Introduction
Thomas Keneally is known today primarily as the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark (1982). Australians of a certain age will also remember him as the author of fictions of national history: Bring Larks and Heroes (1967/1968), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), and much later, The Playmaker (1987). The last title points indirectly to another aspect of the writer’s creative output: a series of stage plays: Halloran’s Little Boat (1966), Childermas (1968), An Awful Rose (1972), Bullie’s House (1981), and Either/Or (2007). Keneally also devised scripts for television and film. He is famous (and sometimes envied and disparaged) not just for his indefatigable rate of production but also for the variety of settings and stories in his novels. Close readings and archival work on Keneally’s papers in the National Library of Australia point to one more facet of his multifarious interests that I would like to elucidate. Keneally’s fiction shows a significant engagement with painting, both in the visuality of his prose and, from time to time, direct reference to artists and paintings as a means of shaping story and pointing to the themes behind the plots.
In 1988, Thomas Keneally was invited to become a patron of the Julian Ashton art academy, one of Sydney’s oldest training grounds for painters (Ashton School of Art, 1988). In a talk to the Ashton academy in 2010, Keneally announced that he wanted to be a painter (Keneally, 2010). In the early days, even before his writing career began in 1964, he helped set up an artists’ and writers’ club with artist Colin Lanceley and others, and over subsequent decades spent a lot of time at gallery openings, admitting that he had a “passion for antiquities and paintings” (Campion, 1969; Graham, 2002). In recent years he has himself taken up painting. Laura Demasi in 2005 finds him at home “on his back veranda, spreading acrylics over a canvas. Painting he says, is a freer, more intuitive form of self-expression”. Four years later Keneally was still painting, saying, with characteristic self-mockery, “No one agrees with me, but I think I’m a good painter.” (Milliner, 2009). In the same year he addressed the Royal Academy and wrote the introduction to the catalogue for its major exhibition of Australian art, citing his love for the figurative, the Heidelberg school, Nolan, the Boyds, Roland Wakelin, Grace Cossington-Smith, and contemporary figures like Gary Shead. Arthur Boyd’s “The Frightened Bridegroom” supplied the cover to The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and two of Shead’s paintings appear on Keneally’s book covers, Bettany’s Book (2000) and An Angel in Australia (2002) (Keneally, 2012b; 2013).
Keneally’s novel drafts and minutes of the various committees he served on are full of rough sketches, usually of people’s heads. They give a strong indication of his interest in people and character, and of his apprehending them as visual presences. Four years into his writing career, he commented at a seminar that it was better to begin with characters and action than with ideas born of too much planning, and reviewers have often highlighted this focus (Cameron, 1968). Neil Jillett (1975), for example, praised Gossip from the Forest: “it’s a brilliant portrait gallery”. Keneally’s admiration for the large-scale landscape work of painters like Streeton and Nolan underpins the strong visual effects in his fiction repeatedly noted by reviewers. Editor Simon King (1973) described one novel as “vivid and almost touchable on every page”, while twenty years later the Kirkus Reviews reader referred to Keneally’s Woman of the Inner Sea (Kirkus, 1992) as “psychically expansive yet visually potent”. Other critics have found fault with Keneally’s tendency to load sentences with adjectives and adverbs (Salusinszky, 1995). This can be explained as an inheritance from the oral storytelling and penchant for rhetorical hyperbole drawn from his family and their Irish ancestry, but such a thickness of style might also be associated with a painterly layering to give texture to verbal description.
Painterly style
Bring Larks and Heroes opens with scenes that work as mini-paintings. In the first years of Sydney’s convict settlement, Corporal Halloran strides through a “mesh of sunlight and shade” at the edge of a forest, his shabby clothing detailed. He stares “through the slaty trees at the very still indigo water” and December’s climate had ravaged colonial gardens, “where muddied stooks of young corn stood like the camp wreckage of a beaten army” (1967/1968: 21).
