“I would have scattered their blood and brains like rain,” he writes, of the police on his tail. One document that did survive was the so-called Jerilderie letter of 1879, in which Kelly’s voice jumps off the page, a mixture of dialect, scrambled syntax and moments of lyricism. The only written records came from the courts and the police, and of course later newspaper reports of those wonderful robberies.” “These were poor people so there were no diaries or private libraries. “It’s this huge story that was incredibly underimagined, it seemed to me,” says Carey of his initial motivation for telling Kelly’s tale. The best-known among them is True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey’s reinvention of the Ned Kelly story, which earned him his second Booker Prize in 2001 (the first was for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988) and has finally been given the film adaptation it deserves. The same is true of his fiction which, over the course of 14 novels, has probed questions of the Australian identity, and the complex, often cruel, history that formed it. Perhaps it is this energy that makes him seem much younger than his 76 years.Ĭarey left New South Wales for New York in 1990, but he still feels – and sounds – resolutely Australian. After ushering me in, Carey folds his tall frame into an office chair that swivels and rocks, accommodating his restlessness. The walls are lined with bookshelves and on the desk a laptop is raised on a stand, braced to receive its punishment from the notoriously hard-typing novelist who burns through at least one keyboard a year. In the streets of Manhattan, the morning crowds are being drenched by a freezing rain sweeping off the Hudson river, but six storeys up, Peter Carey’s home office feels like a sanctuary.

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