Coming to Terms with Australia's Past: Thomas Keneally's <em>Bring Larks and Heroes</em>

Abstract

THOMAS KENEALLY'S THIRD NOVEL, BRING LARKS AND HEROES, is among most significant works of 1960s to portray penal society of Australia's past at the world's worse end (Keneally, Larks 7).1 Published during time of deep social and cultural change in Australia, book is an investigation of mechanisms that lie at foundation of an oppressively brutal society, in world where values of old clash with, and are transformed by, reality of new. The release of novel marked crucial moment in life of its author by establishing him as professional writer.2 As Laurie Clancy states in his essay Conscience and Corruption: Thomas Keneally's Three Novels:Bring Larks and Heroes [. . .] takes him from apprenticeship into maturity at one lightning stroke. Although it is not an unflawed novel, astonishing range and variety of effect its language can encompass, its power of bringing past into dazzlingly relevant present, and its sheer lyric momentum, mark it as one of outstanding achievements of fiction since 1945. Here ideas and dilemmas which remained half-buried under weight of artificiality in first two novels are brought fully to surface and explored in depth (Clancy 33).Set in late-eighteenth-century penal colony somewhere in South Pacific,3 novel offers vivid and stark portrait of first years of European settlement in Australia through recovery and restoration of convict life, voices and experiences that have been for so long object of collective amnesia, which Robert Hughes in his influential and thorough study on convictism, The Fatal Shore (1987), defines as a national pact of silence (Hughes xii).Keneally demonstrates right from beginning strong preoccupation with past and specific interest towards subjects marginalized from official historiography, thus reflecting new way of thinking about (and its multifaceted and often conflicting interpretations/representations) that characterizes intellectual community starting from mid1960s. It was during this period, in conjunction with great decolonizations and emergence of social and history from below (see Chakrabarty), that Australian Legend began to show signs of weakness: revising dominant myths and challenging stereotypical beliefs became urgent and essential. The more orthodox nationalist versions of past artificially formed by process of selection and exclusion began to be deconstructed, reappraised and enriched by addition of groups and classes that had been ignored, romanticized or relegated to margins of official master narratives. Public intellectuals, particularly historians and writers, made-and continue to make-a great contribution to process of retrieving past and rewriting history. By subverting very notion that reveals facts and absolute truths (see Hayden White) and dismantling assumptions that coherent and univocal representation is possible, they re-read and rewrote past through lens of richer, more varied-albeit often problematic and complex-history.Naturally, process of recuperation rarely proceeds without opposition and with respect to two great removals from (regarding, respectively, Aboriginal peoples and convict past) national consciousness remains somewhat divided in way in which it interprets and handles darkest aspects of of Australia.4 Such process of revision finds one of its greatest expressions in historical novel. This literary genre allows writer to disclose through stories whole world that has been buried, in an attempt to give back to protagonists who lived those stories voice and human complexity that exist beyond limits of traditional historical representations.Far from being, however, an historical novel in former, limited connotation of term, emerging historical novel differed from social reportage la Tolstoy or la Dickens by re-reading and re-telling events of past that are analysed and scrutinized by virtue of their relevance to present. …