which inspired novelist Peter Carey’s highly praised reinvention of the Kelly tale, True History of the Kelly Gang .
    If Kelly had found Gill on that fateful Monday in Jerilderie and his letter had been published, what would its readers have made of it? It’s difficult to imagine that it would have been welcomed by the majority of selectors in north-eastern Victoria. Many had already been victims of the ‘wholesale and retail horse and cattle dealing’ carried out by the Greta mob, and would have examined the niceties of Kelly’s justifications with a jaundiced eye.
    Kelly’s appeal to Ireland’s oppression, his rhetoric of rebellion, would also have brought little sympathy. Many of the farmers he stole from, not to mention the policemen he killed at Stringybark Creek, were Irish. Apart from the shanty culture that thrived along the