THOMAS KENEALLY 

Tom Keneally is one of Australia’s and the world’s most successful writers, having been nominated three times for the Booker Prize and winning it once. He is the author of more than 40 published works and has also won several other prizes including two Miles Franklin Awards and a Logie Award, an AFI Award and the Critics Circle Award for his screenplays. 

Thomas Michael Keneally was born in Kempsey on October 7, 1935 and went to school on the north coast of New South Wales and in the western suburbs of Sydney. Like so many other Australian authors he was taught to be literate by the Christian Brothers. In adolescence, in that remote Australia of the 50s, he studied for the priesthood but did not take orders. 

After this adventure, he worked in a variety of jobs including high school teaching and had his first short story published in The Bulletin. During one Christmas holidays he decided to write a novel which Cassell in Great Britain agreed to publish - before going broke. The first novel was The Place at Whitton, published in 1964. 

Ignorance of the realities of publishing led Tom to believe there was a living to be made in professional writing in the Australia on the 60s and it was only this ‘wrong-headedness’ that allowed him to survive. While working as a part-time insurance collector in Newtown and Marrickville he completed a second novel, The Fear (1965) and received a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant, which allowed him to write Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) marking the beginning of a career as a full-time professional. This novel won the Miles Franklin Award in 1967, as did Three Cheers for the Paraclete in 1968. The Survivor (1969) was awarded equal first prize in the Cook Bicentenary Award. 

He spent 1968-69 as a Lecturer in Drama, University of New England. He lived 1970-71 in England and there wrote A Dutiful Daughter and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), which later won The Royal Society For Literature prize and became Fred Schepisi’s film. He continued publishing novels and the occasional play. (He remembers sharing a season at the Parade with a barely-known, lankly young fellow from Melbourne called David Williamson.) 

His novel writing then entered a historical war phase with Blood Red, Sister Rose (1974), Gossip from the Forest (1975), Season in Purgatory (1976) and A Victim of the Aurora (1977).  

He lived and gave lectures in America during 1975-76, gathering information for a book on the South called Confederates, ultimately published by Collins in 1980. Confederates was his third novel to be short-listed for the Booker Prize in Great Britain. He has also written a non-fiction work about the American South-West called The Place Where Souls are Born. 

Tom also wrote a children’s story, Ned Kelly and the City of Bees (1978), the allegorical novel Passenger (1979) and The Cut Rate Kingdom (1981) which was first published by the Bulletin magazine. One day in Beverly Hills Tom met a luggage merchant who told him the story of Schindler’s Ark (1982), which, with its controversial blending of fact and fiction, won him the prestigious Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and led to Steven Spielberg and Universal Studios commissioning him to write the screenplay. 

In the meantime he served on the Australia-China Council, an organization which operates under the aegis of the Department of Foreign Affairs. In 1982 he travelled extensively in the Northern Territory to write a book called Outback with photographs by Gary Hansen and Mark Lang. In 1983 he was presented with the Order of Australia for his services to literature. 

In 1984 he wrote for the Herald and Weekly Times group and the Sydney Morning Herald at the Los Angeles Olympics. The next novel, A Family Madness (1985) was written as a follow-up to Schindler’s Ark. In 1985 a play, Bullie’s House, was performed at the Long Wharf Theatre on the West Coast of the United States. He was then Writer in Residence at the University of California, at Irvine. 

In 1987 Tom’s novel The Playmaker was published in the UK and Australia. The novel was later adapted for the stage by the Royal Court Theatre in London, re-titled Our Country’s Good. The drama company enjoyed a successful season touring the play in Australia in 1989. 

Of Thomas Keneally’s novel Towards Asmara (1989), about war and famine in Eritrea and Ethiopia, the New York Times Book Review wrote: “Not since For Whom the Bell Tolls has a book of such sophistication, the work of a major international novelist, spoken out so ambiguously on behalf of an armed struggle”. Moral dilemmas have long been the making of Keneally’s thought-provoking fiction and such is the case in Flying Hero Class, his novel centring on the loyalty, terror and revolutionary fervour that arises when Palestinian guerillas hijack a plane with an Aboriginal dance troupe on board. 

In 1992 Tom published a travel book about Ireland, Now and In Time to Be , and another novel Woman of the Inner Sea. His next novel Jacko (1993) was a brilliant fable about the power of television and features one of Keneally’s most finely crafted characters, the great Australian hero Jacko Emptor. Steven Spielberg’s incredibly successful film Schindler’s List catapulted Tom to a new level of recognition.  

