Tom Keneally Watch #7

Reviews of Searching for Schindler

Dwight Garner in "The New York Times": "The book was published as fiction, Mr. Keneally writes, because: 'I felt that in Schindler I had written as a novelist, with a novelist's narrative pace and graphicness, though not in the sense of a fictionalizer. If three or four people told me that Schindler had more or less said certain things, I certainly put them in quotation marks, but otherwise the manuscript was largely innocent of dialogue.' He adds: 'For both commercial reasons and reasons of passion, I didn't want this book stuck in that section against the back wall of most American bookstores labeled JUDAICA.'"
Laura L. Hutchison in "The Free-Lance Star" considers the book "one to put on your 'list'".
"Lighthouse Patriot Journal": "you enjoyed the original story, you will also enjoy this follow up. Stephen Spielberg stated that he would have added film time if Keneally had written this book before the film was created."

Interview

Nicholas Wroe in "The Guardian".

Keneally has written about relations between Aboriginal and white settlers in Australia as well as European dealings with white Australia. He has produced novels and non-fiction books about the American civil war and the Irish diaspora. He has written about the fight for independence in Eritrea and repeatedly circled the events and implications of the second world war.

It is a fascination he traces back to childhood. "The town where I grew up had two Aboriginal settlements. Questions of the balance between races and, when two races don't get on particularly well, how they behave towards each other were everywhere. This was wartime, and the notion that Catholics couldn't be trusted if it came to the crunch, because they would side with the Pope not the Queen, was very strong. It is essentially the same rhetoric that is currently used against Muslims, and even at the time that fascinated me as much as it scared and affronted me. This stuff has always been my bag. It's what I'm interested in."

The DVDTimes website from the UK provides a review of The Devil's Playground, a film by Fred Schepisi that featured Keneally in an acting role.
The same website reviews the film adaptation of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.
The National Library of Australia has recently acquired an extensive selection of Tom Keneally's papers.