Author
DLitt (honoris causa) (Qld), (UWS), (Nat.Univ., Ireland), (Fairley Dickenson Univ., USA), (Rollins, USA)
Mr Thomas Michael Keneally addressed graduates from the UTS Business School in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Monday 30 September 2013, 5.30pm.
At the ceremony, Mr Keneally received the UTS honorary award, Doctor of Letters (honoris causa).
Thomas Michael Keneally AO is considered to be one of Australia’s most prolific writers and is known for his novels, non-fiction novels, non-fiction books and screenplays. He was educated by the Christian Brothers and entered St Patrick’s Seminary at Manly in 1952 where he trained for the priesthood. However, in 1960 he decided to leave the priesthood and turned to teaching and writing, publishing his first novel in 1964. He was soon recognised as a successful author winning a Commonwealth Literary fund grant in 1966. In 1967 and 1968 he won successive Miles Franklin Literary Awards for best Australian Novel of the Year.
Thomas Keneally has been the recipient of a number of prestigious literary awards, including: the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Shindler’s Ark and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for his novels Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete. Other awards included the Royal Society of Literature Prize, the Scripter Award of the University of Southern California, the Mondello International Prize and the Helmerich Prize. A number of his novels, including The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, The People's Train and Confederates were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Thomas Keneally continued his teaching career, taking up a position as a lecturer in drama at the University of New England between 1968 and 1970. In the late 1970’s, he spent some time as a lecturer in Connecticut and in the mid 1980’s he was appointed as a writer-in residence at the University of California at Irvine.
Besides his American teaching commitments, Thomas took on various responsibilities in Australia as a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council (1985-88) and as President of the National Book Council (1985-89). In 1987 he travelled to Eritrea, the site of a civil war, under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Front.
Thomas Keneally is a passionate republican, strongly advocating an Australian Republic. He was the inaugural Chairman of the Australian Republican movement from 1991-1993, and continues as a Director.
Thomas has been a council Member of the Australian Society of Authors since 1981, and in 1983 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to Australian Literature. Thomas Keneally is also a Life Member of the Writers Panel for Sydney branch of PEN, a worldwide association of writers, which emphasises the role of literature in mutual understanding, world culture and freedom of speech.
Thomas Keneally has and continues to participate and support numerous Australian Writers Festivals and travels around Australia and internationally, lecturing and presenting seminars and workshops. In 2011, he was instrumental in the opening of the Thomas Keneally Centre in the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts. The Centre, which runs regular programs of talks and writing workshops, is a cultural hub for all Australians who love literature and learning and reflects on Thomas Keneally’s approach to writing and life, “open access to knowledge, continued learning and social change”.
Thomas Keneally’s involvement in the community goes beyond the sphere of literature and writing including his role as an ambassador for the Asthma Foundation. Through his first-hand experience of asthma he uses this role to help the Foundation in fund raising for research and in raising awareness of this illness in the wider community.
In 1997 The Australian National Trust established a list of “Australian National Living Treasures”. Thomas Keneally received the honour of being included on this list of people who have made outstanding contributions to Australian society in any field of endeavour.
Over the last decade Thomas Keneally has been actively involved with UTS, speaking as an Occasional Speaker at UTS Graduations in 2005 and 2012 and participating as a guest speaker in the UTS Library’s innovative program “Library Markets Forum.
It is a great honour for the University of Technology, Sydney to award Mr Thomas Keneally AO an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa), in recognition of his outstanding achievements as one of Australia’s most respected authors and his contributions to the advancement of literature both in Australia and internationally.
Speech
May I offer my heartfelt congratulations also. You earned your degrees. All I did to earn mine was write books, to which I am in any case addicted, and live to be seventy-seven. I am very grateful to the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and others who decided on the delightful folly of giving me this honour.
But you are the true people of this day, and what happens today will never leave you. And now you want to get out into the air and take each other by the hand, embrace each other, and receive the applause of your families and maybe more kisses than are totally necessary from your mothers.
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 give you a brief stint of advice or information you're probably not in the mood to hear. You’ve heard of the soup du jour. Well, I am the boring old bloke du jour.
I am a writer and in that sense live off a publishing industry which, like most industries you will enter, is in revolution. I began school in 1941 in a country town in New South Wales – Kempsey -- using a slate, and a slate pencil. Thus, since slate is stone, I am a Stone Age human. Yet here we stand on the verge of the age of nanotechnology, at which some of you will work and in which invisible-to-the-naked-eye nano-machines will build your computers and other goods. The nanomachines and the nanobots are advancing on me, a child of the slate age, and on you, the children of the Information Age.
