Thomas Keneally and Jimmie Blacksmith

Abstract

This volume has been put together in some haste as a working text for a Residential School at the University of New England in September concerned with 'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith' and Keneally's later novels. It follows on the similar weekend study course on Keneally's first five novels held here early this decade. For several of these seminars on the Modern Novel - in an ongoing series now numbering almost a score from the first one in January 1968 - folders of notes have been prepared, or books of select proceedings have been issued, notably with 'Tolkien: Cult or Culture?' (1969) and 'Gleanings from Greeneland' (1972). The present compilation falls somewhere between these two approaches. Many persons are interested in Keneally's novel on the aborigine's defiance for differing reasons - because of the local aspect of the historical events, the modern fictional recension, or the film's largely New England locations. For these persons, there has been a bias in the items selected, towards the process whereby the novel and the film have, in the last year or so, created their own legend, as well as a remarkable momentum both within Australia and overseas. Some attempt has thus been made to indicate, through various documents, the stages whereby this has occurred.