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His betrothed, Anne, laughs behind her fingers: “the laughter was supple and shivered with colour like a tree” (8). A man’s age is dramatized in striking visual image: he is “clawing up the breakneck face of his eighty-sixth European winter” (9). We encounter Ann’s mistress Mrs Blythe as though she is a Rembrandt composition:
She sat in a heavy, straight-backed Italianate chair. Her feet rested on a hassock, and there was a rug over her knees. On the table to her left stood all that was needed to run, anoint, lance, probe, cauterize and dress her leg. A squat stone lamp, the spoons and needles and lancet, the rags and jars of stewing poultice […]. (10)
When smallpox hits the colony the writer describes one sufferer in painterly terms: “The flesh turned purple and suet in streaks” (26) and Halloran’s ear, seen against ocean light, is “green and blue-rimmed” (32). Such colourist perceptions are not entirely dominant in the book — it is a novel after all, and one interested in exploring moral niceties and emotional fluctuations — but the skittering movements of these as they hit up against brute circumstance are often rendered in visual images, as are the shifts in scenery:
While they had been speaking, the aspect of the world had changed. From the unknown south-east hove wet clouds of badly tarnished silver, keeping blockade on the harmless little port. The light was intimidated to thin yellow and gave a luminous fringe to the Irishman’s shoulders. […] It gave a sharp sense of refreshment to Halloran to see crooked shrubs of yellow and olive on the layered cliff across the river, shaking themselves in the wind. (57)
Bring Larks and Heroes appeared in the wake of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957). Like White, Keneally was widely praised for dignifying Australian colonization with both metaphysical questions and prose rendered rhythmic and visually powerful by a flow of vibrant metaphors. Many of Keneally’s favoured painters are icons of Australian modernism and his early novels display a modernist experiment akin to White’s: one that blends the word with something of the visual music of the tone poem, and the colour composition of the painting (thinking of both Forster and Woolf). Keneally would gradually simplify his style and never relied on painting as much as White — certainly not ever to dramatize the exceptional genius of the artist as White did in The Vivisector — but nonetheless, like White, Keneally has showed throughout his career hints of being a “painter manqué” (Hewitt, 2002).
Painting as thematic index
Bring Larks and Heroes has another link to the visual arts: one of its characters is a painter. Thomas Ewers “transported forger, engraver, limner, landscapist” (34) is the sole public representative of The Arts in the new colony. His presence in a sailboat causes Halloran to think privately of the labouring crew in artistic terms: he had “[s]een some of the flabbergasting but redeemed ugliness in Leonardo’s sketch-book” and suspected that the scenes of new settlement “would delight an artist, send him grabbing for his transforming charcoal” (36). It is Halloran, the ordinary man, who has the artistic vision here; Ewers is more caught up in the formal codes of European painting and in New Holland can find only “a land of broken promises to the artist” (47). Here we have a brief intimation of a technique that becomes more significant in later work: allusion to painting not just as reference to visual style, but as a pointer to themes behind the action of the novel. The pairing of Halloran and Ewers suggests the idea voiced more clearly in The Playmaker (1987) and the non-fictional The Commonwealth of Thieves (2005): that imagination and art might change our view of Botany Bay’s ugly beginnings into a gleam of promise while at the same time revealing the true horror of a penal system that ends up killing first Ewers, then Halloran and Anne. Unfortunately, art, like the red cord that supposedly prevents pregnancy for Halloran’s beloved, and perhaps like God in such a forsaken world, fits into Anne’s pronouncement: “You have to put your faith in something, but nothing brings you what you want all the time” (89).
After 1967, painters desert Keneally’s fiction for a while until he reworks his Mawson-like tale of Antarctic death and guilt (The Survivor, 1969) into a version of Robert Falcon Scott’s earlier expedition. A Victim of the Aurora (1977) awaits its proper assessment, having been read mainly as an exotic form of “closed-room” murder mystery (see Ware, 1992 for a sound discussion). Though it has murder at the centre of its plotting, it is also a meditation on the barbarity lurking beneath the surfaces of civilization, and the end of innocence occasioned by two world wars. Freud’s notions of eros and thanatos, totem and taboo, civilization and its discontents, are put to work as a symbolic foundation on which conflicts of personality, class, race, sexuality, and morality are piled up. The whole structure is presented to us by participant–observer, then Tony, now Sir Anthony, Piers, who begins as a 24-year-old novice English painter and ends at 92, famous as a designer in Hollywood. The clash between his guilt and innocence within the story he tells and the irony through which he recalls events from old age gives the book a greater depth than reviewers first saw, and some of that thematic complexity is conveyed through changes in the narrator’s painting as well as through his career shifts.
