All about Aussies

Plaudits have come in the form of two Miles Franklin awards, probably Australia’s highest literary honour, as well as for short-listings for the Booker Prize, winning in 1982 for his most famous and acclaimed novel, Shindler’s Ark, that stirring, stunning piece of work that was, with a slight tweak of its title, made into the Oscar-winning Steven Spielberg film, Schindler’s List.

Keneally is a man of many talents and he has enjoyed a second, parallel career in non-fiction. This work is overshadowed, perhaps, by his fiction, but Keneally has received frequent acknowledgement as a sharp and erudite essayist and a passionate historian. He seems ideally suited to tackling a project with ambitions to recount nothing less than the geographical, political and cultural shaping of an entire continent. The result of this is Australians: Origins to Eureka.