SOURCE: "Wizard of Oz with Jet Lag and Too Busy for His Own Good," in The Observer, September 12, 1993, p. 53.

In the review below, Conrad finds the arguments and production values of Memoirs from a Young Republic "shockingly amateurish.".

Writers are the makers and the keepers of a nation's identity. Thomas Keneally (or Tom, as he now matily styles himself) has done as much as any living writer to identify and extol Australia. He deals with the bogus ceremonial of its European settlement in The Playmaker, and with the suppressed tragedy of aboriginal dispossession in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith; in Outback he tramps across its dusty, torrid, adored terrain.

He was an inevitable choice as chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, which aims to make the country at long last its own master by severing constitutional links with Britain before the centenary of federation in 2001. Why then has...