Bring Larks and Heroes

THOMAS KENEALLY
was born in 1935 in country New South Wales to Irish Catholic parents. As a child he dreamed of becoming a famous sportsman. In 1958 he entered the seminary but left in 1960 before being ordained. He had a number of different jobs and became for a time a schoolteacher.

Keneally published his first book
The Place at Whitton
in 1964. He won the Miles Franklin Award in consecutive years for his novels
Bring Larks and Heroes
(1967) and
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
(1968). He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times before being the first Australian ever to win it, in 1982, for
Schindler's Ark
. This book formed the basis of Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film
Schindler's List.
His novel
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
was made into a film by Fred Schepisi. The author played a cameo role.

Thomas Keneally has written over thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as plays and essays. He is an ardent Republican and was the founding chairman of the Australian Republican Movement. In 1983, Keneally became a Member of the Order of Australia and in 1997 was named as an Australian Living Treasure.

Scan the index of Robert Hughes' landmark account of Australia's founding,
The Fatal Shore
, and you will find no mention of Thomas Keneally's third novel,
Bring Larks and Heroes
. The omission is noteworthy because Hughes's 1987 history, hailed for its unsparing depictions of life in the penal colonies, would have been impossible without it.
Bring Larks and Heroes
laid bare the horrors of the convict era two decades before
The Fatal Shore
's appearance, at a time when there were few works on the history of transportation in print. Only Marcus Clarke's
For the Term of His Natural Life
and Jessica Anderson's
The Commandant
bear comparison with it as fictional explorations of the period. A notoriously exacting historian of the day, John Ritchie, made the novel compulsory reading for his first-year students at the Australian National University. ‘Where else,' he said, ‘will students get a more vivid and truer idea of those early days?'

Hughes' book arrived at a propitious moment. The years surrounding Australia's bicentennial were characterised by a newfound confidence. We had woken to a sense of ourselves as an independent, prosperous, multicultural nation, and were ready to embrace a ruthless accounting of the country's inauspicious beginnings.

Keneally laboured under different conditions. Australia in the mid-sixties was only beginning its slow non-Anglo flowering. Indigenous Australians had just won the right to be counted as citizens in their own land. The old tribal divisions between Protestant and Catholic remained entrenched, while the stain marking those with convict origins had not been expunged. Keneally dealt with a benighted past in an unwaveringly stark manner. For all the excitement that marked its reception, the novel sat awkwardly in its moment.

And, despite his hours of research at Sydney's Mitchell Library, Keneally was writing fiction.
Bring Larks and Heroes
is set with deliberate vagueness in ‘a penal colony in the South Pacific' during ‘the late eighteenth century', according to a prefatory note. The author shuffles the chronology of the Port Jackson settlement as well, most notably backdating the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion by a few years, so that the actions of the Irish agitators who shape his narrative can be linked to the revolutionary fervour emanating from France after 1788.

These easy liberties were evidence that a remarkable new novelist was in the ascent.
Bring Larks and Heroes
won the author his first Miles Franklin, in 1967. A year later he won it again with
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
—a quinella that has tended to blur the distinctive traits of two very different novels.

Bring Larks and Heroes
is, then, an early peak in a career whose Updikean longevity and range has few parallels in Australian letters. Keneally's story of an Irish Marine and his love for a servant girl is told with passion, intelligence, empathy and gallows humour. His is a vision of Hell on Earth in which intimations of paradise stubbornly persist.

Keneally's settlement is without roots in the past or hopes for the future. Threatened by starvation and driven by fear, what society it has is riven by resentments of class, religion and rank. The absurdity of a prison that punishes gaolers and felons alike by obliging them to share an alien environment at the end of the Earth is captured with bitter relish. But the world of
Bring Larks and Heroes
suggests a darker question. Have the agents of a distant empire, freed from custom or institutional restraint, grown as coarse and brutal as those they punish? Or is theirs the true face of power, stripped of its familiar guises?

Such is the regime that Corporal Phelim Halloran serves. He's a young man from County Wexford whose two years spent training for the cloth have coloured a sharp natural intellect with a casuist's taste for moral dilemmas. A family member's association with nationalists at home abruptly ended his hopes of a life in the Church. He joined the Marines from a prison cell.

Halloran is disturbed that he shares more with Catholic political prisoners transported for radicalism than with his Protestant senior officers, the plump sons of England's middling gentry. But most disturbing is the thought that he cannot marry his sweetheart—Ann Rush, a convict servant—because there is no Catholic priest in the colony to perform the ceremony.

In an old volume of Catholic doctrine Halloran discovers an obscure dispensation available to those in their position, permitting a secret exchange of private oaths. His guilt assuaged and her reticence overcome, Halloran and Ann become lovers. Their relationship, unsanctioned by Church, state or society, is the purest thing in the novel: a single true note among the discordant whole. And it is the necessity of hiding the marriage that obliges this man of conscience to perform otherwise intolerable tasks.

Halloran's intelligence, idealism and sincere if troubled faith make him a marvellous vehicle for Keneally. Through him we witness the colony in all its depravity and despair. From the grotesque lags rotted by scurvy who row him and a convict artist upriver to paint a commission for one of the colony's surgeons, to the official empyrean of Government House where His Excellency sits in judgment over all, the young Corporal traverses the breadth of what we might call colonial ‘society', if the word did not suggest a sense of community notably absent.

