The tale of how Mick Keneally became Thomas Keneally, writer, begins with personal drives and spreads out to involve economic need, national cultural construction, the machinery of publishing, international differences in publishing cultures and the frameworks in which critical feedback is generated. But to start at the beginning, in July 1960, aged 24, Michael Keneally finally admitted to himself that he could not accept ordination to the Catholic priesthood. He left the seminary, alone and with ‘no clothes other than black, and no money, no training, no job’. Life at this point could have headed in any number of directions. But the young Keneally was not a totally blank slate: he had taken certain proclivities into the seminary, and was leaving with some modified and others intensified.

Thomas junior, called by his middle name, Michael, to avoid confusion, remembers his father Tom as a lively teller of stories and a football hero who also carried a melancholic strain. These traits transferred to the son, Keneally alternating ‘huge uncertainty’ with ‘huge artistic arrogance’. Despite his many successes, the writer regularly mentions being just a working-class boy from the bush who rashly pushed beyond his origins. As Keneally tells it in his autobiography Homebush Boy (1995), young Mick was clumsy in primary school and suffered from asthma. Around 1940 he was admitted to hospital with diphtheria. This inspired one of his first poems, in which his mother watches by his bedside like a guardian saint during ‘the hell night of my life’. Awareness of the self as fragile body stays with him throughout his work, most vividly manifest in the surgical details in Season in Purgatory and The Daughters of Mars.

Recurrent bouts of illness kept him at home during primary school, and his mother set him reading: ‘A boy with a book is never bored’, she intoned. He sought social approval by throwing himself into sporting activities but was always left at some point watching the play. At one stage, he managed to combine his two interests, recalling to this writer that ‘I had a game of cricket at home when I was preadolescent and I used to make two imaginary teams, one made up of composers and one of writers.