"I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

"God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we poor Irish suffered in the present age […]

"Your grandfather were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen's Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun." (Parcel 1)

This is the beginning of Peter Carey's novel about Ned Kelly, the Irish-Australian bushranger.

So Ned Kelly was this actual outlaw who lived in Australia in the 19th century and gave the British colonial authorities a really hard time. He's kind of a Robin Hood figure, really. The novel tells his story, through his voice. Ned Kelly was not an establishment guy. He did not like the British establishment, and his English is not establishment English.

We get a sense of Ned's rebelliousness through his language. Ned didn't exactly have the best education, so his written English is different, it challenges "standard" English. No punctuation? No problem. Grammatical mistakes? So what.

The fact of the matter is, Ned tells the story in his language, which is not establishment English. Ned's voice challenges the monopoly on language that the colonizer has. This is a way of communicating with the colonizer in a way that the colonizer can understand—while still maintaining your own identity.

It's also interesting to see colonization happening a little closer to home here. Ireland is a European country right next to England, but it was colonized by the English as early as the 16th century. Many Irish people, like Ned Kelly's forebears, were exiled to Australia during the colonization of that continent, which makes the perspective of a dude like Ned Kelly complex in a unique way.