Tom’s most recent novel, A River Town, was published in 1995 to critical acclaim at home, and in London and New York alike. A memoir of his sixteenth year, Homebush Boy, was recently published - The Australian called it ‘a brilliant and evocative slice of Australian social history’. His most recent non fiction work, is The Great Shame, a story of the Irish in the Old World and the New. 

Tom married Judith and raised two daughters who grew up thinking it was normal for a father to stay at home sweating onto blank pieces of paper. He was the founding chairman of the Australian Republican Movement. When not writing, lecturing or attending speaking engagements, Tom enjoys politician-watching, swimming, cryptic crosswords, telling anecdotes about his brilliant daughters, hiking, cross-country skiing and watching sporting events.

Interview with Thomas Keneally 

Do you see yourself as a Leader and what vision are you working towards?

No, I don’t see myself as a leader, more as the ancient role of a bard who stands at the edge of a firelight of the tribe and makes a few comments. I would find it very hard to influence policy although I’ve had experiences with directing policy through my involvement in the Australian Republican Movement.  But I think it’s the old role of the bard that I am stuck with. 

Would you like to see Australia become a Republic?

Oh very much so because I think the Monarchy says very little about who we are. It says nothing about our impulses towards egalitarianism, equity, which we still have even though they  are under attack. It says very little to our neighbours in Asia too. Do we really think that the British Fleet is out there in the Pacific to protect us from them? It’s an old colonial delusion whose time has past. 

Why do you think that we didn’t achieve what we wanted to through the Referendum?

Well, I think that that failure was due to a lot of clever work by the Prime Minister, Monarchists and Direct Electionists who made it not into an issue about Australian constitutional identity but into an issue of getting even with politicians, always a popular thing in Australia. 

I also think that the big mistake the Republican Movement made and there are reasons for it, was to not to adequately canvas the possibility of direct election and the fact that many people wanted direct election. This is a mistake which won’t happen next time. 

What’s your thoughts about Reconciliation between Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders?

I believe that this is absolutely crucial. You see there are two ways of looking at Australian society and one is to say, look if we acknowledge their legitimacy, their right to be in the landscape here, maybe it will cast a shadow over our right. After all who are they? They are just a pack of barely reformed nomads. So what right have they got. But I think the mass of Australians feel that when we recognise the legitimacy of Aboriginal society and the Aboriginal imagination, that is when we will become more fully ourselves and when we ourselves will have legitimacy, I think that it and the Republic are subtly related to each other and of the two, of course reconciliation is the most pressing duty particularly after two hundred and twelve years. 

How do you respond to the finding by the Aboriginal Council of Reconciliation that while Australians overwhelmingly support a Reconciliation, they are evenly divided on issues such as whether or not Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People are the most disadvantaged Australians?

I think people want Reconciliation, but I think they are also feeling threatened themselves. As we go through the motions of celebrating the Centenary of Federation, and we chose to call this country a Commonwealth, I feel that a lot of people feel that they have no share in this Commonwealth, that of that common bowl of Austaliahood from which we all eat, of which I have mentioned in my speech in the Celebration. A number of people don’t believe that they have a place at that Table and this is a very dangerous thing for Australians’ social stability, cohesion, and also it’s denying fellow Australians their place in the sun. So I think that lots of Australians feel under threat for many reasons and so there can be an impatience when they say, every one’s talking all the time about this group who they are doing it hard. Maybe they are, but I’m doing it hard too. Even middle class people who might feel that their jobs are not secure and certainly people who are deprived of work and don’t quite know how they are going to get work. It’s hard for them to feel that there are people more disadvantaged than themselves. What is inherent in that contradictory finding you’ve mentioned, is that lots of Australians feel under threat themselves. This is a dangerous phenomenon and an unjust phenomenon, particularly in the year in which we are celebrating something called the Commonwealth. 

The Council also found that some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples remain unconvinced how Reconciliation can improve employment, eduction and housing. 

Yes, that’s right. It is an important gesture. But if restricted merely to a gesture, that’s all it becomes. I think that systems of empowering Aboriginals should be put in place. The tendency in Australia has been to allow various black organizations certain amounts of power but to impose on them our white liberal and democratic values. So for eg,  what do you do with an elder who has too much dignity to stand for elected office. No one has any inhibitions about standing for electoral office if they want to in white society, but there might be cultural inhibitions which ought to be studied. The Aboriginal leadership should be permitted more input into actually giving themselves and their people power. You look at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and it is very much whether it is represented or not is the first question and the second question what sort of power does it have. It doesn’t have much. So, ultimately the redemption of Aboriginals, and a lot of Aboriginals believe this,  lies in their hands. Some great solution won’t be brought in from outside. But the Aboriginal community can be allowed, facilitated and supported in having its power by the rationalists, and we haven’t quite got round to that yet, allowing Aboriginals their own power. 

