Our Sunshine

by Robert Drewe

Our Sunshine is the tale of a man whose story outgrew his life, Robert Drewe's strikingly imaginative recreation of the inner life of Ned Kelly, the National Hero and Devil Incarnate of the Antipodes. Written with brilliant clarity and impressionistic economy, it carries the reader into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation, an entrancing and frightening landscape of murder, sexuality, persecution, robbery, vanity, politics, and corruption.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Australia, Literary Fiction, Historical, School, True Crime

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Robert Drewe is among Australia’s most loved writers – of novels, memoir and short stories. His iconic Australian books include The Shark Net, The Bodysurfers and Our Sunshine. He is also editor of Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories annual series. Recently, he has revisited the short story himself, with a masterful new collection, The Rip. Jo Case spoke to him for Readings about storytelling.

Reviews

[Big Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is one thing that is certain about Our Sunshine, it's that the prose is superb. Robert Drewe has created a poetry here; be it in the monologue and thoughts of Ned Kelly or in the short sections removed from his view. I know a fair bit about the life and times of Ned Kelly, and Drewe deals with the legend and how it connects to the man behind the (iron) mask.
There are moments here where it actually surpasses Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winner True History of the Kelly Gang (one of my favourite books), but when viewed holistically, Our Sunshine is by far the inferior.
Drewe's strongest character is (of course) Ned) with his deputy Joe Byrne ranking second. Joe Byrne is not the ill-tempered, opium smoking intellectual of Carey - in some ways he is closer to the soft-spoken, legend-making, hard-drinking "flash writer" of real life. Aaron Sherritt, the Kelly Gang's traitor would rank number three in this list.
Unfortunately Dan Kelly and Steve Hart (the Gang's fourth member) do not rise as particularly memorable characters, unlike Carey's telling. Other than some anti-Orangemen sentiment, Hart's character does not stick in my memory (a pity - he was a bit of a character in real life, but seems to get the short end of the stick in fiction). Dan is barely more present - however, there is one line from one of the shortest but most memorable sections I have not forgotten about him:
"Dan stayed on his horse. He didn't trust Aaron even then."
The build-up to the Massacre at Stringybark Creek is done perfectly (surpassing Carey), and the incident itself is told very well. However, Carey chooses to characterise Ned as a man discovering the horror of having taken human life for the first time. while Drewe concentrates on the outlaw he is becoming. In his recollection, he insists that only he and Joe Byrne killed the policemen (mostly supported by historical fact: Kelly killed two; the second shooter is unknown). They are both interesting accounts and I take no favourites here.
The weakest point of the novel is a rather far-fetched romance between Kelly and a landowner's wife (Mrs C). It feels untrue, out-of-place, and only has significance in the plot as an alibi (which Ned does not use, for obvious reasons) for his location during the Fitzpatrick incident, and to explain where he got his horse from. Kelly's romance and marriage in TTHOTKG comes off as far more plausible and realistic.
The oddest point of the novel is the presence of a circus-zoo at Glenrowan.
As a Kelly buff, I find it a pleasure when Drewe takes the small true moments of history and incorporates them into the novel.
Thomas Curnow is a practically absent character in the novel, which is ironic and works well.
Interestingly, Kelly's final personal stand at Glenrowan is downplayed and severely cut down from fact here, in an (intentionally) jumbled hallucinatory sequence that despite its fine prose, ultimately does not do justice to the man and myth of Edward Kelly. Peter Carey's economic telling - part eyewitness manuscript, part forged-document account - at the beginning and end of his own True History of the Kelly Gang recreates this scene in far superior fashion, and reintroduced the lesser known but true quote:
"I am the b----y Monitor, my boys".
However, the downfall of the Gang is conveyed well, with the deaths of Dan, Joe and Steve conveyed as accurately as possible (though Dan and Steve presumably died of asphyxiation from the smoke, though suicide is another possibility).
I've always wondered, Why do most of the Kelly novels portray his relationship with his stepfather George King as hostile? According to history, they seemed to get on well enough. However, I liked the way the relationship between Ned and his real father, Red Kelly, is done.
Our Sunshine is a minor Australian classic, but a classic all the same. It was the first of the revisionary/visionary novels on Ned Kelly, and it should not be forgotten.

[Glen O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

The original title of this book is "Our Sunshine." Changing it to "Ned Kelly" is an unfortunate marketing device to tie in with the film that was based on the novel.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. An interesting, vividly and concisely written, character based short novel mostly told from the perspective of Australian bush ranger, bank robber, convicted police murderer, Ned Kelly. He lived from 1854 to 1880 and is known for wearing a suit of bulletproof armour during his final shootout with the police.

