Gaile’s Carey gives us a non-traditional view of Australian history: one that incorporates its criminal origins and its brutalising of the Aborigines as against the traditional version, like that of former Prime Minister John Howard’s, which Anthony Mason summarised as emphasising ‘the successful European settlement, the Anglo-Saxon legacy, the monarchy, and the sense of national unity and pride in our achievements’. Gaile’s view is that Carey believes ‘the English are as big a pest as the rabbit’. Americans come off no better. Depicted as Voorstanders in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), they treat their friends as badly as they do their enemies.

Gaile divides his study into four parts. One: Carey and postmodernist theory. Two: Mythistory: ‘a recalibration of ... categories such as true and false, right and wrong, fact and fiction.’ Three: ‘Carey’s depiction of ... issues in Australian history.’ Four: Carey’s rewriting ‘of the subject of his biography, Australian national identity.’

I have said nearly enough about postmodernist theory, but will also mention that Gaile returns to it again in his postscript, where he mentions that ‘the battles of post-structuralism have long been fought and the question of the truth-telling capacities of language has been answered finally, and in the negative ...’ That presents a problem for some of the magnificent things that Carey has written and some of the excellent insights into his work that Gaile presents in his book. For instance, Gaile’s Carey sees Australia as lacking a substantial culture because it lacks those ‘songs, stories, myths, memories that give meaning to the present’. His fictional and non-fictional writing provide what is missing:

The stories Carey tells no doubt enrich the Australian tradition. A church drifting up the Bellinger River, members of the Kelly Gang riding across the colonial paddocks in women’s clothes, a 139-year-old illywhacking narrator who spins yarn after yarn, Ern Malley eventually coming to life at the age of twenty-four, Harry Joy’s three deaths, the archetypal convict wrenching himself free from Dickens’ grasp and installing himself as founding father of many members of the Australian race – these all constitute narrative ingredients that have the potential of becoming part of the national heritage, of being referred to and indulged in when cultural nourishment is needed.

To show us how these elements of myth come to stand in Carey’s fiction, Gaile discusses such undeniably historical facts of Australian history as the doctrine of terra nullius (that is, the land belongs to no one), which allows for its settlement by deadly appropriation from the Aborigines, who absolutely owned it when the British arrived. Settlement gives rise to the transportation of convicts, who often stay in Australia when their sentences end. Terra nullius also inspires exploration of the interior with Ludwig Leichhardt (1813–48), who also inspired Patrick White’s Voss, serving as historical model. In this world of settlement and exploration, the role of women – those ‘intruders in the bush’ – is seen as decidedly secondary to that of men, though they were often intellectually and emotionally superior to them.

These historical events lead to some of Gaile’s tellingly convincing comments on Carey’s novels. 30 Days in Sydney (2001) makes a mockery of terra nullius: ‘Bennelong Point, the site of the Sydney Opera House today ... in 1788 was covered with “great piles of shells abandoned after meals, and these middens were twelve metres high on that side, evidence of ancient occupation”.’ Oscar and Lucinda (1988) gives us not only the falsified journals of the ersatz, and eventually split-brained, explorer Jeffris, but also Oscar the gambler’s attempt to transport a glass church into the blazingly hot outback: no bet on spreading the Gospel could have been more mistakenly made. Thus the absurdity of bringing British ideas and ideals to the land of Aboriginal Dreaming. Jack Maggs (1997), as Carey’s version of Dickens’s Abel Magwitch, is an ‘attack on one of the Empire’s central institutions: namely that of English literature’. Maggs’s life ‘is a tragedy inflicted on him by his cruel Mother Britain, as personified in the character of Ma Britten’. True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) presents Australia’s most famous criminal hero: Kelly ‘becomes a figure of national import, pompously apostrophized by his gang members as the “greatest adjectival man alive”, a born leader who should really “be the ruler of the colony”’. And female characters such as Lucinda, who has Oscar’s church built in the manner of the Crystal Palace, get things done. Ellen Kelly ‘replaces her ineffective husband’, and her ‘skills as an improviser lead her family through the poverty and squalor of life in a place where “nothing flourished ... but misery”’. Leah Goldstein ‘has a natural affinity with the Australian outback’ and is ‘Carey’s female version of Crocodile Dundee’. And not every woman needs a husband and children, as Phoebe Badgery proves in Illywhacker (1985) when she prefers her aeroplane to them and flies away. In Carey’s world a real Waltzing Matilda is a man’s swag, but a real Matilda is a woman who carries her own weight.

Although I have trouble with Gaile’s theorising (perhaps the effect of the book’s academic origins), which makes Rewriting History considerably longer and more awkward than it needs to be, I do like many of the points that he makes and the insights he evokes in analysing Carey’s novels. No one who, having read Rewriting History, rereads one of Carey’s novels will find it the same book. That is, in itself, no small achievement.