The Making of Thomas Keneally

Abstract

The making of Thomas Keneally can be conventionally addressed in regard to his Irish Catholic working-class ancestry, his discovery of a vocation that was not the priesthood, and the forging of a career that has been at once an artistic and a commercial success. The approach here will be more oblique, examining the role of Manning Clark, the early volumes of whose A History of Australia were an important influence on such novels by Keneally as Bring Larks and Heroes (1968), and to a lesser extent Patrick White, in the making of Thomas Keneally; also the ways in which – as Keneally himself put it, with some ambivalence – ‘the critics made me.’