This book provides good descriptions of the time, the place, the people and the development of Ned Kelly’s character.

This book was first published in 1981 and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone who knows the Ned Kelly story back to front, this was an entirely fresh approach to me.
I was astonished to find myself completely riveted and mesmerised as I listened to this short audiobook in one sitting. The time raced by.
I always enjoy Michael Veitch's narration but he was no longer himself, he completely channelled Ned Kelly with a slightly Australianised Irish accent.
It seemed exactly as I would have expected Ned Kelly to sound.
Highly recommended. Just over 4 hours extremely well spent.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From IMDb:An innocent man becomes one of the most wanted criminals the world has ever known.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: The original smart-ass
Ned Kelly, in the book (I haven't seen the movie with Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom) comes across as the lovable smart-ass, but with a sharp edge. In a first-person inner monologue, Drewe tells the story of Australia's most famous outlaw elliptically and sometimes cryptically. Perhaps it is Australia's history as a nation of outlaws that made him so revered and sheltered like no other outlaw save perhaps Robin Hood and Jesse James.

Drewe's Kelly is a spirited rogue, with a sense of history and showmanship, and the true actor's pure egotism that sees and acts only his own interest. He also has an honorable side, in protecting and fighting for the poor like Robin Hood, and a humorous side, making jokes and posturing for history in his pronouncements for the paper and his willingness to tweak the preening and expose the incompetent among the police authorized to kill him and his "gang" on sight.

But he also had a dark side. There are hints of an incestuous sexual desire for his mother, perhaps expressed in taking older women as his sexual partners. There is a cruel streak that wants to hurt those who hurt him, in even the smallest ways, and his return is more than like for like. In the end, his heroics become humorless histrionics; friends and supporters die defending him and his egoistic approach to life.

In the end, he ended up at the end of a hanging rope, in the Old Melbourne jail here in the city where I am working on a customer project for my company. In just a few days in Melbourne, I have walked past landmarks named in Ned Kelly, and felt a bit of the free spirited approach to life that Ned Kelly represented. In the end, it is hard to hold him responsible or even dislike him too much, because he represents a common longing for freedom of action and readiness to accept consequences we all wish we had the audacity to act upon. If Ned Kelly wasn't real, we would have to invent him to make us wholly human, and perhaps we have.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must have planed for all of ten or fifteen minutes this cool and magic day of to-and-fro. Paying me attention. The air was all enclosed and warm around the two of us. Sweet wood smell. In my daze he called me Sunshine.

You know that lump you get in your throat when you're about to cry? Pretty much had that reading this entire thing. Both a humorous and melancholic expression of a young man's life, told through poetry-like prose. It barely even matters that the young man is in fact Ned Kelly but I think that context does sadden me a lot more :( Both intuitive and reflective, at times speculative, the portrait of this young man and his friends, often peculiar and jumbled...but very moving. Can't really explain much else, it felt like I was reading something that could have happened only recently. I think I knew from the title alone how I was going to feel about this one. Beautiful stuff.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw and emotional, and I actually learned a lot about the Ned Kelly story by reading this.

[caity ☾ · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m not particularly fond of the abrasive ‘grit, dirt, dust’ variety of Australian literature and I really hate the ‘larrikin’ archetype.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before there was “True History of the Kelly Gang” there was “ Our Sunshine”.

I loved it.

[Lyndsay-ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a weird book. I found it hard to follow what was happening, and it seemed to bounce around a lot at the begining. Was a fairly quick read. Somewhat held my attention but I was trying to figure out what was happening more than extreme interest. Was slighty disappointing because of this.

[Daniel Headifen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some parts that really grabbed my attention. Read the last parts of the siege while listening to Pearl Jam’s Hard Sun which lent it even more atmosphere.

[Aidan Phelan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There have been a great many attempts to fashion Australia's most renowned outlaw as a literary figure. Most authors opted to stay close to the known story while reshaping it into something more in keeping with the pulp Western novels of the early 20th century. There are obviously some texts that co-opted the idea of Ned Kelly and transplanted him into other settings as well, but none of those ever claimed to be telling the story of Ned Kelly in any meaningful way. What Robert Drewe's 'Our Sunshine' signifies is a shift in the way that fiction authors thought about Ned Kelly. This was one of the first texts that really tried to find a way to dissect who Ned Kelly was and find a truth to him that took him away from being this almost abstract figure in a slotted helmet, and show the human being with organs and emotions behind it all.

