True History Of The Kelly Gang Quotes

Getting The Kelly Gang Quotes Right Without Driving Yourself Crazy

I spent a couple of evenings last month tracking down accurate quotes from Peter Carey's novel for a university paper. What I found was that most sites get them wrong — either paraphrasing, mixing up editions, or inventing lines entirely. The version you're looking at matters a lot, especially since the book goes through different printings and some quotes circulate with minor wording changes that shift the meaning. Start with the text itself. The 2001 Picador paperback edition (ISBN 978-0330375411) is the most commonly cited one. If you're pulling quotes for anything academic, I'd recommend getting the ebook through a legitimate retailer or your library rather than downloading PDFs from random sites. Those often have OCR errors that turn things like "squatter" into "squatterr" or drop entire paragraphs. I ran into a specific problem when cross-referencing a quote about the Skillion gun debate. One site had it as "It was a skillion gun, sir" while another had "It was a skillion gun." The difference is nothing huge but in a close reading it matters. I ended up pulling up the actual page in my copy — page 72 in the Picador edition — and confirmed the longer version was correct. The workaround was simple: I kept a spreadsheet with page numbers, chapter headings, and the exact wording. Took about twenty minutes to set up but saved me from making a fool of myself in the final submission.

The Quotes Themselves

Here are some of the ones people actually quote and misquote most often: "The more you know the more you're not allowed to tell. The less you know the more you can say and do." "I'm just ordinary and I have a right to behave as an ordinary person."

"The only real injustice in Australia is the poor being ruled by the rich." "If I don't stand up for myself, who will?" "I am Ned Kelly. I am the devil they say."

"I'd rather be a devil than a servant to devils." "They say I'm a monster but I never hurt a child or a woman." "The police are the only criminals in this country and they're backed by the government."

"I don't want any money. I want justice." "You can hang me but you'll never hang my spirit." Those last few are the ones that get stripped out of context most often. People like to pin them on Ned Kelly as though he wrote them down as manifestos. He didn't. The whole book is framed as his autobiographical account written before Glenrowan, and Carey himself has said in interviews that he wanted to give Kelly a voice that history denied him. That doesn't mean every line is historically accurate to what a real bushranger would have said — it means it's dramatic interpretation dressed as first-hand testimony.

What Beginners Miss

Two things trip people up regularly. First, the narration is unreliable. Kelly is telling his own story and he has clear motivations to make himself look better than he was. The book knows this — Carey builds in moments where the reader can see the gaps and the exaggerations. Treating every line as historical fact is a mistake. Second, the spelling and dialect choices are deliberate. When Kelly writes "reckon" or "matey" or uses non-standard grammar, it's not an error in the text. Some online quote sites "correct" these to standard English and then people cite the sanitized versions thinking they're reading the original. Another thing nobody mentions: the closing lines of the book are deliberately ambiguous. The final paragraph shifts in a way that makes you question whether the whole account is trustworthy or whether Carey is letting Kelly have the last word on his own terms. It's a narrative trick that rewards careful reading but gets missed entirely if you're just hunting for quotable material.

When This Approach Falls Apart

If you need every single quote verbatim with absolute precision — say for a literary dissertation with full citation requirements — the free resources online aren't enough. You need the physical book or an approved academic edition. Even then, different editions have different pagination so your footnote numbers will vary. There's also the question of whether to cite the 2000 first edition or later revisions. Carey made some small cuts between editions and while most of the famous quotes survived intact, a few passages around the Jerilderie letter section were trimmed in later printings. For casual use — a blog post, a study guide, general reference — the paperback edition and the quotes above will serve you fine. Just double-check page numbers if you're citing them. I learned that the hard way.