‘I found a 1st XI with two Dickenses and a Trollope’
The new book by Tom Keneally tells the story of Dickens’s son, sent away to Australia by his father to better himself. By Duncan White
Listening to Tom Keneally in full flight, you suspect he’s probably forgotten more than you’ll ever know. A couple of months shy of his 85th birthday, the great Australian man of letters is irrepressible, the anecdotes, erudition, and gags unspooling at a remarkable rate, interrupted only by his cackling laugh or the opportunity to upbraid himself (“I’m being an old sod and bombarding you!”).
One minute he’s discoursing on the ecology of the Australian bush, Aboriginal storytelling, or the history of colonial transportation, and the next he’s quoting Oscar Wilde or Les Patterson from memory.
His books are a reflection of his hungry and omnivorous mind. He is a master of historical fiction, and his novels range across the centuries and the globe. The most famous among them, of course, is Schindler’s Ark, the story of Oskar Schindler, the German factory owner who saved an estimated 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.
That book won the Booker Prize in 1982 and then reached a huge readership when it was adapted by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List in 1993. By then, Keneally was already a novelist of distinction, having published his first in 1964, and having been thrice shortlisted for the Booker Prize with The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Gossip from the Forest (1975) and Confederates (1979). “For the descendant of Irish convicts I’ve done well out of the Brits!” he says, speaking from his home in Manly, a northern suburb of Sydney.
His latest novel is The Dickens Boy, and it is one that has been decades in the brewing. Drawing on deep research, it tells the story of Charles Dickens’s youngest son, Edward Dickens, who was nicknamed “Plorn”. At 16, having struggled at a number of schools, Plorn was shipped out to Australia in 1868 in order to, in the words of his father, “apply himself ”.
In doing so, he followed his older brother Alfred, who had also been sent to New South Wales to make something of himself.
It is hard to think of a writer better equipped to render the bizarre juxtaposition of Plorn, the son of the most famous writer in the world at the time, learning the wool trade in the vast Australian bush.
“I find Dickens’s relationship to Australia absolutely fascinating,” Keneally says. “Early in the century it was the convict hell, somewhere nobody would go voluntarily. But then as free settlement became dominant, it suddenly became a place to send people for redemption. In David Copperfield Micawber goes to Australia, cleans up his act and becomes a magistrate, little Emily goes to Australia and is redeemed from the shame of her seduction by Steerforth, and the honest Pegottys go there and become affluent based on their goodwill and their labour.
“About 20 years ago I read about how two of his sons, Plorn and Alfred, came to the Australian bush in the 1860s to attempt their own version of redemption, having failed to live up to their father’s expectations.”
Keneally found the idea of one of Dickens’s heirs making his way through this world compelling and was seduced by some of the bizarre details. “I found it very endearing that Plorn was a cricket nut. At one point the 1st XI of Wilcannia, which is now a partly abandoned town, featured two Dickenses and a Trollope in their team.
“It’s beyond belief. What’s also interesting is that Plorn used Aboriginal bowlers in his teams. He shared his father’s geniality towards the despised.”
Keneally, though, is not one to sentimentalise Dickens. The great enemy of poverty, child labour and capital punishment might have been liberal-minded about many issues, but he was also irredeemably anti-semitic and racist, a fact highlighted again recently when the words “Dickens Racist” were scrawled on the outside of the Dickens House Museum in Broadstairs, Kent, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“When his son died of apoplexy after fighting in the Indian mutiny, he said he wanted to see Indians ‘exterminated’,” Keneally says. “And he barely says anything about the famine in Ireland. So he was at the very least inconsistent in his empathy.”
And for all his playfulness as a
Dickens judged his 10 children harshly as they grew older
parent when his children were young, he could be a harsh judge as they entered adulthood. All of Dickens’s 10 children felt the heavy weight of paternal expectation, but as the youngest, Plorn had to bear the added burden of coming of age as his parents’ separation became public.
“He was only 16 and a boy of modest gifts,” says Keneally. “He had struggled at school and these days would probably have been diagnosed with dyslexia or a learning difficulty.
“He and his brother Alfred didn’t have a literary bone in their bodies and they were surrounded by people to whom their father was a god, a kind of secular messiah, even though he was an ambiguous bloke in many ways. And they carried with them the emotional burden of their parents’ separation and the sense that they had failed to live up to their father’s expectation. Australia was their second chance.
“At first I thought that I couldn’t write this book. What do I know about the life of a 19th-century gent? But there was something universal in the idea of seeking to validate yourself in the eyes of the father.”
In many ways the novel is itself Dickensian: a bildungsroman like David Copperfield and Great Expectations that draws on a large cast of vivid characters, from the convicts who were transported to Australia, to those self-imposed eccentrics and exiles seeking a new start.
And, above all, it is a novel attentive to the fact that these people were seeking redemption on stolen land. Plorn’s journey takes him up the Darling River to the interior, the home of the Paakantji people, where he settles at Momba Station, run by two brothers, Fred and Edward Bonney.
“The more I read about Fred Bonney, he was almost too good to be true. He understood that the country belonged to the Aboriginal [people] and much of the detail about the Paakantji in the book comes from his journal, articles and letters he sent to anthropologists and ethnographers. He was a wise feller that bloke Bonney – he kept mounted police off his land to try to prevent the kind of massacres such as the one that takes place in the book.
“Bonney was like Schindler in that regard. There are some people who extend areas of protection beyond themselves, who go to great lengths to protect people beyond their ‘own’. There’s something in the neurochemistry of people like that which allows them to identify with others.
“Ultimately, in real life, his brother Edward got tertiary syphilis and they both had to go back to England so he could be treated. It must have been terribly hard for him because he must have known the Paakantji had a lot of blood in their future.”
In real life, Plorn himself might have become heir to Bonney’s legacy. He applied to the position of Secretary to the Department for the Protection of Aborigines in Western Australia, but did not get the job.
“He was very sympathetic to the Aboriginal people. Those that were appointed to those jobs went about their work with great enthusiasm. This ended up with the mass separation of families, with children taken by force and put into homes, put into institutions, sent off to work as servants. These are what we call the Stolen Generations.
“Would Plorn have taken part in these separations and forced assimilations? It would have been a great test for him, but I don’t doubt he was a man of good intentions.”
Keneally is a man of good intentions himself. He has campaigned for the building of a cenotaph and information centre to honour Aboriginal heritage and is an advocate for those seeking asylum in Australia.
He has long argued that Australia, like the UK and the US, has become enthralled by the free market, but believes that, despite all its terrors, the pandemic is leading people to reconsider how they want society to run.
“I feel like a lot of punters are sick of letting the market run everything,” he says. “We are seeing governments go back to pump priming with Covid. Now, it is unfortunate that they could not be persuaded by some less lethal means, but I think we are seeing a change. There has been a lot of political cooperation and a real sense
‘For the descendant of Irish convicts I’ve done well out of the Brits!’
of community. I think when we come out of this it is going to be harder to go back to the way things were.”
One thing that won’t change is Keneally’s commitment to his work. He hopes to write a sequel to The Dickens Boy in due course, that will tackle Plorn’s career in business and politics, neither of which ended well. “I actually meant to tell the whole story, but ended it the summer after Charles Dickens’s death [in 1870]. I wanted to give Plorn a happy moment, a bit of stasis. I’d love to write the rest of it.”
You wouldn’t bet against him: he already has a new novel close to completion and another one in the pipeline. Going strong in his ninth decade, Keneally has an untapped multitude of stories still to tell.
The Dickens Boy (Sceptre, £20) is published next Thursday