What is your vision for Australia? Do you see it as a Leader in the Pacific Region?

Yes, I’d like to see that we can be a human rights leader in the Pacific Region, that we can be a creator and supplier of technology in this Region. I’d like us to have a decent debate on immigration  one which we’ve never had. Of course salinity is a huge problem. It may be true what the environmentalists say that we can’t take any more population, although given our political place on earth, it’s hard to see how we won’t. So environmentally sane, human rights driven, having put all its own issues to bed, which it is nowhere near having done, and a creative country, creative in all regards with creativity encouraged whether it be in the sciences, arts or whatever. The biggest issue is for the Commonwealth of Australia in this Centenary Year is that the Commonwealth is being eroded. There are a fewer and fewer people who are enjoying that Commonwealth. Australians have a high expectation of equity and that should be encouraged. We are in an economic period when the market is considered the great god and it will look after everything. This has never been the view that ordinary Australians have had of the world and they are right. The market is only tolerable when it is delivering justice to as many people as possible. That’s not a fashionable view now, but I hope it comes back into fashion in this coming century in Australia. I’d like to see us socially progressive. We brought in votes for women early. We introduced tension and arbitration courts. All these items of the early twentieth century progressiveness in Australia are under attack as we speak. I’d like us to go back to being progressive, to being world leaders, not necessarily in the movies we make, although that’s important with everything else, but in the way we treat everyone. 

Going back to your life, after completing your schooling you pursued a vocation for the Catholic Priesthood but in 1960 abandoned it. Why did you change your direction?

Well, you know it’s hard for anyone under 40 to imagine what Australia was like in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, how sectarian it was, how Catholic versus Protestant it was. Issues that didn’t really matter and that have been eroded, thank god, by the arrival of multiplicity of other cultures in Australia, but, that was the great cultural divide in Australia when I was a kid. So this sense of being imbattled , of belonging to a minority encouraged me to try to become a Priest because Priests were depicted as leaders of their community. But in fact the culture of the Priesthood is an authoritarian one and it runs counter to most of what Australians believe about independence of thought, about saying what ever they want to say. So, the sort of priestly training that I was to receive was at odds with general Australia culture. It was an authoritarian culture in which you are supposed to believe what your superior said, particularly if your superior was the Vatican. Well this runs counter to the sort of ordinary scepticism which is so honoured in the Australian community, which is both one of our great strengths and our great weaknesses, but we’re stuck with it. And I think that tension actually sent me around the bend. I’d like to say that I had a love affair while I was in there but I didn’t chat up any of the laundry girls or anything. Sex wasn’t as big an issue, although it was an issue, naturally. It wasn’t as big an issue as the sort of tension my existence as a citizen and my existence as a cleric and so most of the boys I studied with for the priesthood, many of them, possibly the majority, have left since then. Some of them left after they were ordained and are out in the general community. Australians would be surprised to know who they were. For example, Brian Johns who ran the ABC was in there with me. There are judges and lawyers, all sorts of scamps out here in the general community, generally two fisted drinkers, because there’s something about the old church that brought out the alcoholic in your average Irish Australian boy. But in any case, if I were to say why I studied for the Priesthood, I’d have to create that Chiefly and Menzies era which is hard for any Australian under forty, particularly under twenty to recapture when Australia was going from being pretty monolithic to having the ethnic tapestry of which we are now so proud. It was a far more restricted world before all these other voices arrived. All these other voices had a powerful liberating effect upon Australians. I left home in a mono-cultural society in which the main thing that mattered was whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant, whether you were a Protestant school kid or a Catholic one and I came out into a society which was turning into the tapestry that we now have. This was an exciting and liberating experience. 

What inspired you to write your first novel?

In the 1950’s it was a pretty weird thing to do because there wasn’t a visible literary writing community. Creative writing was not taught anywhere. It was regarded as pretty poor. It had no place in the universities. The experience of having been in the seminary, they didn’t tell me how to talk to women in the pubs, not that many women went to pubs in those days, naturally. I was looking for an identity. I was a bit of a lost soul. I was studying law. I taught. I coached Rugby and I was looking for some form of validation. I was a voracious reader and always had been since I was a little kid. I thought that the tricks that writers thought of, was the most important tricks of all. I thought that books, particularly fiction was the biggest game in the universe and I still feel that way. I know that hardly any of us make a living and I’ve been lucky in that regard but I still feel that what other writers do are the most essential and important tricks of all, even though not every one reads us anymore. The novel in the nineteenth century was in a privileged position in that there was no Television, no radio. He was the only game in town, other than the theatre. I've always felt that and I sent my book of to London and when they accepted it for a 150 pounds sterling, I thought, wow, I now have to become a full-time Writer. I didn't know half the things young writers know now about publishing, about how hopeless the whole process is, of how hard it is to make a living unless you've got another job. I just set out and tried to produce a life out of writing.  I was helped by my colonial innocence, by the idea, well it must be possible and I've got to give it a burl. That's how I got writing. Thank God I did? I would have been either a lawyer or a lost soul by now. 

