SOURCE: "History and the Refuge of Art: Thomas Keneally's Sense of the Past," in The Writer's Sense of the Past: Essays on Southeast Asian and Australian Literature, edited by Kerpal Singh, Singapore University Press, 1987, pp. 160-69.

In the following essay, English examines the subjective bases of the authorial consciousness that informs Keneally's novels, emphasizing specifically the textual connections between his own biography, his sense of history, and other written texts..

In every aspect of his published writing and commentary, Thomas Keneally presents a consistent and uniform consciousness: he lives in a world of unresolved dualisms. The primary dualism is that which distinguishes the sacred potential of the will from the profane, finite betrayal of all bodies, or forms, most importantly the human body.

Keneally presumes that to be an author is to accept the task of eliminating these dualisms. He regards himself as a mediator in the eschatological...