Mollies Down Under: Cross-Dressing and Australian Masculinity in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang

It has become almost ubiquitous now to consider that nationalism is gendered and sexualized, especially in contexts where anticolonial nation building is so intimately tied to the legitimizing of newly independent nation-states. George L. Mosse pointed out in his 1985 work Nationalism and Sexuality the many interconnections between modern European nationalism and sexual respectability as well as the development of "manliness" as a constitutive component of the bourgeois morality that underpinned Western nationalisms.¹ M. Jacqui Alexander confirms that an imperative of heterosexual masculinity also holds true for decolonizing nations to the extent that their gender norms have been shaped by European imperialism.² Elleke Boehmer further argues that "gender forms the formative dimension for the construction of nationhood."³ The links between nationalist and gendered discourses range from the role of women as both biological producers and symbolic icons of ethnic groupings and nations to the "deep, horizontal comradeship" or "fraternity," even homosocial structure of male bonding, constitutive of national identity.⁴

It is within this critical context that celebrated expatriate Australian writer Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang, published in 2000, marks an important challenge to the heteromasculinity of Australian settler nationalism through its disruption of the gendered symbolism of one of Australia's most iconic historical figures, bushranger Ned Kelly.⁵ Ned Kelly is important to popular Australian nationalism because of the values his legend embodies-antiauthoritarianism, loyalty to family and "mates," and a fighting spirit-and because his career and death immediately preceded a critical moment in Australian nationalism in the 1880s and 1890s. Carey challenges the masculine symbolism of the Kelly gang through his invention of the Sons of Sieve, a secret society of Irish origin in which the men, including members of the Kelly gang and Ned Kelly's own father, ritually wear women's dresses and blacken their faces during demonstrations against police or governmental authority. While some critics have dismissed the sexual subtexts of the cross-dressing in Carey's novel by linking it to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish agrarian protest ritual, the Irish connection in fact strengthens the sexually disruptive force of the Kelly gang's cross-dressing, for Carey's novel unburies a host of cultural anxieties about gender and sexuality that circulate around the historical record of Ned Kelly himself and around the nationalist functions he iconically performs.

This article explores several of the functions of the Sons of Sieve in the novel and argues that the cross-dressing plays a central role in the novel's reimagining of gendered Australian identities and mythologies. The discussion has two parts: the first explores the social functions of cross-dressing in Irish agrarian protest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and demonstrates the multiple parallels between that context and the milieu of Ned Kelly. This investigation is not to capitulate to Carey's critics' suggestions that the Irish story is the real story of the Sons of Sieve but rather has several related purposes: to enrich the understanding of the historical origins of the fictionalized Sons of Sieve; to weigh the imaginative possibilities offered by Carey's text for reenvisioning the Irish roots of Australia's early settlers and convicts and through their connection with Irish protest to reimagine the function of communal identity in Australia; and to explore the myriad connections between gender, communal identity, and antiauthoritarian resistance that the Irish example can offer to an understanding of Australian national identity in Kelly's era and in the present. The second part of the article addresses the cultural anxieties around the sexuality of the Kelly gang and demonstrates how Carey in True History of the Kelly Gang uses the Sons of Sieve to trouble the prevailing versions of Australian national identity and history. The contextual meanings of cross-dressing as a gendered activity cannot simply be transferred from eighteenth-century Ireland to nineteenth- or twentieth-century Australia, and I do not attempt to do so. Rather, I hope to show that ritual cross-dressing can demonstrate the complex ways that...