An interview with Thomas Keneally: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and the politics of Australian aboriginality

Thomas Keneally is one of Australia's best-known novelists, with a reputation as a popular but serious writer both at home and abroad. In 1972, the publication of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, his fictional reconstruction of the axe murders of the half-caste aboriginal, Jimmy Governor, in 1900, a dark episode in the history of Australian-Aboriginal relations, brought him local fame. In this interview with Bruce Harding undertaken in New Zealand in 1984, Keneally, with the hindsight then of 12 years, reflects on the novel as a reassessment of social and political change, and considers race relations more generally, before turning to his early career, his break with Catholicism and his attitude towards Australia's convict past. Harding's opening and closing commentaries provide historical contexts for the novel's story and its moment of publication, which coincided with the initial euphoria of the Whitlam years.