Keneally: Nationalists as ‘Tomorrow’s Ancestors’

Thomas Keneally has long been a writer who gives expression to nationalist sentiment. In 1978 J.J. Healy commented that writers such as Keneally represented ‘a collective, many-motived consciousness’ whose impulse was ‘political, public’. Indeed, many of Keneally’s earlier novels illustrate what we might call ‘national progenitors’. In From The Ruins of Colonialism Chris Healy describes a unique historiographical practice of retrospective genealogy, where James Cook was constructed within a nationalist vision which saw him as the founding ancestor of Australia. The ancestral narratives within Keneally’s historical fictions do the same thing, by constructing characters who function as ‘tomorrow’s ancestors’. In his pre-1995 novels, Keneally depicts historical figures as ancestors of the modern nation. He uses the resources of mythic narrative to create a distinctive national identity which is broadly ethnic in nature, and which is implicitly defined against ‘other’ nationalisms. This is a fairly straightforward example of how groups ‘mobilise collective memories to sustain enduring corporate identities’. However, his more recent fiction includes an element of flexibility in this portrayal of nationalist ancestors, as he begins to move towards a post-humanist conception of national identity through ancestry. It is in his most recent novels that this posthumanist vision is most clear; this is the subject of Chapter Four. This chapter begins with a brief overview of theories of nationalism which have a specific bearing on Keneally’s ancestral narratives. Bhabha’s notion of ‘national narrations’ is central here, as it outlines how narratives articulate differing conceptions of the nation. Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolist approach is also relevant, because it suggests how myth and narrative are essential in the transition from ethnic to modern national identity. Smith’s analysis of ethnic myths of descent is especially useful, as it highlights the role of ancestral narratives in the