One of the strengths of Drewe's book is that he has clearly done research on the history to be able to build his world around. Characters and events are often plucked straight from the pages of history, but transmogrified into this new creature that Drewe has envisioned. Without an understanding of the history it becomes difficult to truly explore this idea of who Ned Kelly was. After all, how can you find the truth when you don't even know the story? For all his deviations and inventions, and there are many, Drewe demonstrates a respect for the history despite his recklessness in his straying away from the facts. Thus the real meat of the text comes from the way that Drewe takes this baseline of history and adds dramatic flourishes to it. It's visceral, it's vulgar and it's full of the blood and bone with which great stories and characters can be fertilised and blossom into something extraordinary. The version of the Kelly story we get may resemble the truth in many respects but it is definitely a wholly new evolution. It's the kind of interpretation that literature lovers will probably get a kick out of but history buffs will be repulsed by. What emerges from the pages of 'Our Sunshine' is a depiction of Ned Kelly's life that is full of raw passion, horror and tragedy but sprinkles in historical facts to remind us that these were real people and events.

The disjointed way in which the narrative unfolds, bouncing around temporally in order to inform us of Ned's past as he waits for his plans to come to fruition at Glenrowan, is touch and go. Sometimes it works and other times it feels half-baked. This may be a turn-off for some readers. No doubt there would have been ways to streamline the narrative, perhaps by clearly delineating chapters where we shift away from the main through line of the outlaws at Glenrowan, but Drewe made the executive decision to give the book an almost dreamlike structure wherein the train of thought is constantly shifting direction without any real notice.
It is all bundled together in a quasi-stream-of-consciousness mode of narration that has this strange, breathless commotion to it. Words roll off each other like gravel in a landslide. This also makes it difficult to follow at times and lends itself more to reading aloud. There will be obvious comparisons made to the later work by Peter Carey, 'True History of the Kelly Gang', which takes a similar approach across the board but is quite different in all respects, and arguably more competent in execution. While Carey's attempt to capture the voice of Ned Kelly was inspired by the Jerilderie letter, Drewe gives Ned a totally unique voice that is unrecognisable as Ned when compared to the historical counterpart through recorded instances of his phraseology and the tone and syntactical features of his use of language. This Ned speaks in a breezy way, as if giving a TED talk rather than in the verbose, bullish way that Ned was known to speak. It's almost anachronistic but not enough to take you out of the text. At times this makes it easy to power through the reading, at other times it can leave you slightly dazed as to what is going on but you just hold on tight and let the text guide you, hoping that it knows what its doing.

It is also worth pointing out that this provided the basis for the 2003 Gregor Jordan film that starred Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom, but if you pick up the book expecting it to be like the movie then you're in for a shock. The sex and violence in the novel are cranked up to ten. They are almost bizarrely specific at times, to the point where you start to wonder whether perhaps the author doth protest too much with some of the details in those intimate moments. In many ways it is a shame that the film did not take the risk of sticking closer to the source novel as a lot of those more extreme moments, especially in the wake of the bushfire sequence, could have made for very powerful cinema in the vein of 'The Proposition'.

'Our Sunshine' is a good read if you like texts that are imaginative, lyrical and illustrative with their language. It is entertaining and easy to get through fairly quickly. If, however, you go into this expecting an accurate depiction of Ned Kelly's life then it is not the book for you. This is a fantasy novel with a Ned Kelly skin. In the end it doesn't quite hit its mark of giving us an answer as to who Ned was and what made him such a powerful figure because it moves too far away from reality to effectively dissect that. It is somewhat of a case of style over substance and it is a pity that it doesn't stick the landing.

[Gracie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel inspired the 2003 film "Ned Kelly"- featuring the wonderful Heath Ledger as the leading man. I rewatched the film recently and didn't know that it was based on a novel. I was excited to find a copy of the novel in our school library.

I really enjoyed this book. The prose is easy to read and is almost lyrical/ dreamlike in the way that Drewe writes. I won't compare it to Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang", because that's one of my all time favs and they are quite different reads. I've long been a fan of Ned Kelly since I did an essay on him back in like Year 9/10 for history.

There is a lot of mysticism about Ned Kelly. But lets just say I'm a fan. And he is part of Australian history & culture. And last time I checked, you can see his armour at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. Highly recommend viewing it, it's pretty amazing to see it in the flesh! And you can even see the green sash Kelly was awarded when he was a kid for saving a young boy who almost drowned. And fun fact - Heath Ledger tried on the original armour when he made the film and it fit him like a glove. That's pretty cool.

