THOMAS KENEALLY was born in 1935 in country New South Wales to Irish Catholic parents. As a child he dreamed of becoming a famous sportsman. In 1958 he entered the seminary but left in 1960 before being ordained. He had a number of different jobs and became for a time a schoolteacher.
Keneally published his first book The Place at Whitton in 1964. He won the Miles Franklin Award in consecutive years for his novels Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968). He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before being the first Australian ever to win it, in 1982, for Schindler’s Ark. This book formed the basis of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List. His novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith was made into a film by Fred Schepisi. The author played a cameo role.
Thomas Keneally has written over thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as plays and essays. He is an ardent Republican and was the founding chairman of the Australian Republican Movement. In 1983, Keneally became a Member of the Order of Australia and in 1997 was named as an Australian Living Treasure.
GEORDIE WILLIAMSON is chief literary critic of the Australian, a position he has held since 2008. His essays and reviews have been appearing in newspapers and magazines here and in the UK for over a decade. In 2011, he won the Pascall Prize for criticism.
ALSO BY THOMAS KENEALLY
Fiction
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
A Dutiful Daughter
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Schindler’s Ark
An Angel in Australia
Gossip from the Forest
Confederates
The Widow and Her Hero
The People’s Train
Non-fiction
Our Republic
Homebush Boy: A Memoir
Searching for Schindler: A Memoir
Australians: Origins to Eureka
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Copyright © Thomas Keneally 1967
Introduction copyright © Geordie Williamson 2012
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First published by Cassell Australia 1967
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer
Primary print ISBN: 9781921922237
Ebook ISBN: 9781921921834
Author: Keneally, Thomas, 1935-
Title: Bring larks and heroes / by Thomas Keneally ; introduction by Geordie Williamson.
Series: Text classics.
Other Authors/Contributors: Williamson, Geordie.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
At the World’s Worst End
by Geordie Williamson
Bring Larks and Heroes
Scan the index of Robert Hughes’ landmark account of Australia’s founding, The Fatal Shore, and you will find no mention of Thomas Keneally’s third novel, Bring Larks and Heroes. The omission is noteworthy because Hughes’s 1987 history, hailed for its unsparing depictions of life in the penal colonies, would have been impossible without it. Bring Larks and Heroes laid bare the horrors of the convict era two decades before The Fatal Shore’s appearance, at a time when there were few works on the history of transportation in print. Only Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life and Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant bear comparison with it as fictional explorations of the period. A notoriously exacting historian of the day, John Ritchie, made the novel compulsory reading for his first-year students at the Australian National University. ‘Where else,’ he said, ‘will students get a more vivid and truer idea of those early days?’
Hughes’ book arrived at a propitious moment. The years surrounding Australia’s bicentennial were characterised by a newfound confidence. We had woken to a sense of ourselves as an independent, prosperous, multicultural nation, and were ready to embrace a ruthless accounting of the country’s inauspicious beginnings.
Keneally laboured under different conditions. Australia in the mid-sixties was only beginning its slow non-Anglo flowering. Indigenous Australians had just won the right to be counted as citizens in their own land. The old tribal divisions between Protestant and Catholic remained entrenched, while the stain marking those with convict origins had not been expunged. Keneally dealt with a benighted past in an unwaveringly stark manner. For all the excitement that marked its reception, the novel sat awkwardly in its moment.
And, despite his hours of research at Sydney’s Mitchell Library, Keneally was writing fiction. Bring Larks and Heroes is set with deliberate vagueness in ‘a penal colony in the South Pacific’ during ‘the late eighteenth century’, according to a prefatory note. The author shuffles the chronology of the Port Jackson settlement as well, most notably backdating the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion by a few years, so that the actions of the Irish agitators who shape his narrative can be linked to the revolutionary fervour emanating from France after 1788.
These easy liberties were evidence that a remarkable new novelist was in the ascent. Bring Larks and Heroes won the author his first Miles Franklin, in 1967. A year later he won it again with Three Cheers for the Paraclete—a quinella that has tended to blur the distinctive traits of two very different novels.
Bring Larks and Heroes is, then, an early peak in a career whose Updikean longevity and range has few parallels in Australian letters. Keneally’s story of an Irish Marine and his love for a servant girl is told with passion, intelligence, empathy and gallows humour. His is a vision of Hell on Earth in which intimations of paradise stubbornly persist.
Keneally’s settlement is without roots in the past or hopes for the future. Threatened by starvation and driven by fear, what society it has is riven by resentments of class, religion and rank. The absurdity of a prison that punishes gaolers and felons alike by obliging them to share an alien environment at the end of the Earth is captured with bitter relish. But the world of Bring Larks and Heroes suggests a darker question. Have the agents of a distant empire, freed from custom or institutional restraint, grown as coarse and brutal as those they punish? Or is theirs the true face of power, stripped of its familiar guises?