Piers begins his story with his early successes in 1908–1909 as “a bona fide artist, a landscapist no less”. His attempts to capture the play of light on Tyrolean glaciers, influenced by Turner’s impressionist work, bring him to the attention of Sir Eugene Stewart, who signs him on as “official artist to the New British South Polar Expedition” (Keneally, 1977: 6–7) so he can paint the drama of exploration and the romance of the Aurora Australis.
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Piers’s difficulties in capturing complex and elusive phenomena on the canvas serve as an index to the narrative’s problems in conveying an Edwardian zeitgeist now unfamiliar to modernity and the successive alterations of perspective in and around the central characters. The novel seeks to show the shock and outrage of idealistic civilized people experiencing not only the violence of the First World War after the events being narrated, but also the realization that the seeds of its barbarism were silently germinating in the very culture that appeared to be its opposite and in the expedition that seemed to embody the highest ideals of that culture. This intangible, abstract idea is dramatized in the clash between the noble purpose of Polar exploration and its cruel realities. That clash is then manifest to the reader in the personal story of the narrator-artist. Artist, art, and narrative structure become the key to the book.
A Victim of the Aurora is full of ironic turns of history in which first impressions turn out to be erroneous. Sir Eugene is memorialized by his wife in a photo, not of him as explorer–hero, but of a bureaucrat “frowning over papers against the background of books, bed and tattered baggage” (60); Kittery, “a puckish little man with glasses” whose primary interest is in how sea ice forms, turns out to be “one of the successes of the expedition. He sledded for two summers. He managed dogs well and could out-stubborn most ponies” (35–36); the other-worldly vicar later leaves the church to die fighting on the Somme (222); modern hope in machinery is quashed when tractors seize up in the cold and the cruder transport of sleds is required (71); an incredible legend of survivors from a previous expedition turns out to be true, though not in any expected way (40). When Piers returns to the South Pole years later, it “was no longer a mythic place”, being inhabited by bored American sailors and machinery (162). Who or what the victim in the novel actually is becomes an open question. The expedition leader, remote and revered, is shown to be emotionally vulnerable and then, in the team’s isolated situation, must either renounce the codes of home civilization validating the enterprise or in enacting them manifest the totalitarian cruelty of being one-man judge and executioner. Such shifts in perception are made possible because the aged Piers, recording his failing memories of events in 1910, almost 70 years earlier, can swing to and fro in time, not just supplying backstories for himself and most of the expeditioners, but also telling us what became of them during and after the expedition. At the outset of the novel, Piers resolves to tell us something he has promised not to, because he wants to show where such a breaking of faith began: “the lying set in with Henneker’s death, and ever since, the world has been fuelled and governed by lies. That is my concise history of the 20th century” (6). The narrator’s act of betrayal matches the betrayals within the story, and is paralleled by the change in his profession after he quits the expedition:
It may amaze the film-buffs, who knew me as a film designer of the 30s, 40s and 50s, it might amaze equally the corporations, airlines, armies and fashion experts who employed me as a design consultant, to find out that I was once a bona fide artist. (7)
Young Tony is contrasted to the Sir Anthony giving us his memoirs:
I was tall and dark-haired and blue-eyed. I looked as spiritual as an artist ought. You should see what’s happened to it all now, the tallness, the dark hair, the blue eyes, above all the spirituality. (8)
The shift from “golden frivolous […] summers” (7) in England to a Californian nursing home and cynicism begins when young Piers discovers himself haggling with the expedition accountant over his percentage of sales. He discovers after the southern adventure that “the great man” Sir Edward has had to hustle to raise supplies, and the young painter learns as he is being persuaded to join the team that his art is to be sold on return to London to cover expedition debts, just as Sir Edward has engaged a controversial journalist and a cinematographer to help publicize the trip (13–14).
Painting permits Keneally to present a number of ideas to his readers, all connected to the themes of the book, and sometimes to his own writing as well. He has often debated what the novel has to offer now that film and television have taken over the job of telling us stories (for example Krausmann, 1979: 49; Stretton, 2002: 16), and there is a parallel in Piers discussing with a team member how painting will be affected by photography (21). He expresses envy of the natural sciences in being fuelled by more passion and idealism than “dull” art (147). Piers’s own attempts to capture the aurora implicate him in the civilization–savagery dualisms of the story. If the enclosed fug of team quarters are in opposition to the brute power of outside nature, then not only does the action of the story — from Russian shamanic dog handlers running amok, to each of the elite group revealing moral, sometimes violent, flaws — show how the two spaces are not entirely autonomous, but Piers’s art also brings savagery into the hut as the aurora injects frenzy into his painting. At the same time, as the plot is about to turn violently, he
sat heavily on the stool and stared at the last sketch. The real aurora pulsated continuously. How to get the pulsations in […]
All at once the afternoon changed for me.