[Mariele · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story begins and ends with Ned Kelly’s dramatic showdown with the police. In between, you have all sorts of non-linear flashbacks of his life’s journey that led him to Glenrowan. More Fenian than a 19th century Robin Hood, Ned Kelly has nevertheless become an Australian icon and an essential representative of how Australians would like to be seen.

It’s a slim novel of 200 pages, with so much empty space in between pages that it could probably be broken down to perhaps 150 pages, and can easily be read in one sitting. However, it might require a second reading, as many sentences are not immediately interpretable.

As a re-interpretation of the historical character, the novel is told from a very idiosyncratic 1st person point of view. The quality of the writing is very poetic and often dream-like. Robert Drewe endows Ned Kelly with a compelling voice and an important message that draws you to Ned’s side right away, horse-thief or not.

The narrative structure makes the story very difficult to follow if you are not initiated to the Ned Kelly history, as you are thrown right into its middle, without any story or character expositions. Sometimes the POV even switches haphazardly from first to third person for no apparent reason.
I don’t think I would have understood what’s going on if I had not recently seen the film. Therefore, I cannot recommend it unreservedly.

[Matilda Shones · Rating 3 out of 5]

im going to be honest here, i think this review may just be a vent about my experience studying this in my literature class.
I gennnnuinely dont beleive this story is that insightful. How on earth am i supposed to justify saying that ned wearing the sash under his armour that he made is symbolic of how he was born good, and forced to be bad.
Because it really isnt! Drewe didnt come up with that, it actually happened! And i can guarrantee Kelly wasnt thinking "oh yep let me forge this armour to show them how i was pushed to become the monster i am"

Also, the hypocricy!
I understand Drewe is trying to provide an alternate perspective and to villify the press for assuming the know about Kellys experience, but so is Drewe.
He wasnt there, and im sure has no insight thats unavailiable to the rest of us.
How is he not doing the exact thing he criticises?

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best part is when Drewe writes about the various effects of hangovers via different alcohol, that paragraph always pops into my head when I think about this book. However, its a book based off a movie (or maybe the reverse?) so if you've seen the movie you don't really need to read the book (unless you really liked the movie which I'm guilty of). Overall its a very light read that doesn't really add to anything over than giving you their mindsets throughout the events of Ned Kelly's bandit career.

[Sam Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every Aussie knows the story of the Kelly Gang and this was a unique albeit slightly confusing way of telling it. I don't mind that the story jumps around in bits and pieces, like someone recalling their memories and jumping back and forth in the story as they remember other events that happened. It was the constant jumps between first and third person, sometimes within the same paragraph! that did my head in.

Overall a fascinating fictional retelling of a well known tale from the point of view of the famous outlaw Ned Kelly himself and rather enjoyable.

[Clive Parkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook that I listened to in preparation for some external VCE Literature marking. Really enjoyed it to the point where likely to include in next year’s Lit list- possibly alongside the film as the Adaptation and Transformation Unit. Certainly looking forward to explore more of the different voices, timeframes and poetic descriptive language (at times).

[Kevin]

I loved this book when I read it nearly 30 years ago. I remember it as possessing great prose.
Now that I am reading Peter Carey's "True History of the Kelly Gang" (so boring, how often do the Booker Prize judges have to get it so wrong?) I want to go back to Our Sunshine and read it again.

[Glen Cowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting if you are familiar with the story of Ned Kelly, sectarian relations in early settlement or Australian history. However, if you are not, the text isn’t very accessible. The stop start nature of the book doesn’t help either.

[David Gagen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully written novel. The events leading up to the seige at Glenrowan are described with such beautiful language. Drewe recreates Ned's famous campaign against the police; we get inside the mind of the famous bushranger and his motivations. Add half a star.

[Kim Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

New to me author. Very confusing story line. Narrative was not enjoyable. Very short story. Would not inspire me to watch the film.

[Josiah Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

First half potent, second half lackluster, modernism filtered through degrees of narrative pretense. Cut half the words and you might have a great one.

[b e a c h g o t h · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love all things serial killer so I was surprised I didn’t like this. I yawned almost all the way through it.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's quick to read and quite entertaining. Anyone interested in the Ned Kelly story would enjoy this book...except perhaps those that despise Kelly.

[Sparks Lowry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really beautiful prose, but most importantly, mostly succeeds at giving you an idea of the inner life of the infamous bushranger.

[Dulcie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just brilliant. Gave me the same rush that The Bodysurfers gave me so long ago. Robert Drewe is a genius.

[Cher · Rating 4 out of 5]

About Ned Kelly and the gang fictional but still based on reports the jerilderie letter etc very good retelling of a sad story

[Duncan Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressionistic, idiosyncratic minor classic about the short life of Ned Kelley.