The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith

I avoided this novel by Thomas Keneally because I thought it would be worthy-but-boring. It’s not; it’s worthy, not boring, but chilling, like an Australian In Cold Blood. This Aboriginal guy gets hassled at every turn, snaps, and axes a bunch of women. He escapes through the bush with relatives, runs around Australia, meets some interesting people, dies in the end. It was written around 1971, it’s set in 1900 where the big news is Federation and the Boer War, and what is Australia, and who are Australians, and it would’ve been an explosive book back in 1971 when Aboriginal people couldn’t even vote, I don’t think.

It’s a brave book because it includes chants of the tribe that Jimmy comes from, includes lots of ideas about Aboriginal people, it’s mostly told from their perspective. It races along and thank goodness doesn’t turn the conversations into unreadable dialects of “Australianisms” – except for when Jimmy is replying to a white man, underlining the whole idea of having to put on a form of inferior language and thought just to get by in the white world. I wonder what the feminists thought of it though, because there’s a lot of the underlying bitterness towards women – the free man getting shackled by their desperate need for order and propriety, mostly – that a lot of novelists of that time put in. It’s a book with masses of food for thought, but I don’t know if I could read it again, because even thinking about that axing makes me feel sick.