Briefly tell us about your book
Outlaw Girls is the story of Ned Kelly’s teenage sister, Kate whose amazing horse riding skills helped Ned and the gang stay alive in the bush for two years, because she delivered supplies and kept the police on their toes, running them this way and that. Kate slips through time and meets a girl called Ruby who is also an amazing rider, and is staying at her uncle’s place on the other side of the Warby Ranges. Ruby gets dragged into Kate’s complicated life, right up to the siege at Glenrowan. The book is aimed at readers aged 10-14 years.
What inspired the idea behind this book?
We’d already published another historical time slip about Australia’s first ever Olympic gold-medallist Fanny Durack, and we wanted to write another book together about an Australian girl who should be more famous than she is. We settled on Kate Kelly because we felt she was often overlooked in the Ned narrative and her perspective would be a fresh look at a very famous story.
What were your favourite books as a child?
We both loved time slip stories when we were kids. Emily’s favourite was Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer which is the story of Charlotte who starts out in the 1960s at boarding school and is transported via a bed to 1918 the end of the First World War, where she is mistaken for a girl called Clare. And Nova loved Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park which is fantastic time slip book, and also the horse novels, in The Silver Brumby series by Australian author, Elyne Mitchell.
Can you tell us a bit about your writing process?
We begin by researching the real person who will eventually become one of the two protagonists, which means reading newspapers from the time, books about them, and visiting the places they lived. Then we plot the story, and because it is alternating points-of-view, this can take some time, because we need to work out the individual character arcs and the combined one. Then we write a character each, and basically send the chapters back and forth like a series of letters, where we give feedback and edit each other as we go.
How did you go about developing your characters?
Kate Kelly is a real person, but we didn’t really know what her character was like, so we had to do a huge amount of research and then fill in the gaps with our imaginations. We had to imagine what it would be like to be the middle child in a large working class poor family who had been in trouble a lot with the police, and then invent the weighing up of Kate’s responsibilities to her family and her personal ambitions for her own life. We knew we wanted the contemporary character to live in a large regional town like Shepparton because we haven’t seen that heavily represented in Australian literature. We also wanted the girls to be in close physical proximity so they could time slip to each other’s lands. We didn’t want Ruby to be a perfectly behaved teenager, we wanted her to be pushing boundaries and often in trouble, and through the friendship with Kate, discover what she wanted in life.
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