Novelist, playwright, author of non-fiction
DLitt (honoris causa) (Qld), (UWS), (Nat. Univ., Ireland), (Fairley Dickenson Univ., USA), (Rollins, USA)

Thomas Keneally addressed graduates from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Thursday 26 April 2012, 10.30am.

About the speaker

Our speaker today is Thomas Keneally.

Thomas is considered one of Australia's most prolific writers and is known for his novels, non-fiction books and screenplays. He won both the prestigious Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize forSchindler's Ark. In 1993, Steven Spielberg's cinematic adaptation of Thomas' book was released as Schindler's List, which won several Academy Awards. His novels The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, andConfederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The Miles Franklin Award is awarded to a 'published novel or play portraying Australian life in any of its phases'. Thomas' Bring Larks and Heroes andThree Cheers for the Paraclete have both won this award. His book, The People's Train, was a contender for both the Miles Franklin Award and Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia division.

His non-fiction works include Three Famines which was an LA Times Book of the Year, the memoir Searching for Schindler, and historical narratives The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel.

His fiction work includes An Angel in Australia, Bettany's Book and The Widow and Her Hero, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award.

Thomas has received an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from both the University of Queensland and the National University of Ireland. He has held lecturing and academic positions at the University of New England, the University of California and New York University.

Thomas is an ambassador for the Asthma Foundation and was awarded the Order of Australia in 1983 for his services to Australian Literature.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Mr Thomas Keneally to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

May I offer my heartfelt congratulations also. You're all young, and now you want to get out into the air and take each other by the hand, and kiss each other and receive the applause of your families. Some of you may be the first of your clan to take a degree, and your family is waiting to applaud you with a special intensity.

But the rule of these ceremonies is that before you can be liberated, you are forced by your university to listen to some older person like me give you ten minutes of advice or information you're probably not in the mood to hear. But that's the way it is today. It's bad luck for you. You've heard of the soupdu jour. Well, I am the boring old bloke du jour.

I am a novelist and a lay, that is, non-academic, historian. I have written a great deal of novels about racial and cultural hysteria. These fevers seem to be part of our nature. As we see each evening on television - they bedevil our species. They cause us not only to insult each other, but also to harm each other psychologically, and out of the mouths of semi-automatic weapons, and with high explosives. I've been fascinated by race ever since, as a little kid in a country town in the White Australia of the early 1940s, I saw Aboriginals from the local settlement walk past our gate. They were a people bewildered by loss of land, by having their culture intruded up on and squashed, and in a naive childhood way, they fascinated me.

My most notorious novel about race is Schindler's Ark, called Schindler's Listin America. As an Australian redneck I'd always been engrossed in the question of why there was so much hate in Europe, and why it's still there, all crammed into such a small space. Since my father was an Australian soldier in North Africa, and regularly sent me home what I saw as souvenirs - German corporal's stripes, pistol holsters, and what I thought of as glamorous mementos - I was always enthralled by the way European hatred emerged in World War II, stoked by the demagogue Hitler.

What has changed? In two areas of the world which presently have our attention, Afghanistan and Egypt, there is in the first country savagery from the Shi'ite majority against the Sunni Pashtoon minority, and in the latter, Egypt, attacks on Coptic Christians by zealots in the civilian population, and even in the army. The story of our cultural and religious tribalism, and the brutality it gives birth to, rolls on and on, and always leaves in its wake the debris of corpses.

There is an obscure novel of mine, probably out of print, and a book which will never be made into a film by Steven Spielberg, named A River Town. In it, I tell the story of my immigrant grandparents from Ireland. It's full of lies, of course, as all novels are. They don't call them fiction for nothing. The point is that when I was a kid, the Irish Catholics were considered untrustworthy by many in the majority culture. Who would we be loyal to? bigots asked. The Church or the country? I am reminded of some of the recent prejudice directed at Muslim immigrants.

In any case, in this novel of mine, set in a bush town in 1900, there exists a small community who are lower in status even than the Irish and even than the Aboriginals. It is a group of Indian hawkers who sell cloth and patent medicines to farming families up and down the river. I depict in the novel a friendship developing, after initial hostility, between the Irishman and the Indian peddler. For that is the remarkable thing - you can achieve brotherhood across the barriers of hatred, suspicion race and culture, and there is always something wonderful and dramatic about that. Rescues of human by human do occur, and not only does our society benefit but so do the plots of novels, plays and movies. Romeo loves Juliet despite the hated between their families.

I believe that many of our fevers and frenzies about race are ultimately proven wrong by history. The Irish Australians did make good Australians. After World War II the Age newspaper ran a poll on what immigrants Australians wanted. People said they wanted, above all, people from the British Isles, and if necessary, Northern Europeans. Germans were to be preferred to Jews. The Greeks and Italians, it was believed, should not be invited to immigrate and would not make good citizens. I heard people declare in the suburb where I was then living as a pre-adolescent child, 'They'll never be Australians like we're Australians.' Folk from the Baltic States and from Eastern Europe, many of whom were what were called Displaced Persons, the equivalent of today's refugees, were not enthusiastically welcomed at all and were referred to as 'reffos'.