I got my formal art training as a scholarship student at an academy in Paris called the Evraire. My landscape instructor told me, “Monsieur Piers, you are a barbarian. Train yourself with water colours to be less of a barbarian.” […]
I had tried for so long and so well to restrain my tendency to large barbarous gestures that now I had managed to paint the aurora as a mere colour profile. I had no conveyed its movement, its arrogance or barbarity.
I began to paint again as wildly as I could with water colours, the throbbing undulations, the vast electric shards of colour. (47–48)
Here we can infer something about the British class system that preserved ideas about the workers being inherently “wild”, and Romantic ideas about nature as sublime and distinct from culture. Piers’s “scholarship” background enables him to sit on the edges of the group he observes while being part of it (he forms an instinctive bond with the socialistic Australian colonial in the team). We see in his brief moment of artistic abandon the shift from Edwardian culture into modernist modes of art that will respond to and try to reflect the barbaric aspects of Western civilization. One of the many ironies in the book is that Piers’s access to “barbarian” energy allows him to fulfil his role as artist in supporting the expedition and to provide a moment of comfort to his fellows, who “seemed to feel that now I had halfway expressed the inexpressible they would never be as awed and frightened again” (195), whereas its parallel in the plot drives him to forsake civilized art gallery painting for the barbarity of commercial design and film-making. Though he appears to be immune to the surprises of life after the First World War follows his expedition experience, he shows in cynical jokes about Antarctica (one could make money by shipping rich bodies there for cryogenic storage; or by sending flabby tourists there to tone up muscles by pulling sleds (165)), how the disappointments of the Polar expedition continue to rankle. The slash and flash of his painting provides a foundation for the highly coloured melodramatic language with which old Piers recounts the moment when he realizes the truth and motivations of the crime at the novel’s heart:
It was all tentacles. It was more livid and purple, more glutinously, more heinously limbed than anything Hoosick and Quincy would ever bring up from beneath the ice. It was the grandest and worst cancer and might yet devour our crude society and stain the primal landscape. (197–8)
In the face of such epiphany there is no going back to a “primal landscape” of innocence, no basis for holding to stable social ideals. Survival can only be a compromise of ironic double vision; ideals hover at a remote distance like the aurora but can only be hinted at through the fractured energies of an art more modern than Edwardian landscape painting.
Keneally acknowledged that A Victim of the Aurora failed to do well, partly because readers were so focused on its murder-mystery form that they could not see the underlying theme of the civilizational collapse of empire and Europe (Baker, 1987: 136). Increasingly across his career, Keneally’s reputation has fluctuated around this “middlebrow” mix of popular genre and thematic or stylistic complexity. There is a telling phrase that crops up several times across the interviews with Keneally. He takes up novel writing because he is fascinated by “the tricks” that novelists can perform (Musgrove and Lee, 1994: 157). Despite all the serious moral questions and the examination of historical legacies and national identity, Keneally has been ranked lower than other Australian literary “greats” for “playing around” with diverse fictional devices and not taking his subjects seriously enough (Craven, 1987–8). The author himself admits that some of his titles are more “commercial” than others, but he claims the right to vary his output, and — as we have just seen in the slide of Piers from British painter to American designer — often rehearses in his fiction debates over distinctions between “high” and “low” cultural values. In Bring Larks and Heroes, colonial painter Ewers airily asserts that the arts are not for hire, especially by colonial officers who only want pictures to document the new land, but Ewers the convict is quite prepared to use his illustrative work as currency to buy a pardon (47). Recourse to other art forms (theatre and film) have supplied Keneally with technical experiments that gained early praise (as in Gossip from the Forest (1975, for example), and inclusion of both painterly style and reference to painting has also enabled him to negotiate his unstable position as someone hailed early on as a literary figure of national value beyond mere monetary return, but one who has always sought to earn enough from his writing to live on.
