Brenden James Abbott has been all these – and more – depending who is telling the story.

At the peak of his notoriety, the so-called “Postcard Bandit’’ was an anti-hero who captured the public imagination like a modern-day Ned Kelly.

MORE: Brenden Abbott wins parole bid

His exploits as an outlaw inspired books and a movie. But he remains a mystery to all but a small handful of family, supporters and lawyers.

For three decades Abbott has been more myth than man.

Now 53, he is a middle-aged man who believes he has paid his dues to society and wants to live out his life in dull obscurity.

But it is likely to be many years yet before Abbott walks free – if ever.

Interstate police are expected to be waiting when the Queensland Parole Board releases him. He still has 11 and a half years of a jail term left to serve having escaped from a Western Australia jail and could face charges over that breakout and potentially robbery charges in that state and South Australia.

THE third of Brian and Thelma Abbott’s five children, he spent his early years in Broadmeadows – a knockabout suburb of battlers in Melbourne’s north – just a few streets away from Aussie Rules and TV quiz show celebrity Eddie McGuire, two years his junior.

When Abbott was 9, his father sold the family home and took the family on the road in a caravan before walking out two years later, leaving Thelma with Brenden and his younger siblings Glenn and Diane.

His mother formed a new relationship and they moved from town to town, eventually settling in the West Australian mining town of Tom Price, where the 12-year-old’s life took a dramatic turn.

Abbott hit a girl with a bicycle pump during a schoolyard row. He later told Derek Pedley, author of Australian Outlaw: The true Story of Postcard Bandit Brenden Abbott, that it left no lasting injury but he was charged in the children’s court and sent to a Perth boys’ home as a ward of the state.

It was here that Abbott got his first taste of institutionalisation – a state that was to define much of his later life – but the following year he was allowed to return to his family who had moved to Perth to be closer to him.

Leaving school at 15, Abbott was involved in a series of petty crimes and, by his mid-20s, he was part of a burglary gang regularly targeting electrical stores around Perth.

Arrested in a dawn raid, he was taken to the city’s Nollamara police station for questioning. Taking advantage of a young detective’s offer of a cup of tea, Abbott coolly unlocked the back door of the station and took off.

Showing some of the chutzpah that would become his trademark, Abbott later rang the police station where his brother was being held, pretending to be his lawyer, and was put through to him for a chat.

He travelled to the east Coast for several months before deciding to return to the west – with a plan to bankroll the deposit for a business through armed hold-ups.

Abbott pioneered “drop-in’’ bank robberies, where he and accomplices would jump down from the ceiling cavity, wearing balaclavas and armed with guns.

“He was a terrifying figure for bank staff,’’ Pedley says. “There’s no doubt he is a violent criminal. He didn’t ever physically hurt anyone in a bank ... but at the same time he overwhelms them with violent threats.’’

In 1987, Abbott was convicted of a robbery at the Commonwealth Bank in Belmont, Perth, where at least one shot was fired and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

He had other ideas, however. Abbott got a job in the tailor shop at the high-security Fremantle Prison and used it as an opportunity to make uniforms similar to those worn by the guards. He and fellow inmate Aaron Reynolds made it to the roof of the jail and leapt to freedom.

Abbott remained a fugitive for the next five-and-and-half years, criss-crossing the country and committing a string of bank robberies – each more sophisticated than the last – which netted an estimated $6 million, none of which has been recovered.

His reputation as “a pro’’ spread, thanks to his skill in disabling bank alarm systems, creating false IDs and becoming a master of disguise to avoid detection. He even stole a police computer so he could run checks to ensure his vehicle wasn’t being followed.

“He should be more famous for robbing banks than escaping,’’ Pedley says. “It’s a terrible thing to do, but he was very good at it.”

Abbott became the most wanted man in Australia. And his infamy was boosted when a West Australian newspaper ran a story, sourced from police, that Abbott had been sending postcards to detectives from all around the nation while on the run.

The “Postcard Bandit” was born.

But it wasn’t true. What police had was a bundle of photographs – seized from Reynolds when he was arrested – taken of the pair at locations around the country while on the run including one cheekily snapped outside the Dwellingup Police Station in WA.

Police thought it would raise Abbott’s public profile and help lead them to him. It backfired, turning him into some sort of folklore figure thumbing his nose at authority.

But the infamy was also to become a curse for him.