Have any of the prejudices of that post-war period been proven to be right? No, none of them have. Imagine Australia today if we had not had immigration from Southern Europe.

In the 1990s Pauline Hanson saw a threat to our culture, and our very essence, in Asian immigration. Has her hysteria been proven to be well founded? Again, obviously not. I know that the issue of immigration and refugees is one which makes people yell at each other and creates more fire of rage than light. So --honestly - I'm not looking for an argument on your day of days. I am telling you merely of what I have seen in a lifetime. That nearly every phase of immigration since World War II created ridiculous statements and ludicrous levels of fear in parts of the Australian community at the time they occurred.

And I would like calmly and with respect, and without accusing anyone of malice in their thoughts or acts, to suggest that our present political obsession with asylum seekers might be just as wrong as people in the past were wrong about the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, the Balts, the Poles, the Chinese, the people of Muslim background, and so on. For with the end of White Australia, the growing Asian immigration to Australia did not cause the sky to fall in.

May I argue that it seems in some senses ridiculous to me that so much of our political fervour is spent on asylum seeker boats? Everyone is concerned about the safety of those who travel on these risky boats. Everyone is concerned about the criminality of those who own and crew them. Yet why does this question of boats dominate so much of our debate? I ask the question because less than one in five asylum seekers arrives in Australia by boat. More than four out of five arrive by plane. We lock up the ones who arrive by boat and, generally, not the ones who arrive by plane. Yet while the owners of the boats are committing a crime, the people who -- in their desperation -- travel on them, are not. In fact, 80% of those who arrive by boat are eventually given Australian residency, whereas only 20% of those who arrive by plane get residency. Yet all the concentration of resources and political opinion and the ravings of radio jocks are concentrated on the less than 20% who arrive by boat.

Why then the difference of treatment between the boat people and those who arrive by plane? Is it necessary to lock boat asylum seekers for indefinite periods at great expense to our Commonwealth, and thus to you? Last year a Tamil refugee named Shooty Vikadan suicided in Villawood detention centre after having been declared a genuine refugee in March. He was still locked up in October while awaiting a merely routine clearance from our security authorities. Why was it necessary to lock him up in the first place, at your expense and for more than two years? Why did it take so long to decide he ought to get Australian residence? And why was he still there, denied a day pass to go to a Hindu festival, months afterwards? Of course we can't let just anyone into the country, and no one is saying we should. But there are other less expensive and less damaging ways to handle the matter and to deal honourably with the people involved. And is this an issue of race? Well, let me say I have never met an illegal, visa-overstaying Caucasian - American, New Zealander - in a detention centre. I don't want to, of course. But how interesting that our detention centres are full of non-Caucasians!

What's the answer? Rather than leaving this as an issue for politicians to blather and chicane around, let's set up an independent refugee authority to look after policy. Let's phase out mandatory detention - which is costing you and me while saving us from nothing - and let us quickly - quickly! - determine the cases of asylum seekers. Let's use mandatory detention only for health, identity and security checks that do not take years, but one month. Let's have accommodation centres - not prisons -- for the people involved. And for God's own sweet sake, let's release all children from mandatory detention. If these are crazy suggestions, then I'm happy to be called crazy.

I raise this, even at the risk of annoying you, as the last sombre sentence you'll hear before you leave these great teachers and this wonderful institution behind you. I do so because all my writing, all my experience of race matters, all history proves that we should be suspicious of politicians of any party who tried to concentrate our passion upon a small minority. When we see this kind of trick played upon us we should ask, 'Who is benefitting from this? Are our taxes validly being spent upon it?' We should be suspicious of it because it means that they may be distracting us from some more important issue -- like a conjurer who makes us concentrate on his right hand as he performs the trick with his left.

I am sure there will be a time in Australian history when we will look back upon all this boat people hysteria as a farcical episode in our history. I believe that our government and the opposition are wrongheaded in their treatment of, and emphasis upon, this matter, and that we are being taken for a ride.

I am at the same time quick to celebrate the fact that we live in one of the more successful societies in the world, where there are citizens of various origins, the great majority of whom put a value on our shared respect for each other. Much of that is evident in today's audience. And we are fortunate - just to take one example -- that when a Prime Minister is defeated, he/she just goes out of office. He/she does not call out the army to install them for life. Nor would the army come out and do it. But no nation is perfect and no nation is so immaculate that it is without its sins. That is why citizens, particularly select citizens like yourselves, have always to ask questions about public hysteria over race and minorities and culture -- over matters of 'them' and 'us'. Because my lifelong experience of Australia is that the 'them' quickly become the 'us'.

And so this brief purgatory of a speech ends. And now comes rejoicing. You have earned your imminent joy at your success, and I hope my earnestness hasn't detracted from it in the slightest. Because the most important thing today is that you go out there and celebrate now, and that then you go into the further community. And there - I'm sure - you'll be marvellous. And you will shine.