Composing contrasts
The tension between crafty tricks and crafted art is evident in the book that was intended to be the most successful after The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Entered for the Booker Prize, but also with expectations of being a commercial bestseller, Confederates (1979/1988) had all the sex and violence elements of popular fiction, combined with serious historical purpose and set-pieces of scenic description and observation of idiom that carried literary weight. Keneally saw the book as a correction of Gone with the Wind, showing that the Civil War was not just about keeping or abolishing slavery: most soldiers were rough peasants who had little ideological attachment to any cause. He also pointed to the industrialization of warfare as a prelude the First World War (Willbanks, 1991: 136). Neil Jillett reviewed this sudden turn from Australian and European history to America’s Civil War, commenting that “Keneally’s willingness to rove in time and space is as astonishing as his energy”, but he added: “My chief complaint is with its conflict of styles, between its intimately personal literary qualities and its dimensions as a blockbuster apparently aimed at Hollywood” (Jillett, 1980: 27).
Confederates is Keneally’s fictionalizing of the campaign leading to the Battle of Antietam, one of the lesser known but decisive battles in the American Civil War. The novel provides us with a “cast-of-thousands” epic scenario. It has the sense of a plein-air landscape painting of forests and fields, though really the scenes are of people in motion against a backdrop. The action swirls around two characters, one of whom, Decatur Cate, is an educated young man who travels the countryside painting portraits of farmers and their wives so as to escape his father’s more conventional career expectations for him. Although he sympathizes with the Union cause, Cate is forcibly recruited by the Confederacy in order to get him away from seducing a young woman whom he has been painting. That woman is married to a poor southern farmer, Usaph Bumpass, who meets Cate on the battle line and is consumed with suspicious jealousy of him. His rage seems to carry him through repeated dangers until he can return home wounded.
Painting itself does not carry the thematic loading that it does in A Victim of the Aurora, but the contrast between Cate’s domestic portraiture and the outdoor scenes of war does point to how Keneally’s work has progressively moved away from his earlier smaller-scale work — a work like Gossip from the Forest, for example, in which the action occurs within a railway carriage and consists in conflicts of personality and culture amongst the four people negotiating an armistice to end the First World War. Keneally’s métier becomes a wider story of many people interacting within a large world-historical situation: more Walter Scott and Tolstoy than Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky. In one sense, it is a turn away from modernist experiment to nineteenth-century epic; in painting, one of those colourful and crowded Biblical or battlefield extravaganzas that take up half an art gallery wall.
In Confederates, characters are either tied to historical record and military leaders concentrated on present battle, or they are rustic foot soldiers bent on survival and bound by Southern attitudes. Decatur Cate’s painting not only generates a dramatic interpersonal rivalry to hold together all the historical material, but also Cate, as a historical forerunner of the worldly-wise Anthony Piers, is the only figure who can provide the author with an opportunity to convey views about the events depicted and how their larger movements relate to the individuals who form part of them. Cate’s chosen profession implies seeing from a distance to capture a character or tone in phenomena and composing a vision of what is perceived. This with his sceptical apolitical outlook lends breadth to the otherwise relentlessly present immediacy of Bumpass’s experience of war. His antagonist companion asks him why he doesn’t just walk away from an army he has no allegiance to:
“I stay, Bumpass,” said Cate, and Usaph couldn’t make out whether he was joking or bitter, “because I got this view of history. I see that you and me, Bumpass, in all our present discomfort, are dead in the heart of history, like currants in a cake. […] History, Bumpass, history is a building whose goddam mortar is the blood of the young. History is a river, Bumpass, in which you and I are the fish. Have you caught a river perch, Bumpass, and when he lay panting wondered if he’d had a happy morning before you hauled him ashore? Did you wonder what his passions were, if he’d been near a lady fish that day, what the poor son of a bitch had had for breakfast? Neither does God or history enquire such things of us, Bumpass. Yet without us, God and history would not be a river. That’s the puzzle, Bumpass, that keeps us here.” (355)
The contrast between the painter and Bumpass highlights the class divide between officers and infantry of both sides throughout the book. Cate’s profession as artist is a marker of an ideal cultured society against which we see the filth and suffering of soldiering reality. Her last portrait displays a beauteous still body in domestic space and hovers over the narrative as an ideal to which all the troops long to return, offering a contrast to the noise, movement, and ugly harrowing of bodies on and near the battlefield. Cate and Bumpass together enact the writer’s struggle to combine the dramatic impact of action adventure (commercial appeal) with prismatic glints of colour, smell, texture in immanent details, with reflections on the form and meaning of events, and with “wide-angle” lyric scene painting, all of which infuse the narrative with literary qualities. Whether read as literary fiction or commercial blockbuster, it was Keneally’s vivid word painting that divided critics. Typical of the responses are David Holloway (1979), who reviewed Confederates as “a series of pictures, stark, impressionistic, intimate and at the same time vast”, and Mark Thomas, who lamented all the horrific depiction of wounded flesh as tasteless excess.