Such is the regime that Corporal Phelim Halloran serves. He’s a young man from County Wexford whose two years spent training for the cloth have coloured a sharp natural intellect with a casuist’s taste for moral dilemmas. A family member’s association with nationalists at home abruptly ended his hopes of a life in the Church. He joined the Marines from a prison cell.
Halloran is disturbed that he shares more with Catholic political prisoners transported for radicalism than with his Protestant senior officers, the plump sons of England’s middling gentry. But most disturbing is the thought t
hat he cannot marry his sweetheart—Ann Rush, a convict servant—because there is no Catholic priest in the colony to perform the ceremony.
In an old volume of Catholic doctrine Halloran discovers an obscure dispensation available to those in their position, permitting a secret exchange of private oaths. His guilt assuaged and her reticence overcome, Halloran and Ann become lovers. Their relationship, unsanctioned by Church, state or society, is the purest thing in the novel: a single true note among the discordant whole. And it is the necessity of hiding the marriage that obliges this man of conscience to perform otherwise intolerable tasks.
Halloran’s intelligence, idealism and sincere if troubled faith make him a marvellous vehicle for Keneally. Through him we witness the colony in all its depravity and despair. From the grotesque lags rotted by scurvy who row him and a convict artist upriver to paint a commission for one of the colony’s surgeons, to the official empyrean of Government House where His Excellency sits in judgment over all, the young Corporal traverses the breadth of what we might call colonial ‘society’, if the word did not suggest a sense of community notably absent.
What we are given instead is the portrait of an authoritarian bureaucracy in which torture is ubiquitous, dissent is crushed and the rule of law is arbitrary. Halloran cleaves to his oath of allegiance, but his loyalties are tested daily. He watches helplessly as a convict accused of rape is hanged, even though he is a eunuch. Later Halloran will try to help a felon whose sentence has ended, yet who is tricked into a longer term. He sees indigenous men, dying of disease, strung together like a brace of pheasants. He sees a woman sell herself for a scrap of meat.
A generation later Hughes the historian would write of lashes administered in such punishing numbers as to shred a convict’s skin to the bone. Keneally takes these objective facts and brings them to appalling life. For instance, the flogged Irishman, Eris Mealey, whom Halloran discovers in a convict hospital straight out of Hieronymus Bosch:
It was so huge an injury that you needed to verify your first sight of it, were compelled towards it, pushing your nose through its solid reek. But it was dim in the corner, and the putrefaction got behind the eyes and fogged them. You got an impression, though; at least that. Halloran’s impression was that from neck to knee Mealey was halfway wrapped round by a fat, black, vampiring slough.
The white bones of the Irishman’s shoulder blades, the jellied mass of his muscles and flesh, are images that Halloran, for all his determination to ignorance, cannot forget. It’s no mistake that the novel’s most consequential meeting, between Halloran and Robert Hearn, a fellow Irishman and a political prisoner, occurs in that scene’s sickening wake.
Hearn is a silver-tongued Jacobin who senses the stricken conscience of his younger compatriot. He tests Halloran’s commitment to King and country, and finds it compromised. Hearn’s criticisms of the System are unanswerable; Halloran privately agrees with them. But it is the eloquence with which the Wicklow Presbyterian espouses his revolutionary ideals that nags. If the absence of any positive connection between individuals is what makes the colony a place of torment, Hearn suggests that different bonds might be forged.
The possibility of a less cruel and a more equable society touches a deep nerve in Halloran. When Hearn eventually calls on the Marine to choose his side, he does so in the knowledge that the young man’s scruples will oblige him to act against the colony’s regime. Here is the tragedy of Keneally’s novel: Halloran is manipulated into making a sacrifice that will destroy him. But, because the Marine’s crime is committed for reasons beyond the personal, his punishment overspills its single vessel. His end will exonerate the unknown victims of an unjust system in a way no history could.
Keneally is too independent a moral and intellectual agent, and too fond of the sensuous world and its inhabitants, to let Bring Larks and Heroes be reduced to quasi-Christian parable or political tract. Halloran’s innocently carnal love for Ann is not a convenient device for the furthering of narrative. Their relationship offers glimpses of a transcendence that damns the iniquity all around.
A reviewer wrote of Keneally’s second novel, The Fear, that the former seminarian would not produce something lasting until ‘he wrote the Priesthood out of his guts’. What makes Bring Larks and Heroes Keneally’s true first novel is the sense that he has finally overcome the strictures of Catholic dogma (Keneally left the Church in the late 1950s and married soon after). The novel’s prose may describe a dystopia but its music is that of a liberated man, exulting in the free play of his imagination.
