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THOMAS KENEALLY'S THIRD NOVEL, BRING LARKS AND HEROES, is among the most significant works of the 1960s to portray the penal society of Australia's past at "the world's worse end" (Keneally, Larks 7).1 Published during a time of deep social and cultural change in Australia, the book is an investigation of the mechanisms that lie at the foundation of an oppressively brutal society, in a world where the values of the "old" clash with, and are transformed by, the reality of the "new." The release of the novel marked a crucial moment in the life of its author by establishing him as a professional writer.2 As Laurie Clancy states in his essay Conscience and Corruption: Thomas Keneally's Three Novels:
Bring Larks and Heroes [. . .] takes him from apprenticeship into maturity at one lightning stroke. Although it is not an unflawed novel, the astonishing range and variety of effect its language can encompass, its power of bringing the past into a dazzlingly relevant present, and its sheer lyric momentum, mark it as one of the outstanding achievements of Australian fiction since 1945. Here the ideas and dilemmas which remained half-buried under the weight of artificiality in the first two novels are brought fully to the surface and explored in depth (Clancy 33).
Set in a late-eighteenth-century penal colony somewhere in the South Pacific,3 the novel offers a vivid and stark portrait of the first years of European settlement in Australia through the recovery and restoration of convict life, voices and experiences that have been for so long the object of a collective amnesia, which Robert Hughes in his influential and thorough study on convictism, The Fatal Shore (1987), defines as "a national pact of silence" (Hughes xii).
Keneally demonstrates right from the beginning a strong preoccupation with the past and a specific interest towards subjects marginalized from official historiography, thus reflecting a new way of thinking about history (and its multifaceted and often conflicting interpretations/representations) that characterizes the Australian intellectual community starting from the mid1960s. It was during this period, in conjunction with the great decolonizations and the emergence of social history and the "history from below" (see Chakrabarty), that the "Australian Legend" began to show signs of weakness: revising dominant myths and challenging...