Meantime, I don’t spend time lamenting the arrival of e-books in publishing, because I read them too. Technology is unstoppable. The interesting thing is that the more sophisticated technology gets, we humans remain pretty much as primitive in our souls as we always were, As we were say a thousand years past, in 1013, when the first university of all, the Muslim university of Al-Karaouine at Fez in Morocco, already existed (founded incidentally by a Muslim woman), but before the first university in all Europe was established, in 1088 at Bologna in Italy. We have made extraordinary moral advances in some ways. We have abolished slavery, we have advanced some way on freedom for women. Yet it is to be regretted that the recent election at the same time was fought out by the use of the most advanced data-collection technology by the parties, but characterised by leaders haranguing us with fiscal and social fairy stories, as if we were children. The technology was whizz-bang; the standard of debate was sometimes primitive, often asinine, and only sometimes distinguished.
And for all the technology, humans remain human. There are many human institutions which still exist even though there seems no technological reason for them. It astonishes me how well the old-fashioned print, or you could say, “Gutenberg”-style book continues. This month a book of mine, previously published here, was published in the US. In its first week ‘out’, it sold just under 3,500 on e-book but nearly 3,000 in the hold-able, physical book. We like to hold books because we are tactile animals. We have no technological use for cinemas either, yet we go to them because we are social animals and because, as Aristotle called us, we are homo risibilis, laughing man, and we love laughing or being scared in a pack. There is similarly no technical reason why universities should not be entirely virtual. But visible universities with buildings and live lectures and libraries exist, and we prefer that if we go to university it should still be, at least in part, a social contact, a physical experience. To labour the point, we don’t need stadiums either – games could be played somewhere in a studio with astro-turf, without a physical crowd and with canned cheering. Except that we are tribal. We have tribal colours we wish to exhibit. We want to bay the superiority of our colours over those of the other tribe, or else console each other if things go bad. Thus technology cannot always change who we are. We remain a peculiar kind of gifted animal and angel, and we are driven by love and animosity as were humans of past times; we include some and have at least an impulse to exclude others from our tables and from our pity.
I am humbled by this award, and am aware that in part I receive it because like many other and better writers, I have made stories of love and animosity, about the despised people of the earth, about those who are ignored, and also about racial, religious and cultural hysteria, and what it can drive people to. It is also fascinated me how friendships and love break out across the fixed lines of culture and race. 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, Nazi pistol holsters and Very pistols, and other items – I was always enthralled by the way European hatred emerged in World War II, stoked by the demagogue Hitler and others.
Let me rush to say that writers do not use this material because we’re noble people – many of us are terrible to live with, and my wife will give an interview on the matter after this! We write about race and other divisions because they are full of high drama. I've been fascinated by racial hatred ever since, as a little kid in a country town in the White Australia of the early 1940s, I saw Aboriginals from the local Greenhill settlement walk past our gate in Kempsey. They were a people bewildered by loss of land, loss of validity as a people, by having their culture ridden over and squashed. The kids were in bad health. Having had misery imposed on them, they were then blamed for being unable to escape that misery. I was fascinated by them in a naïve childhood way.
In Australia, then and since, like most societies, we too have played at race-hate, notably, as I said, with Australia’s Aboriginal traditional owners. But in other ways as well. Soon after Federation, in the first parliament in 1902, Australia transformed itself into White Australia. Billy Hughes of Balmain, a future Labor and then conservative Australian Prime Minister, declared at the time, ‘Our chief plank is, of course, a White Australia. There is no compromise about that. The industrious coloured brother has to go – and remain away.’ When, after World War II some of our soldiers engaged in the occupation of Japan married Japanese women, Arthur Calwell stated, ‘There is particular objection to the presence of Japanese in this country.’
Other groups incurred discrimination. A sub-committee on immigration decided that Polish Jews who mainly worked in textile industries in Melbourne, ‘could not be regarded as desirable types of migrants’. When I was a kid, Irish Catholics like my parents and grandparents were considered untrustworthy by many in the majority culture. Who would we be loyal to? bigots asked. The Pope or Australia? Yet the Irish Australians obviously 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, other Northern Europeans. Germans were to be preferred to Jews. The Greeks and Italians, it was believed, would not make good citizens. Folk from the Baltic States and from Eastern Europe, many of whom were what were called Displaced Persons, and in particular the Jews the Allies had liberated from camps, were not enthusiastically welcomed at all.
Have any of the prejudices of that post-war period, the oft-expressed belief that these people would never be good Australians, been proven to be right? No, none of the racial hysteria of my childhood proved to be valid and looks ridiculous now. 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. For with the end of White Australia, the growing Asian immigration to Australia did not cause the sky to fall in.
