ABOUT
THE BOOK

Ned Kelly, Australia’s most potent legend, tells his own story of the very human man behind the mask. A young boy raised in the grinding poverty of colonial Victoria grows into a young man defying the wealth and power of those who would destroy him. He speaks to us not as a mythic hero but as a devoted son, a concerned father and a loyal friend. Written in the idiom of Kelly’s famous Jerilderie letter, it is both a lament and tribute, a boy’s defence of his mother and a father’s confiding letter to a daughter he will never meet.