Australian Novelist Tom Keneally on His Upcoming China Tour
By Erica Martin
We anticipated plenty of good stories from our conversation with esteemed novelist Tom Keneally. But we never would have guessed that a first-hand account of the earliest moments in Chinese-Australian diplomacy would be among them.
In addition to penning dozens of novels, including the book that inspired the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List, Keneally toured China in 1980 as part of an early cultural exchange program.
“We had an Australian politician go to China even earlier than Nixon,” Keneally tells us. “By the late 1970s, an Australia-China council had been appointed to advise Australia on the best way to exchange ideas. I was a member of that.”
This was against the backdrop of China’s economic opening, and only a few years after the dismantling of ‘White Australia’ policies that severely restricted Chinese migration to Australia. The two nations had had very little exposure to one another, making Keneally one of the first Australians to witness China on the precipice of rapid development.
Book tours and literary events have brought him back to China over the years (he’s a friend of Michelle Garnaut, founder of the Shanghai and Beijing International Literary Festivals), and he appears thrilled about his upcoming trip for Australian Writers’ Week. “I’m 81, and there will eventually be a last tour of China,” he says with a cackle. “If this is it, I’m certainly looking forward to visiting all the old places.”
Given that Keneally’s genre of choice – for almost all of his 36 novels – has been historical fiction, it seems only fitting that he has has lived through a major historic moment or two.
“It’s probably because I’m a bad plotter,” he jokes, though the acclaim for his books about Joan of Arc (Blood Red, Sister Rose), Australia’s history as a penal colony (The Playmaker, among others), and of course Oskar Schindler, would suggest otherwise.
“History gives you a line to follow, and once time has passed, you know what the ironies are,” he says. “So you can apply those ironies in a way that the contemporary situation doesn’t allow you to.”
As is inevitably the case with historical fiction, Keneally’s personal experience seems removed from his writing fodder. But he still finds common ground with his characters. The fact that his great uncle was sent to Australia as a political prisoner colors much of his writing on Australian history. His father’s stint fighting the Third Reich in North Africa (during which time he sent the then 8-year-old Keneally “bits of pistols, a holster and all the stuff that was in the movies”) made the war more real for him when reflecting on it decades later for Schindler’s Ark, the source material for the film Schindler’s List.
“No matter what we humans do, advance or step back, it’s all bloody complicated, and there are moral and physical casualties,” Keneally says of the diverse characters who’ve inspired his writing through the years. “We are an amazing study.”
Keneally returned to the subject of Schindler more recently in Searching for Schindler, a 2008 memoir about his extraordinary friendship with Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor and one of the real-life “Schindler Jews.” Keneally met Pfefferberg by chance in the latter’s leather goods store in LA in 1980, which eventually led to the novel.
His current project, meanwhile, isn’t exactly historical fiction – and it’s bound to feel more personal than some of his other work. The forthcoming novel will interweave the life of an 80-year-old man in present-day Australia with a man who lived in the same place 42,000 years ago. Keneally drew inspiration from an ancient skeleton discovered in Australia – and from his own experience of aging.
“The book is about the eternal problem of dying,” Keneally says, “but that doesn’t mean I’m putting my hand up to the gods and saying, ‘Please knock me over now!’ I want to get my tour of China in first.”
BEIJING: Tom Keneally: The story behind Schindler’s List; May 12, 7-8.30pm; RMB50 (includes a drink); The Bookworm, 4 Sanlitun South Street 三里屯南街4号楼(6586 9507)
SHANGHAI: May 16, 7-8.30pm. No Cover. Shanghai Library (china.embassy.gov.au).
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