Kelly, by Eric Lambert - a troubled man writes about a troubled man [Brian Stevenson]

Brian McDonald's judgment was succinct on the novel, Kelly, by Eric Lambert: 'Not for research.' Published nearly fifty years ago, the work has unarguably been overshadowed by the novels of Peter Carey and Robert Drewe, but it is a powerful enough work on its own, and an entertaining read.



There are plenty of historical errors for the purists to stress over, but the work does not purport to be anything but a novel so Lambert does not have a case to answer. It matters little that Stringybark Creek is fought on 3 July, Ned rescues a grown man and not a boy from drowning, there seems to be a long period of time between the death of Aaron Sherritt and Glenrowan, and that Helen [sic] Jones, daughter of Anne Jones, dies in the siege. The gathering of traps, including Fitzpatrick, from Kelly's past to confront him at Glenrowan, is an effective touch, and it is to Fitzpatrick that the final insult, kicking the captured Kelly when he is down, is left. Fitzpatrick is described as 'merely unlovely' and, we are told, watching him was 'like seeing a skin lifted to reveal malignancy.'



The use made of some of the real characters in the drama is intriguing. Curnow is not the quiet and outwardly compliant schoolteacher, but an argumentative man who is caught trying to sneak away from the siege, but despite a blow on the head from Steve, tries and succeeds the second time. In a bizarre touch, his son has died in a train accident. Mary Miller, who as far as we know did not have a large part in the real life drama, is Ned's lover, friend and confidant. Squatter Angus McBean, who in real life was relieved of his watch by Harry Power, is a diarist and tells of nocturnal visits from the fugitive Kelly, where among other things, Kelly astonishes him with his take on the role of the Upper House or Legislative Council in the colonial Parliament: 'your [Legislative] council is Queen Victoria's cork.' Surprisingly, the fictionalised Ned informs McBean that he is 'quite a good speller' !



The Gang and their associates pretty well conform to their stereotypes. Dan is the kid brother. Joe is a sensitive soul, bursting into tears for the sake of the women and children when the inn is besieged, and reminding Ned after one of his (Ned's) tirades, 'in a voice as soft as a girl's' that he is not Jesus Christ. Aaron is as oily as ever, happy to take trap money but wincing from a feeling of self-disgust after shaking Nicolson's hand. Steve's characterisation is surprisingly well delineated. At one stage he accuses Ned of seeing him as 'the iffy one', the one that Ned does not quite trust. Ned answers, diplomatically, that he never knows what Steve is going to do next. When Steve accuses Ned of being obsessed with his mother, Ned decks him and then apologises. He denies, to a young chambermaid, ever firing a shot at Stringybark Creek.



But towering over them all, of course, is the tortured Kelly, the 'half wild ass of a man', to borrow Manning Clark's phrase. Kelly's face is 'set in time, never to grow any older.' Teri Merlyn, in her doctoral thesis on Eric Lambert, sees the novel as 'a sympathetic but acute observation of his decline into monomania and madness through isolation and a burning resentment against a regime he knows will never give him and his kind any justice.' In Lambert's novel, she continues, Kelly is an 'explosion of fury' against the historical injustice of English oppression of the Irish.



As for Lambert - he was a troubled and tortured man himself. The author of seventeen novels under his own name as well as novelisations of films was born in England in 1918 but came to Australia with his parents as a toddler. His war service left him in poor health: at one stage he was injured by a grenade, and he claimed to have an ulcer 'the size of a poached egg.' Lambert was talented and idealistic but hypertensive. His state of mind was, in the words of the Australian dictionary of biography 'unpredictable and disputative.' In 1947 the troubled Lambert joined the Communist Party and became mates with the celebrated Communist author, Frank Hardy, who was his best man at his first wedding. Their friendship was, in Teri Merlyn's words in her 1998 article on Lambert in Overland (a journal he helped to found in 1954) 'a tumult of idealistic political high jinks and high drama, fuelled by vast quantities of alcohol and prolific writing.'



In 1956 Lambert went to Hungary as an observer and broke with the Communists in the wake of their excesses after the Russian invasion of that nation. He wrote articles for the right wing press attacking Communism, and his friend Hardy saw him as a traitor to the cause, telling Lambert in an open letter 'you have more ex-mates than any other Australian.' Eric Lambert died of acute hypertensive heart failure in 1966. He was only 48.