This pleasure expresses itself multiply: in the deftly framed arguments between the revolutionary Hearn and his ambivalent compatriot; in the moral seriousness built in to the narrative, a paradoxical, secularised drama of conscience that recalls the best of Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch; and in the novel’s brilliant descriptions of place, a world that elicits the same mild awe from readers that the first European arrivals would have felt. Of dozens of passages worth quoting the following account of a whale hunt in the harbour is typical of his elegant yet muscular approach:
The Whales came back in white froth, and went again; back and went again. Whenever they went, they whacked the water with what looked like wrath in such big creatures. Yet perhaps it was horror. Whichever way, men disappeared amongst curds of angry water…
…The creatures did not come back the third time. Halloran saw them in the fore of his mind nosing down into those foreign shallows. Behind their pigs’ eyes, the brains and foundry hearts were busy with dismay, busy with deprivation, busy with pain. The bay healed back to uniform blue as if they had never come.
We’re so used to the knockabout fluency and swiftness of Thomas Keneally’s later style that the burnished prose of Bring Larks and Heroes comes as a surprise. The most obvious parent of these pages is Patrick White: an observation not without irony, for Keneally’s early champions held him up as a worthy alternative to the lugubrious, aloof elder statesman of Australian literary art.
White loomed so large then that the real challenge was to not be overwhelmed by his presence. Keneally shares his ability to, in Peter Pierce’s words, ‘vivify Australia’s past, making it momentous—by turns strange and terrible, comic and tragic’. But he departs from White in his preoccupation with individual conscience and its agonised relations to institutional authority. This is what links Bring Larks and Heroes to Three Cheers for the Paraclete—it’s the golden thread that runs through all his fiction.
There is a peculiar clarity to this early iteration of Keneally’s lifelong concern. The novel is a mirror, a terribly clear one. Its nightmares persist into the present. Marine Corporal Phelim Halloran, lovesick poet, doomed democrat, good and honest man, is a victim but the system he suffers under has not been banished by Enlightenment ideals. Keneally’s remarkable novel reminds us that the forces that enabled that system remain inescapable; that Sydney and Port Arthur were precursors of the concentration camp and the Gulag; and that Phelim Halloran walks among us still.
To Judith
who nursed this poor herd of chapters to pasture
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This novel is set in a penal colony in the South Pacific. The time is the late eighteenth century. Though the germ-idea from which the book grew was a passage in Captain Watkin Tench’s journal, Account of Settlement at Port Jackson, and although many of the administrative details of this fictional station will resemble those of the settlement of which Tench wrote, the members of the administration are all – for better or worse – imaginary.
The geography of the colony suggests that of Sydney, but is not meant to be identified with it.
An example of the liberties I have taken is the use of the word ‘felon’ in preference to ‘convict’. While ‘felon’ did not, until well into the nineteenth century, become a general term for transported prisoners, it is used generally of prisoners in this story. ‘Con
vict’ is a word which possesses pungent tones and colours, a word loaded with distracting evocations, especially for Australian readers. Whereas ‘felon’ was free to take on the colour of whatever happened in these pages.
Anachronistic idioms have been avoided wherever their use would seem too blatant. But it is hoped that the reader who accepts the claim that the world of this novel is a world of its own will also accept the claim that it is allowed to have an idiom of its own.
1
At the world’s worse end, it is Sunday afternoon in February. Through the edge of the forest a soldier moves without any idea that he’s caught in a mesh of sunlight and shade. Corporal Halloran’s this fellow’s name. He’s a lean boy taking long strides through the Sabbath heat. Visibly, he has the illusion of knowing where he’s going. Let us say, without conceit, that if any of his ideas on this subject were not illusion, there would be no story.
He is not exactly a parade-ground soldier today. His hair isn’t slicked into a queue, because the garrison he serves in has no pomade left, and some idle subaltern is trying to convert the goo into candles. Halloran’s in his shirt, his forage jacket over his left arm. He wears gaiters over canvas shoes. Anyone who knew firearms would take great interest in the musket he’s got in his right hand. It’s a rare model that usually hangs in the company commander’s office.
The afternoon is hot in this alien forest. The sunlight burrows like a worm in both eye-balls. His jacket looks pallid, the arms are rotted out of his yellowing shirt, and, under the gaiters, worn for the occasion, the canvas shoes are too light for this knobbly land. Yet, as already seen, he takes long strides, he moves with vigour. He’s on his way to Mr Commissary Blythe’s place, where his secret bride, Ann Rush, runs the kitchen and the house. When he arrives in the Blythes’ futile vegetable garden, and comes mooning up to the kitchen door, he will, in fact, call Ann my secret bride, my bride in Christ. She is his secret bride. If Mrs Blythe knew, she would do her best to crucify him, though that he is a spouse in secret today comes largely as the result of a summons from Mrs Blythe six weeks ago.