Cirrus@Austlit

'Peter Carey said he was inspired to write his novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by an exhibition of Kelly paintings in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art byt the famous Australian modernist Sidney Nolan. Nolan (1912-83) was one of the first Australian painters to achieve international recognition. Thus the story of the bushranger Ned Kelly, which had provoked an upsurge of anti-British national feeling in the nineteenth century, became the means of achieving international acclaim by Nolan in the mid-twentieth century and was used again for an international success by a New York-based, acclaimed (Booker Prize 2001) Australian writer at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This continuity of interest and its widening reception is remarkable not just as individual success story but as an instance of visual globalization or migrating images. Carey, I will argue, developed certain visual strategies in his fictional narrative inspired by Nolan's series which allowed him to make the Australian imaginary connected with Kelly available to a larger international audience.' (p 179)