Painting as meta-commentary
Peter Pierce (2015) has observed how Keneally features writers as central characters in his fiction, providing a metafictional commentary on motivations for writing, the workings of the publishing industry, the relationship between writer and reader, and the moral responsibilities of the novelist. In a later historical novel of war, these topics are presented through a visual artist.
The Daughters of Mars (2012a) is very much in keeping with the fictionalized history mode of Confederates and Schindler’s Ark. The novel can be read as a late-period work in that it allows Keneally to reprise many of his techniques and interests. The story centres on two sisters who, as Australian nurses in the First World War, move between the battle fronts of Gallipoli and France. Doubling of protagonists, settings, and the structure of the novel permits Keneally to indulge in a technical device attempted a couple of times previously: an indeterminate ending involving alternative outcomes. In this book, the confused relay of news from overseas and the arbitrary fates of individuals in mass warfare give a degree of plausibility to our uncertainty over which sister fails to return home.
This confused doubling has a parallel in the sisters’ lovers. Charlie Condon appears in the second half of the novel. Officer Condon becomes nurse Sally’s companion and the counterpoint to her sister Naomi’s romance with a Quaker medical orderly, Sergeant Kiernan. Condon has ambitions to become a professional painter and makes sketches of life on the Western Front. Of course, the historical aspect of the novel validates the inclusion of an artist — several notable painters (Arthur Streeton, George Lambert, Will Dyson) bolstered their reputations with battle scenes on Turkish ridges and pictures of ruined villages in France. Charlie Condon is closer to someone like George Benson, not an official war artist, but an enlisted artilleryman who sketched and painted as a sideline (Australian War Museum, 2019). But apart from historical determinism, including Condon also provides Keneally with the opportunity to rehearse some of the concerns surrounding his own beginnings as an artist of the word.
The Daughters of Mars (2012a) is a late work in two senses: it comes when the author has entered his late seventies, and it treats a nationally celebrated period in history (Gallipoli and the war in France) that he touched on over three decades earlier (in Gossip from the Forest, 1975) and that had already been written about many times.
The story of nurses treating wounded soldiers provides the author with a justifiable basis for indulging a fascination with medicine and suffering bodies that runs through all his fiction, and which Keneally had been criticized for not controlling ever since Bring Larks and Heroes (Porterfield, 1972; Neville, 1978; Thomas, 1980). Keneally’s brother was a paediatric surgeon and his wife a nurse; he himself had spent a time in hospital as a child because of weak lungs, and was increasingly under medical care for heart-related problems as he passed middle age. In The Daughters of Mars the military hospital settings demand some medical detail, and their horrors serve to highlight the strangely stoic calm of the severely wounded. This does not fall into jingoistic paeans to young Australian heroes, but rather points to a mystery of how dignity and self-possession can survive here and there amid horrific circumstances. The late work allows Keneally to reprise elements of his writing career and find a form appropriate to carry them, his theme of potential redemption despite oppressive circumstance, and his own intimations of mortality. As Charlie says to nurse Sally, he wants in his paintings to capture “humans in the moments they’re unaware of their grace” (Keneally, 2012a: 305).
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In the novel it is both painting and the artist that represent this conundrum of the salvific persistence of “grace and style” in the face of blind violence, arbitrary death, and general squalor (416, 560).