And the depiction of early Australian life and Australian settings, seems to be a prominent feature in much of your writing.

Yes, I'm fascinated by the social history of that period. I'm fascinated by convicts. Perhaps because I was in the Seminary, I've got a fixation with prisoners,  Jewish Prisoners, Australian Convicts. You know it fascinates me that although we are not the only penal colony on earth, we are the only major city on earth that was founded exclusively as a penal settlement and that proposition teases me, that we began as the guards of the fallen who are equally as fallen as the people they are guarding. I've always identified with convicts and I find now, through having researched and written The Great Shame that for example, my wife had two convict Great Grandparents. I have a convict Great Uncle, who was a political prisoner in Western Australia. I have a Great Grandfather who is a convict Tailor from Dublin and so on. So it was there in the blood stream, I suppose. But I am fascinated by convictism, by that system because it's an abnormal system. It is extraordinary that this penal institution was our founding institution. I consider it an important metaphor for Australian society. I feel that there's an intense relationship between the young doomed teenagers of the convict ships and those adolescents who are alienated in Australia right now. I feel they're exactly the same sort of people because these young convicts were the alienated of Great Britain and we have now taken two hundred and twelve years to create a degree of alienation in our society which matches that in the Georgian era in Britain which produced Australia.

Have your skills and focus changed over time as a Writer?

Yes, I think you get more skilful as you get older. You don't necessarily get credit for being more skilful because there's a certain nostalgia for your earlier work. But I think that technically, writers get more accomplished. But do they get better in an absolute sense, I am not sure. It was probably better when we all died of Tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five, but that doesn't happen anymore and we stay on and we write and we write and we write. The reason we write and we write and we write is because we are not satisfied with what we've already done and there's always this dream of producing the great effortless novel, the great all engaging, all encompassing novel. So as long as we live, most of us want to write. Some of us get cheesed off with the relationship with publishing which is always an imperfect one. Some of us get scared off by criticism, some of us get just world weary and say that the reward is not worth it. 

Do you see Schindler's Ark or Bettany's Book as one of your greats?

I feel Bettany's Book. I have a great affection for Schindler's, but of course it was made into a movie by Spielberg which gives it a visibility into the future, a visibility which the others don't have. Therefore I have this sly ambition that one of my other books will come up and knock Schindler's off its pedestal, not that I resent Schindler at all, its better to be known for one book than for none. I look upon it as a fruitful challenge to try to write a book which is so seamless and perfect that it enters the public consciousness at least the way Schindler's has and it then becomes a rival to Schindler. It is a creative challenge. I don't trust the impulse in writers who want you to admire their most recent work and who get upset when you admire their earlier work because they have written far better work since. I feel that I have written far better books since both the Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and Schindler's List. That's okay. The fact that they are fairly well known will bring a few readers to my other more neglected children and I am very happy with that other arrangement. I think though that Bettany is in its way a better book, even though it is an imperfect book. However, Schindler in the moral sense, even though I was deeming  as all writers do in terms of narration, Schindler's seems to have hit a profound nerve and you can't choose which of your books is going to do that. It's almost an accidental thing. 

How long did the entire process take to write Bettany's Book and what was actually involved in its coming together?

Well it took place over some years, but I was simultaneously writing a big Irish history of the Irish world from the point of view of Irish convicts, because they were the fallout from the terrible society which existed in Ireland and they also attracted the sympathy and the attention and care of the Irish in other places like the United States. So that took a long while to write and I researched this while I was writing that. That took four or five years to write. It was published in 1998 and I really began writing Bettany's Book from 98 onwards. So once the history book, The Great Shame, was out of the way I wrote this fairly quickly. I probably worked on it part-time for a couple of years and then wrote the bulk of it in about a year and a bit. The reason was that I had a lot of time to think about it, that I had therefore a firm sense of who the characters were and my chief doubt was whether I could make the modern section and the 1840's section go together or resonate organically so that they belonged in the same book. For the Sudanese material, I've been to the Sudan four times, but to keep up with it, I used the Internet, which is very cool of me to have done, for a geriatric like me to use the Internet and I kept up with the Sudanese politics, I used the Internet because I didn't want to necessarily go there again. It had become a very difficult country to visit when I was there. The book ends in about 1991. That's nearly the last time I was there. For the pastoral stuff, I used various books on the pastoral industry in Australia, but also the memoirs of this bloke Broadrobb who was a Pastoralist in that area beyond Cooma and who had convict labourers, two of these convict labourers were both my wife's great grandparents and Bettany is based on Broadrobb who is mentioned in the Preface of the Book. 

