To an extent, and far more than the notorious Schindler book, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith has proved something of a chain round my neck. Might I say, that a chain which connects one to a large number of the Australian populace is a lucky chain to have imposed on a writer. Nonetheless, in my view, I have written many much more technically accomplished novels, which Australian opinion hasn’t valued as much as this old, old work of mine. So perhaps I should begin by apologising for the flaws of this book.
At the head of any comment on the young man who, in his recklessness and about the end of 1970, began the task, let me say that it was wild of me, and even potentially imperialist, to write from an Aboriginal point of view. If there were a life sentence attached to that crime, I would merely argue this – that I came from a people, including my grandmother in particular, which was animist, and believed in spirit-inhabited landscapes. This is why the Aboriginal cosmos has always fascinated me. While my grandmother’s animism related to Ireland, that of the Aboriginal peoples related to Australia, the southern hemisphere of the earth rather than the northern. I think I had got the animist habit of thought long before I started to write this book.
One of my motives in writing it was that as a child I had lived in the town Kempsey, New South Wales, which had two Aboriginal reservations, one of which still exists. I saw the children of this race, and their elders, pass our gate on their way to town. They were afflicted with eye disease, glue ear, tuberculosis and other blights.
At the time I started to write the book, Australians had passed, by a huge majority, a referendum that enabled the Federal Government to legislate for Aborigines. This signalled the liberation of Aborigines from being wards of the States (like children and imbeciles), and gave them a new level of control over their destinies, as well as endowing all of them with the vote. And yet in terms of health and acceptance, things seemed the same as they had been in 1901, when Jimmie Blacksmith (and his model Jimmy Governor) did everything to prove his reliability in European terms, and was still rejected. Half-caste or full blood, the destiny of the race still seemed bitter, as it is to this day.
Thomas Keneally, 2013