Cirrus@Austlit

'According to Ouyang Yu, the earliest introduction of Australian literature in the Chinese language took place in 1906, five years after the Federation of Australia. In more than a century since then, Australian literatures, transplanted and transcribed, has taken a life of its own in China, with 'Chinese characteristics', following a trajectory that manifests not only its development in Australia, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the social, economic and Cultural environs in China.' (Introduction)

'Set in a Roman Catholic diocese,...Three Cheers for the Paraclete is about the dilemma of the rebel who knows that established authority is wrong but doesn't know how to put it right because he is himself too much a part of it. It is also about a critical religious issue...the conflict between a new generation which sees religious truth as something that must change with the world, and an establishment which sees it as fixed and immutable.

In the character of young Father Maitland, scholar and humanitarian, many readers will recognize a lost hero of our time. Others, perhaps, will see only an arrogant intellectual, and something of a heretic. But almost everyone will identify with one side or the other of the conflict into which Father Maitland's beliefs and sympathies draw him - a conflict with his superiors which threatens to destroy him both as a priest and as a man.' (Source: dustjacket, 1968 Angus and Robertson edition)

'The Day of the Dog tells the tragic story of Doug's few days of freedom. Set in urban Aboriginal Australia, the novel is a fast paced as it is gripping. Scenes of sudden, devastating brutality give way to peaceful, even lyrical interludes as Doug, his family and those close to him find temporary relief in friendship, love, alcohol or escape to the bush. But they are always drawn back into the ever-narrowing circle of crime, violence, and the inevitable destruction.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'Born into an Irish Catholic family in Sydney, Thomas Keneally published his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964, four years after he abandoned his study for priesthood. The success of that gothic horror set in a seminary triggered a successful writing career of over forty years, in which he produced 25 novels, while making frequent and fruitful incursions into the world of nonfiction. Today Keneally is Australia’s best-known writer and Australia’s living treasure. Although Spielberg’s Schindler’s List became a media event and a household word in the 1990s, it hardly qualified Keneally as an overnight sensation. By that time, Keneally was already a widely acclaimed writer in Britain and America, truly “international”, as the Australians would like to put it, since he had publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and had won the 1982 Booker Prize. Despite discernible changes in his earlier and later works, it’s almost impossible, even as a critical expediency, to divide Keneally’s writing career into clearly marked stages. Writing on both “Australian” and “international” themes, and constantly shifting between past and present, Keneally failed to follow the normal path of arrival, growth and maturity, much to the disappointment of some Australian critics, who eagerly delighted in anticipating the destination of his literary journey...' (Author's introduction)

'Keneally has been persistent in writing about history and in diversifying his historical subject matter. As one of the Irish descendants who “have been accused of an elephantine memory of their past wrongs”(Keneally 1971: 46), Keneally shows “unusual courage”(Kramer 1967: 19) in tackling the hopelessly commonplace history of Australia. There are of course personal predilections and technical conveniences, which Keneally, being a talkative and candid man, is not ashamed to vocalize in very general terms:

I think writers will always be attracted by the past. It is less confusing than the present. Historians have already reduced it to some understandable unity for us. Their gift is beyond estimation. (1975a: 29) (118)

'For those who wrote about her before she was known to exist, Australia was in image a Utopia, a sort of Paradise However, the realities shattered this image. The First Fleet carried not pious and self-righteous Christians as Mayflower did, but perjurers, thieves, robbers, secret society members, and burglars – all “hangable material”(Keneally 1987b: 70). In other words, every corner of their present is marked with the crime of their past. '

95-96)