Peter Carey · 2000 · overland

Peter Carey's Booker-winning 2000 novel, written as thirteen parcels of unpunctuated paper addressed by Ned Kelly to a daughter he never meets. The facts are the ones on the record - Stringybark Creek, the Jerilderie letter, the armour at Glenrowan - but the voice is invented, and it is the voice the book is for.

1. 1
   Beveridge

   Born to Irish convict stock in a hut north of Melbourne, and the story begins with a father who wears a dress and will not say why - the shame at the root of everything the son does afterwards.

2. 2
   Avenel

   The family moves north and the boy pulls another child out of Hughes Creek and is given a green sash for it - which he is still wearing, under the armour, when they take him at Glenrowan.

3. 3
   Stringybark Creek

   Four police camp in the Wombat Ranges to hunt the Kellys and three of them are shot dead - the point past which there is no arrangement to be made, and the colony declares them outlaws who may be killed by anyone.

4. 4
   Jerilderie

   They ride into New South Wales, lock the police in their own cells, rob the bank and try to have a fifty-six-page letter printed - and the printer is not there, so Ned leaves the pages behind and they survive.

5. 5
   Glenrowan

   They tear up the line to derail a police train, take the whole town hostage in the Ann Jones inn, and put on suits of plough-mould armour - and Ned walks out of the fog at dawn firing, and is shot in the legs.

6. 6
   Melbourne

   Tried by Redmond Barry and hanged at the Old Melbourne Gaol on 11 November 1880, aged twenty-five - and Carey's Ned goes on writing to the child until the paper runs out, which is where the book ends.