Condon’s painting not only helps structure material and indicates theme, but also makes metafictional reference to Keneally’s life and to debates surrounding his entry on the field of Australian writing and his subsequent literary career. Charlie Condon grows up in Kempsey as the son of the local professional elite class (a bank manager, in his case), from which position he sees what goes on in the town. Once he trains as an artist, he wants to do justice to the Aboriginal population by actually seeing them realistically and making others see them through his painting (303–304). Charlie’s vision suggests Russell Drysdale’s 1940s paintings of indigenous families, and revisits the author’s depiction of his grandparents’ world in A River Town (1995) and his intentions in exposing Australia’s racism by writing about the Governor Brothers’ brief rebellious hold on the nation’s attention, fictionalized in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Steggall, 2015: 7–15, 150).
In more general terms, artist Condon’s debate with himself and discussions with his girlfriend Sally rehearse the literary project of the young Keneally, who joined a late-1960s revival of literary writing in Australia aimed at regenerating a national culture. There was still at the time little inclusion of Australian literature in school and university curricula, and discussion repeated debates from the 1890s and 1930s about how to use the ties to Europe without sacrificing Australian style and content (see Keneally, 2015; Dale, 2012). Condon’s visual focus sees the issue in terms of light: inspired by Monet’s impressionism, he wants to capture the brighter, more expansive light of Australia (340), and finds wartime France depressing: “A limited palette, you’d say […] Black brown and slimy green-yellow. Not the stuff of aesthetics” (456). It was this palette that prevented Australia’s war artists from receiving more than specialist attention until recent years, even though their European experience helped them to build stronger works once they returned home. In 1960s Australia, when university professors were still disparaging Australian writing for being too raw and too scant to warrant proper scholarly attention, Condon’s comments from 1917 were relevant:
I look at all this [European countryside], so very nice, very ordered. Farmed for thousands on years. And it does call up by contrast where we’re from. I mean to say, what a valley, the Macleay! It’s a valley that deserves a great painter. It’s a place that almost defies a person to become a great painter. It says, Come on, have a go, you useless hayseed! And it would explode Cézanne’s palette. (459)
And yet, the weight of cultural production in Europe sits heavily on the white Australian artist:
It all has a funny effect on your ambitions, you know. Part of you thinks, all right, all you’re fit for, Sonny Jim, is to go back home and illustrate the covers of comic books. And another part thinks, I can do something like that! (459); emphasis in original
Condon could be Keneally talking about his own artistic aspirations and the conditions under which they developed. When Condon returns to Australia, he holds an exhibition of his work. A friend from the war sees one painting and thinks it might be of the Somme. Condon admits that it is the Yser, and attempts to turn attention to his Australian paintings in the next room. The friend replies: “Painting the Yser isn’t an act of national dereliction” (585). This is an almost exact replication of a complaint by Keneally years earlier, that any novelist who departed from writing about Australia was criticized for dereliction of national duty (Baker, 1987: 132; Krausmann, 1979: 56). He was responding to what he saw as a cooling off among his reviewers once he began living abroad for periods of time and writing books set in Europe and North America (and it was the nationalistic demand for local work locally situated that governed who won Australia’s Miles Franklin Award for fiction for many years).
Another change in Keneally’s writing is indicated in Condon’s story as an artist:
He confessed he’s been studying in a Sydney art school which emphasised sketching as the building block of all at and whose motto was that it was better to sketch well for a lifetime than to paint badly for twenty years. (298)
This reminds us of Keneally’s connection with the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney. Ashton was notable for persuading the Art Gallery of New South Wales to acquire Australian works, and he taught war artist George Lambert. The school generated many well known modern Australian painters (Julian Ashton Art School, 2010). Its emphasis on the craft behind the vision is reflected in Condon, who in Egypt favours the less than transcendent limestone architecture of Imhotep over Pharaoh Djoser’s grand attempt at immortality (300). This can be read as a disguised allusion to Keneally’s change of direction in his writing career. Famed for his vivid word-painting and metaphysical interests in his early novels, Keneally consciously disassociated himself from modernist experiment and existential angst. From Jimmie Blacksmith onwards he concentrated on plainer writing and plot-driven stories, hoping to be appreciated as an “honest journeyman” craftsperson rather than an artistic genius (Baker, 1987: 124; Krausmann, 1979: 50; Keneally, 2015: 2). The Daughters of Mars stakes a claim that Keneally has “sketched well” throughout his career rather than “painting badly”, though it also attests to the long influence of painting and its visual effects on Keneally’s writing.