Abbott was recaptured in Queensland in 1995 amid great fanfare and thrown back behind bars, first in the Arthur Gorrie remand facility and then the former Sir David Longland Correctional Centre at Wacol in Brisbane’s west.

Despite tight security and close surveillance, Abbott again embarrassed the authorities in November 1997, when he led a mass breakout by five inmates.

Abbott’s accomplice on the outside was Brendan Berichon, a 19-year-old recently released from the same jail. The escape was organised in phone calls, using women’s names as code for breakout dates. Abbott cut through the bars of his cell with diamond wire smuggled in by a female visitor.

Legend has it he left a piece of paper with a smiley face stuck above his cell bunk.

As the escapees cut their way through the razor wire fences, Berichon unleashed a volley of shots at prison guards in a perimeter patrol vehicle. One later told The Sunday Mail: “It was only luck that stopped us from losing several officers. These people meant business’’.

Later, mistaking a security car for a police vehicle, Abbott got out of the getaway car and fired warning shots from an M14 over it.

With a state election looming, Abbott became the face of a furious law and order battle between the major political parties.

Labor taunted the Coalition government with “Where’s Brenden?’’ bumper stickers, while the government unveiled its “SuperMax Solution’’ for a prison-within-a-prison from which the likes of Abbott would never escape again.

Abbott and Berichon made their way to Melbourne, hiding out for about eight months before the young man shot and wounded two transit police officers. Abbott fled but was eventually arrested at a Darwin laundromat a month later.

He was sentenced to 23 years for the Queensland prison escapes and bank robberies committed in the state.

Peter Beattie’s Labor government had taken power but was just as committed as their predecessors to making Abbott the star inmate of the new SuperMax at Woodford Prison.

He has so far spent 18 years in jail here, about a decade of it in solitary confinement – longer than any other Australian prisoner.

He has been subject to constant surveillance and his movements logged every 15 minutes, his cell searched daily and the bars checked twice a day. He has been moved between cells more than 200 times. When he is among others, nearby inmates are regularly moved to prevent him forming friendships.

Abbott’s lawyer Brendan Nyst, who was just 14 when his client was locked up in Queensland, says there is no doubt he has been treated differently to other prisoners because of the politics surrounding his past.

His father Chris Nyst, who represented Abbott for years, has argued the unprecedented period in solitary took a heavy toll on Abbott’s mental and emotional wellbeing.

The prisoner sought solace in art – revealing some talent as a portrait painter with subjects ranging from ex-prime minister Gough Whitlam to former boxer Mike Tyson.

Abbott’s other focus during his years of enforced isolation was on getting out of prison – legally.

He is not due for release until October 2020, but became eligible for parole in 2011 and has had 15 applications rejected or deferred. He is now among the general prison population at Woodford maximum security jail and former guards have described him as a model prisoner.

It is understood the Parole Board did agree to free him last year – if he was extradited to Western Australia, but authorities there refused to take him at that time.

Abbott has argued that he has been “squeaky clean’’ for years but that his classification as a serious violent offender means he is kept in maximum security and denied the opportunity to prove he is ready for release.

Last month a judge in the Supreme Court in Brisbane upheld a judicial review application by Abbott challenging the Parole Board’s latest refusal.

Justice Jean Dalton said: “There was just no evidence for the reasons of the board saying that it was necessary for you to be classified as high security, rather than that that was the result of a policy.’’

On Friday, the Queensland Parole Board was ordered to make a preliminary decision on whether to release Abbott in just five days.

Brendan Nyst says Abbott is now a man approaching the later stages of his life who regrets the decision he made years ago and is seeking “some light at the end of the tunnel’’ with parole in Queensland and some certainty over what faces him interstate.

Author Pedley says he deserves that.

“I hope the Parole Board remembers that just as the rights of victims need to be taken into account, Brenden Abbott is a human being and he does have some rights.

“He must have enormous mental strength and I admire him a great deal for that. I am astounded that he has not attempted self-harm.

“What he has had to endure in the prison system would have to be unprecedented.

“He has been subjected to treatment that even (mass murderer) Martin Bryant and (serial killer) Ivan Milat haven’t,’’ Pedley says.

“Abbott has effectively served a life sentence. He was a political trophy stuffed and mounted. He embarrassed the Queensland Government and the prison system and they are still punishing him for it.

“He has earned a chance.’’