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Interviews With 10 Australian Authors, Ch 8: Experience colonial Australia with Tom Keneally

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Author Tom Keneally
Interviews With 10 Australian Authors, Ch 8: Experience colonial Australia with Tom Keneally

SUBJECTS:  English

YEARS:  5–6, 7–8, 9–10


Thomas Keneally likes to put himself in the shoes of figures from history.

Whether it's as a member of the SS or an Indigenous man treated unjustly, he asks 'What would I have done?' In this interview he discusses why he was drawn to the Jimmie Governor story and the significance of the looming Federation of Australia.

The novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith depicts the marginalisation of the Aboriginal people. Jimmie is 'half-caste', and this tension between identities, as well as the prejudice he endures at the hands of his white employers, drives the novel and inspires Jimmie's murderous outburst.

Set in the months before Federation, the novel poses questions about the formation of the Australian identity, especially in relation to colonial Britain. Parallels are drawn between the Boer war, a war that Australians were fighting and dying in as citizens of the British Commonwealth, and the war Jimmie declares against those who treated him unjustly.



Production Date: 2015


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Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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