And now we have this matter of asylum-seeker boat arrivals to face. I almost apologise for saying the words, because I know that the issue of immigration and refugees is one which makes people yell at each other and creates more fire than light. So let me say I’m not trying to start fights or adopt some moral superiority on your day of days. While you’re celebrating your degree tonight, forget this speech –you’ll find that easy. But I’m just trying to say what I’ve observed about race in plain towns, in plain suburbs, in Australia, and amongst refugees in Africa.
When it comes to these issues, I would like to honour three former Prime Ministers. Postwar, Ben Chifley; in the 70s and early 80s, Malcolm Fraser; and Bob Hawke, in 1989. Why? Very early Ben Chifley accepted nearly two hundred thousand Displaced Persons, people without documents, scattered across Europe. Many of them were prisoners of the Nazis, others refugees from Stalin. Malcolm Fraser was PM in the days when Vietnamese asylum seeker boats landed in great numbers in Northern Australia. He processed these people humanely. There was no long-term mandatory detention involved. The newcomers were not depicted as sinister invaders. hen, after the Tienanman Square massacre, Bob Hawke announced that all 43,000 Chinese students then in Australia would be offered residency and could stay here if they wished. Again, no extended delay, no subjecting of the students to bullying or locking up! So I would like calmly, with respect for all here, 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.
I believe it is plain absurd that so much of our political fervour and hysteria is spent on asylum-seeker boats? Every one of us is rightly concerned about the safety of those who travel on these risky vessels, and there is a tragic statistic, a thousand people who drowned trying to reach Australia last year. But the more governments fall apart and cruel regimes take their place, the greater is the demand for smugglers the world over. We are not the only people faced with boat arrivals – in one week in 2011, more North African refugee boats and asylum seekers arrived in Southern Italy than arrived in Australia during the entire second half of the year. Until recently less than one in five asylum seekers arrived in Australia by boat. More than four out of five arrived by plane. We locked up the ones who arrived by boat and, generally, not the ones who arrived by plane. Yet while the owners of the boats are committing a crime, the people who -- in their desperation -- travel on them, are not. Their right to claim asylum is recognised by international law. And 80% of those who arrive by boat are eventually given Australian residency and then citizenship, 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 and the outlay of our taxes (much of which go to make international companies who run the system, including Serco and GS4, very rich indeed) are concentrated on the less than half who arrive by boat. Sadly, in the last year an unprecedented 17,000 arrived by boat, which indicates the desperation of refugees the world over but also that our policies of punishing people simply aren’t working. And why the difference of treatment between the boat people, and those who arrive by plane? Is it necessary to lock up boat asylum seekers for indefinite periods at great expense to the souls of these fellow humans, at great expense too to the honour of our Commonwealth, and thus to you? In October 2011 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 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 and despairing of ever getting out, months after he had been declared a genuine refugee?
Of course we can't let just anyone into the country. 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 to make the boats less relevant. What’s the answer? Let’s use mandatory detention only for health, identity and security checks that do not take years, but weeks. Let’s have accommodation centres – not prisons. And for God’s own sweet sake, let’s release all children from mandatory detention. Let’s have an independent commission to decide on asylum seeker policy to stop politicians using it to improve their vote. A new government threatens now to break its obligation under the UN Declaration of Human Rights by taking the right of any asylum seeker arriving by boat to be considered for Australian residency. This is alarming indeed, the act of a rogue nation. And if we say, ‘They’re trying it on!’, let us step back a little and think what was said in the past about our ancestors, about all our forebears at some stage. That we were trying it on. That we would never make good Australians.
I raise all 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 history warns us to be suspicious of politicians of any party, who try to concentrate our passion upon a small minority, and depict them as a major problem. When we see this kind of trick played upon us, instead of succumbing to the race frenzy we all potentially carry inside us, we should ask, “Who is benefitting from this? Are our taxes validly being spent upon it? And who is being harmed in the name of getting a better percentage of the vote?” We should be suspicious of frenzy too, as Oskar Schindler was suspicious of Nazi ideology, because it means that leaders 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.
Let me acknowledge that I am quick to celebrate the fact that we live in one of the more successful societies, where I can utter these opinions and then have dinner, and 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. But citizens, particularly select and educated citizens like yourselves, have always to ask questions about public hysteria over race and minorities and culture -- over matters of “them” and “us”. Because, again, my lifelong experience of Australia is that the “them” can quickly become the “us”.
And so this brief purgatory of a speech ends. And now comes your 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 that you celebrate now, and that then you go out into the further community. And there – I’m sure – you’ll be absolutely marvellous. And you will shine.