Thomas Keneally was born in 1935 and, as well as writing many novels, has shown an increasing interest in producing histories. His novels include Bring Larks and Heroes, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, Schindler’s Ark and The People’s Train. He has the won the Miles Franklin Award, the Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Book Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Scripter Award of the University of Southern California, the Mondello International Prize, the Helmerich Prize. He lives in Sydney with his wife, Judy, and is Number 1 ticket-holder of the Manly-Warringah Rugby League team.
Today, to celebrate the release of his new non-fiction book A Bloody Good Rant, Thomas is on the blog to take on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on …
Thomas Keneally (Photo by Helen White).
1. To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?
Actually, born in Sydney but spent my first six years in the rural New South Wales at Kempsey. Moved to Sydney during WWII. Christian Brothers educated. Degree in theology, Pontifical University of Rome.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
When I was 12 I wanted to be clever. I tended to be a rather dyslexic child till then and I remember praying to be rendered clever.
When I was 18 I was studying for the priesthood and wanted to be ordained a priest. I was both ignorant and scared of women and had not yet suffered from the doubts that would soon enough set in. I wanted to be a social justice priest – I was attracted to the Belgian idea of priests working on the factory floor. But I was also at last growing up and growing out of belief in the system and the people.
When I was 30 I wanted to be a novelist, had already written, and was pragmatically innocent but very determined about how I’d make a living.
3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you don’t have now?
The belief question is answered above.
4. What are three works of art – this could be a book, painting, piece of music, film, etc – that influenced your development as a writer?
The poetry of Gerrard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas; Sidney Nolan’s Burke and Wills series; Patrick White’s Voss.
5. Considering the many artistic forms out there, what appeals to you about writing a memoir?
This book is not quite a memoir, but a memoir of any kind is by nature an exercise in fiction, memory strained through the lens of who you are. There are many stories in Rant of travel and adventures and the questions they raise, but it does not set out to be a comprehensive memoir in every way. It is more that this form allows you to take strong positions, and thus allows you to question the orthodoxies of the time.
To scorn neoliberalism was one of the chief objectives of the rant, but it allowed also for praise of other humans and of being human. I think my preferred mode is the novel because you can live like blazes in it. But writing a memoir was very refreshing, and made me do things I’ve never done before, like read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
‘This book is not quite a memoir, but a memoir of any kind is by nature an exercise in fiction, memory strained through the lens of who you are.’
6. Please tell us about your latest book!
The book was a chance to hold up some of my obsessions to the light and test their edges and translucency. They are the obsessions and prejudices I’ve reached in advanced age, and thus death and grandparenthood are big subjects, as are many questions to do with race, and why it is our favourite sport and crime. Because I believe that the collective unconscious is a great help to writers in helping them to do publishable work, I argue that any mug can write a novel. Having grown up in a religious community I inevitably have to address the issue of God and the cosmos, and dogma, and the rest. I believe in the Holocaust and yet we have made the Palestinians pay for our crimes of religious and ethnic hatred. I believe that if I were Aboriginal I would be pretty annoyed by now, since whatever we come up with, a plea for education in the 19th century, a plea for land in the 20th, a plea for a voice in the 21st, we get mocked for it. Will the republic ever come? Was the discoverer of Australia a child 80,000 years back? Should we dismiss Cook? Why has our history been so loyalist and often so unadventurous? Since the convict strain arose not only from thieves but from protesters, was it a stain or a gift? These are some of the matters I pursue almost for the pure delight of doing it.
7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
I hope, as writers of all such books do, that people will be stimulated by it and look at some of the questions and that of the day in a new way. It’s really a case of an old ranter just asking questions and then dancing on their ashes.
8. Who do you most admire in the writing world and why?
I admire my fellows, especially those who write challenging fiction and survive. And I admire poets and none more so than Judith Wright who was a great writer in the days we were not supposed to produce any. For the same reason, Patrick White.
9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?
I think that like most writers I have simple ambitions, to write quality fiction and make a living out of it. Doing this is harder, and like many primary producers, our farm often carries heavy mortgage. Even so, in old age, things are simpler than that, and though writing is an ongoing jot, I find I just want to be loved as a being, and to have earned that, at least partially.
10. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Begin it as soon as you can, for the process of writing engages your unconscious where all the great gravy of writing is, where the best of the language, the best archetypes, insight into stereotypes lie, and where all ritual, all implicit knowledge, lie germinating 24 hours a day. Beginning thus allows the book to grow. And on the days we write well we feel the transcendence which is really reward for all lonely labour.
Thank you for playing!
—A Bloody Good Rant by Thomas Keneally (Allen & Unwin) is out now. Limited signed copies are available while stocks last!
A Bloody Good Rant
Limited Signed Copies Available!
Thomas Keneally has been observing, reflecting on and writing about Australia and the human condition for well over fifty years. In this deeply personal, passionately drawn and richly tuned collection he draws on a lifetime of engagement with the great issues of our recent history and his own moments of discovery and understanding.
He writes with unbounded joy of being a grandparent, and with intimacy and insight about the prospect of death and the meaning of faith...
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