![]() ![]() ![]() “I dare not strike him,” Kelly had written about Constable Hall, “or my sureties would loose the bond money I used to trip him and let him take a mouth full of dust now and again as he was as helpless as a big guano after leaving a dead bullock or a horse. I had written one unpublished story but was not shy to think that I might write a novel that would transform everyone’s idea of that bearded Australian bushranger. I was still drunk on Joyce, and mad with ignorant ambition. Why had no one told me about this? Had no one else seen what I saw, that the famous bushranger was an avant-garde artist with hardly a comma to his name? ![]() “In or about the spring of 1870 the ground was very soft a hawker named Mr Gould got his wagon bogged between Greta and my mother’s house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it would bog a duck in places.” ![]() I hope you see what I saw: Ned Kelly is on fire. Now I obsessed about Nolan, followed my nose from his paintings to the letter Kelly had written in 1879 before he robbed the bank in Jerilderie, southern New South Wales. I had been reading William Faulkner and Flann O’Brien. ![]()
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