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Good Reading : March 2007
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MARCH 2007 ı goodreading 15 author profile want to do something heroic, but then they don’t always have the nervous stamina, the spiritual endurance, to come through it. And I was very interested in the end of World War II, when all the Australian soldiers came back as heroes, including the POWs, but were they heroes? Their wives had terrible problems with them, they had nightmares. I think Ulysses is the proto- type of the screwed-up hero: when he comes home, he doesn’t say “Darling, I’m home, you can tell all those blokes who’re trying to get into your knickers to clear off ”; instead he disguises himself as a suitor and kills all the other suitors! He’s brought the war home with him! And that was the idea I was working on, of what heroism is to a woman. Women have a different estimation of heroism.’ At one point in the book, Grace muses: ‘Men become dupes for codes of honour which any sensible woman could see through in a second.’ Warrior women, Tom maintained firmly, ‘are just so much more enduring and tough than the blokes’, and cited his own wife Judy’s stoic response to experiencing war in Eritrea compared to his own. They came across a landmine victim in hospital one day, and Tom was ‘immediately out the door and puking.’ Judy wasn’t. ‘My reaction,’ said Tom, ‘was an indication that, as much as we men like to be Hemingway, we’re not equipped for it. Even Hemingway wasn’t equipped for being Hemingway! Women don’t have that urge to be heroic in the same way; they just go and do it. It’s just part of the washing-up again – Judy couldn’t handle her daughter’s room being in a mess but she could handle war.’ He was also interested in showing how callous those times were, when parents and wives could receive a death telegram out of the blue, and ‘They would have been left alone with it. The next day people might have brought a casserole over and cake for tea, but there was no structure of support except the infor mal ones. Or of recompense, for that matter. I’ve become more aware of it as my mother gets older and is so sturdy mentally, that they are a different and special generation.’ War widows, remembers Grace, were ‘a whole sub-class of women in the world, invisible except to each other, who were making their dazed way amongst a society obsessed with housing shortages and electricity strikes, with horse-racing and football, and who were being told against their own instincts that the war was over and suddenly remote, and the dead to be referred to only at ceremonial moments.’ But a story doesn’t stand still; it happens to Grace again and again. ‘It’s over for her husband, but it’s endless for her,’ Tom lamented. But of course our conversation was by no means all sadness and gloom. As Tom Keneally spent many years in a seminary studying to be a Catholic priest, I was interested to hear his opinions on the cur rent debate about The God Delusion. ‘My attitude towards God is rather like that old story of the Irishwoman who was asked whether she believed in the Little People, and she said, “Of course I don’t, I’m a civilised woman – but they’re there, you know.”’ At which point Tom, who bears more than a passing resemblance to a leprechaun him- self, let out one of his trademark cackles. ‘I feel a bit like that about some deistic impulse, which could as well be called the Big It or whatever. Of course God is a delusion, but it’s a necessary delusion, at the emotional level rather than the rational level. It’s like a Holocaust survivor I knew who never went into the city of Sydney from Dover Heights on the bus with- out taking bread in her purse. She knew rationally that the SS weren’t going to hold up the bus and take her away for two days’ snow-shovelling during which they wouldn’t feed her. She knew it rationally but she didn’t know it at the emotional level. And I think that at the emotional level we all cry out for God, but at the rational level it’s an unsustainable argument. ‘I am naturally an animist – I find it possible to believe in various areas of the Australian landscape that are populated by gods who are not mine. I believe in spirit-inhabited land- scapes. So where does that put me, when I deny God but I believe in spirit-inhabited landscapes? But it’s at the emotional level I believe – I know it’s just geologic forces and gravity at the rational level, yet our association with the earth wouldn’t be ‘Much as we men like to be Hemingway, we’re not equipped for it. Even Hemingway wasn’t equipped for being Hemingway! Women don’t have that urge to be heroic in the same way.’
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