By Brad Quinn

Revisionist histories often show that our heroes have feet of clay. Quite the opposite is true for Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. During his short life, Kelly was branded as a horse thief and accused of murder. But that was just the official line. To many Australians, then and now, Kelly was and is a national hero.

In his latest novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey has re-created Kelly's life from his teen-age apprenticeship with a highwayman to his famous iron-clad gun battle with police. Structured as a series of letters by Kelly, the novel reveals a man forced outside the law to protect his family and preserve his own life and dignity. For an Austra-lian like Carey, writing a novel about Kelly was an opportunity to tell his country's great story.

"What a strange people we are that this particular story is our big story," muses Carey from Detroit, during a stop on his current book tour. "It isn't like (Amer-ica's) Jesse James, who is important enough, but Kelly is right at the very top of the (Austra-lian) pantheon. We don't have George Washing-ton or Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson, so Ned Kelly is the guy."

Carey was inspired to write the Kelly story after explaining the outlaw's history to friends at an art exhibit by Australian artist Sidney Nolan. "I brought friends up to look at Nolan's paintings lots of times, proud little booster that I am," says Carey. "It made me see how wonderful the story was. But it made me also see how much we Aussies hadn't thought about. There's been some interesting things done in literature about it, but nothing that's really tried to imagine the whole story."

From the beginning when Carey imagined writing the story, he planned to write it from Kelly's perspective. Misunderstood and hunted by the law, Kelly had hoped to publish a letter explaining his side of the story. This document, known as the Jerilderie letter has survived, and it is from this letter, in part, that Carey created the voice of Ned Kelly.

"It's this great, wonderful rush of prose," says Carey of the Jerilderie letter, "a great river of words with not a lot of commas and a lot of full stops, often very angry, occasionally threatening, but basically informed by this sort of notion that if you could just tell the truth, if you could just tell what had happened to you, then some sort of justice might be done."

In writing True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey relied heavily on historical fact, but in some instances, the author allowed himself some liberties with the story, such as giving Kelly a wife who bears his child. The addition of these characters was essential to the novel, Carey says. If Kelly were to write his story in letter form, there would have to be someone for him to write it to. Carey solved this problem with the invention of an unborn daughter.

"The thought of a child seemed very powerful to me, because he's writing towards a better future," Carey says, "and I like that. And the other thing, he was a young guy, so I had to think about his sex life, given the fact that most young men are walking around with an erection from the day they turn 12. On the other hand, I did think he was shy. It's an interesting thing, really, that someone who was such a powerful and charismatic figure, who women certainly did find charming and decent and spoke well of ... there's nothing recorded about any sort of love life at all."

In many respects True History of the Kelly Gang is like an American Western, with its unforgiving landscape and harsh rustic living. If not for the odd kangaroo or wombat popping up every now and then, this tale could take place in Oklahoma. But the story is ultimately uniquely Australian: Kelly embodies his country's pride and its sometimes painfully humble origins.

"The reason that Ned Kelly is the story that he is (in Australia), is because we love him," says Carey. "There's this whole issue about the convict stain and the convict seed. You know Australia starts as a penal colony. And Ned Kelly, the son of a convict, ends up being important to us, because he shows that he's braver, smarter and more decent than any of the people that are trying to oppress him. There's a way in which he is us, and it shows that it doesn't matter how we started, this is a really fine human being and we admire him."

PETER CAREY will sign True History of the Kelly Gang at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

E-mail Brad Quinn

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