What we are given instead is the portrait of an authoritarian bureaucracy in which torture is ubiquitous, dissent is crushed and the rule of law is arbitrary. Halloran cleaves to his oath of allegiance, but his loyalties are tested daily. He watches helplessly as a convict accused of rape is hanged, even though he is a eunuch. Later Halloran will try to help a felon whose sentence has ended, yet who is tricked into a longer term. He sees indigenous men, dying of disease, strung together like a brace of pheasants. He sees a woman sell herself for a scrap of meat.

A generation later Hughes the historian would write of lashes administered in such punishing numbers as to shred a convict's skin to the bone. Keneally takes these objective facts and brings them to appalling life. For instance, the flogged Irishman, Eris Mealey, whom Halloran discovers in a convict hospital straight out of Hieronymus Bosch:

It was so huge an injury that you needed to verify your first sight of it, were compelled towards it, pushing your nose through its solid reek. But it was dim in the corner, and the putrefaction got behind the eyes and fogged them. You got an impression, though; at least that. Halloran's impression was that from neck to knee Mealey was halfway wrapped round by a fat, black, vampiring slough.

The white bones of the Irishman's shoulder blades, the jellied mass of his muscles and flesh, are images that Halloran, for all his determination to ignorance, cannot forget. It's no mistake that the novel's most consequential meeting, between Halloran and Robert Hearn, a fellow Irishman and a political prisoner, occurs in that scene's sickening wake.

Hearn is a silver-tongued Jacobin who senses the stricken conscience of his younger compatriot. He tests Halloran's commitment to King and country, and finds it compromised. Hearn's criticisms of the System are unanswerable; Halloran privately agrees with them. But it is the eloquence with which the Wicklow Presbyterian espouses his revolutionary ideals that nags. If the absence of any positive connection between individuals is what makes the colony a place of torment, Hearn suggests that different bonds might be forged.

The possibility of a less cruel and a more equable society touches a deep nerve in Halloran. When Hearn eventually calls on the Marine to choose his side, he does so in the knowledge that the young man's scruples will oblige him to act against the colony's regime. Here is the tragedy of Keneally's novel: Halloran is manipulated into making a sacrifice that will destroy him. But, because the Marine's crime is committed for reasons beyond the personal, his punishment overspills its single vessel. His end will exonerate the unknown victims of an unjust system in a way no history could.

Keneally is too independent a moral and intellectual agent, and too fond of the sensuous world and its inhabitants, to let
Bring Larks and Heroes
be reduced to quasi-Christian parable or political tract. Halloran's innocently carnal love for Ann is not a convenient device for the furthering of narrative. Their relationship offers glimpses of a transcendence that damns the iniquity all around.

A reviewer wrote of Keneally's second novel,
The Fear
, that the former seminarian would not produce something lasting until ‘he wrote the Priesthood out of his guts'. What makes
Bring Larks and Heroes
Keneally's true first novel is the sense that he has finally overcome the strictures of Catholic dogma (Keneally left the Church in the late 1950s and married soon after). The novel's prose may describe a dystopia but its music is that of a liberated man, exulting in the free play of his imagination.

This pleasure expresses itself multiply: in the deftly framed arguments between the revolutionary Hearn and his ambivalent compatriot; in the moral seriousness built in to the narrative, a paradoxical, secularised drama of conscience that recalls the best of Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch; and in the novel's brilliant descriptions of place, a world that elicits the same mild awe from readers that the first European arrivals would have felt. Of dozens of passages worth quoting the following account of a whale hunt in the harbour is typical of his elegant yet muscular approach:

The Whales came back in white froth, and went again; back and went again. Whenever they went, they whacked the water with what looked like wrath in such big creatures. Yet perhaps it was horror. Whichever way, men disappeared amongst curds of angry water…

…The creatures did not come back the third time. Halloran saw them in the fore of his mind nosing down into those foreign shallows. Behind their pigs' eyes, the brains and foundry hearts were busy with dismay, busy with deprivation, busy with pain. The bay healed back to uniform blue as if they had never come.

We're so used to the knockabout fluency and swiftness of Thomas Keneally's later style that the burnished prose of
Bring Larks and Heroes
comes as a surprise. The most obvious parent of these pages is Patrick White: an observation not without irony, for Keneally's early champions held him up as a worthy alternative to the lugubrious, aloof elder statesman of Australian literary art.

White loomed so large then that the real challenge was to not be overwhelmed by his presence. Keneally shares his ability to, in Peter Pierce's words, ‘vivify Australia's past, making it momentous—by turns strange and terrible, comic and tragic'. But he departs from White in his preoccupation with individual conscience and its agonised relations to institutional authority. This is what links
Bring Larks and Heroes
to
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
—it's the golden thread that runs through all his fiction.

There is a peculiar clarity to this early iteration of Keneally's lifelong concern. The novel is a mirror, a terribly clear one. Its nightmares persist into the present. Marine Corporal Phelim Halloran, lovesick poet, doomed democrat, good and honest man, is a victim but the system he suffers under has not been banished by Enlightenment ideals. Keneally's remarkable novel reminds us that the forces that enabled that system remain inescapable; that Sydney and Port Arthur were precursors of the concentration camp and the Gulag; and that Phelim Halloran walks among us still.