It was some 38 years later that he tried to capture that uniquely Irish-Australian Kelly voice. I know it’s not Joyce, but it does suggest even to a 19-year-old the possibility of creating a poetic voice that grows out of Australian soil, that is true to its place and hasn’t existed before.” In an interview in the Paris Review, he said, he was 19, “just discovering literature”, when he first imagined a book about Ned Kelly: “I was reading Joyce, and at the same time I read the Jerilderie Letter, a letter written by Ned Kelly in a town where he was robbing a bank. The odds are stacked up so highly against everyone your heart gets broken on every page.Ĭarey’s Kelly had been brewing a long time.

The language is tough, the people are tough, the relationships are even tougher, as is the land and the life. And that, I understand now, is why it took me so long to read it. Where Drewe was tender, Carey is hard-eyed. Carey was right Drewe did change the way we saw Ned Kelly.Īnd then came Carey’s take on Kelly, which changed it all over again. The outlaw Ned called “our sunshine” by his father. It’s been more than two decades since I read Drewe’s novel, but when I think of it now it still evokes a deep and touching sweetness. Prophetically the blurb on Drewe’s front cover is from Carey who says Our Sunshine will “forever change the way we see Ned Kelly”. Then there was Robert Drewe’s extraordinary novel about Kelly, Our Sunshine, its title taken form the term of endearment Ned’s father used for his son, published nine years before True History. Peter Carey in London after winning the Booker prize in 2001. The figure of Kelly often precariously mounted on a galloping horse, depicted almost naively with an oblong black helmet with slits for his eyes and a gun in arm, seemed wild, larrikin and irreverent – aptly Australian. I loved painter Sidney Nolan’s Kelly series. Yet there had been plenty pointing me to Kelly.

It was Carey’s second time on the Booker’s winning podium (firstly for Oscar and Lucinda), only the second person (after JM Coetzee) to win the prestigious award twice.įor some reason, despite the accolades and my appreciation of Carey’s work, it wasn’t until I was living in New York that I cracked the spine of this much lauded story of Australia’s favourite outlaw, Ned Kelly. True History of the Kelly Gang was awarded the 2001 Booker prize. Carey stayed for 26 years with the small press who’d got him going, even though he’d no doubt been wined and dined since his early success by suitors from every major publishing house bearing briefcases of cash. True History of the Kelly Gang was published in 2000 by the University of Queensland Press, which had published each of Carey’s previous books since his first in 1974.

The true history of the kelly gang book