Are you making any assertions about women through your central characters in Bettany's Book?

Well I am looking very much the way women in particular get marked by beauty. I have known some remarkable women who are delighted with their beauty, but then have a crisis when it begins to in a conventional sense, pass. I am also interested in those beautiful creatures, male and female who are not happy with their beauty, for the simple reason that its all that people see. People are blinded by them and they do not to the real person beyond.  So they feel thwarted by their beauty. That interests me and its something I wanted to write about. Beauty and women and the relationship between the real soul and I wanted to ring the changes by sending a beautiful woman to the Sudan where her beauty doesn't count. A beautiful woman in the sense of our society in Sudan where beauty is another entity all together. Cultural concepts of beauty fascinate me. I am a pretty plain old bastard, so I am fascinated by it in more than the obvious sense. Then I wanted to write about women and power. And of course the female factory convict, Sarah Bernard, that is the nadir of power for young Australian women. That is the least power that Australian women have ever experienced. It's interesting to compare it to the degrees of power excercised by Dimp who exercises considerable power in our community and then by Primrose. The question of women and power fascinates me for a number of reasons. It is pretty preposterous on the face of it that after nearly two centuries of progressive politics, 51% of the population are underrepresented in Parliament. If this were the case with an ethnic group, if there were say an indigenous tribe like the South African indigenous groups- the Zulu , the Bantu, etc and they were as poorly represented in Parliament as women were, there would be an outcry and the UN would be onto us and so on. It's astonishing therefore to me what happens to women when they go into situations of traditional power, I see that both in the Labour Party and in the Coalition that there is a tendency for women to jump through male hoops which some are good at, the Maggie Thatcher types, they love the male hoops because then they take them over and use them to beat the men with as Maggie Thatcher was a classic example. But I just wonder what will happen through the century as more and more women come into Parliament and the blokes group's are bent or broken and the men's clubs begin to disappear. One thing I dislike about politics is the way Cheryl Kernot is treated. She's treated as if she ought to be another bloke. Amanda Vanstone is turned into a School Maam by having to be a tough guy. If you're going to be a Minister, you've got to be tough, no sentimentality here. I've seen that happen to a number of Cabinet Ministers. It's because the dominant culture of power is a male culture and I just wonder how it will change as the century goes on and this obscene balance is corrected. I suspect you might find that warriors of the Bronwyn Bishop tilt will be attracted to politics but so will other women who are not of that DNA will be. It will be interesting to see how the habits of power change. I don't look forward to all our ills but I do look forward to something that will change the community and change the tradition of politics of women in the community. I've become fascinated by the question of women and power through being married and through having daughters and I suppose that shows up in this attempt to write from the point of view of women in Bettany's Book.  

What advice would you offer to those who have written their first manuscript but who keep getting rejected by publishers for having not published before?

If there is anything in the letters that are positive suggestions, then look at the Manuscript again and see what they say is ringing any bells. But if you just get the sort of letter that says this does not fit our list which could mean anything. Then I say that after a few weeks and a few months, you look at it again and try to look at it the way they might have looked at it. If that is too dispiriting, the other thing is to start another novel. It's hard to do this when you've got another job but particularly if the publishers have shown enthusiasm for the work, have used sentences such as, "this is very talented, but it doesn't fit our list," I think ultimately, you might have to kiss that first novel off,  but not until you've tried every publisher in the book and you can get information on who every publisher is from the Society of Authors and from the Australian Booksellers and Publishers Association and just by looking inside covers of books. Let no young writer forget that discretely printed the other side of the title page of every book is the publisher's address. So keep sending it out, but occasionally re-look at it because sometimes, something that can seem publishable when you've just finished it will seem full of faults when you read it again, when you've got a bit of distance on it. So, have faith in it. Send it to every  publisher you can. If you have the strength, then look at it after a couple of months and if you find problems with it and yet they've said they've considered it seriously and you've got talent then write a second book. Or go into real estate development and thank god for delivering you from a very ambiguous destiny.