By Casey Neill
“It‘s not from Toorak that the writers come. It’s from places like Dandenong.”
Tom Keneally, the award-winning author of the book behind the film Schindler’s List, should know.
He grew up in an area of Sydney not dissimilar to multicultural Greater Dandenong.
“I know that Dandenong city is a sort of cutting-edge place in Melbourne with social problems of the kind that it, in many ways, creates a creative environment for those who live there,” he said.
“I’m interested in going there for that reason.”
Tom will visit with his daughter Meg Keneally as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival for a free literary lunch at Dandenong Library at 12.30pm on 2 September.
“I’d just like them to see that we’re ordinary people and that it’s ordinary people who write books,” he said.
“Any mug can do it, and I’m proof of that.”
The father-daughter duo are working together on novels – and a television series – following gentleman convict detective Hugh Monsarrat and his housekeeper Hannah Mulrooney.
“When you’re writing these books … it seems impossible that someone will pay their hard-earned money to read what you wrote,” Meg said.
“I’m very grateful for all of them.
“It’s wonderful to actually meet these crazy people who buy our books face to face.
“I would love if people took away a realisation that history is more fascinating and has more juice and blood in it that, perhaps, what they were taught in school.”
She hopes they develop a desire to dig a bit deeper.
“We both feel that Australian history hasn’t yet taken the position it deserve to have in popular culture,” she said.
Meg gave America’s Wild West as an example.
“There’s no reason why our convict history couldn’t have the same resonance,” she said.
Tom said Meg and her mother were descendants from a female factory convict.
“It’s a great part of our history,” he said.
“Convicts who got a ticket of leave would ride by the female factory and choose a bride.
“They’d see all these girls paraded before them.”
Meg has her own book coming out next July, a fiction story called Fled based on First Fleet convict Mary Bryant.
On writing together, Tom said they were “temperamentally similar”.
“Neither of us are the kind that would die in a ditch for our favourite sentence,” he said.
“We out the plot together, then Meg does most of the writing of the first draft using the characters I invented some time ago.
“Then we collaborate from then on.”
Meg said: “Initially we thought we’d write alternating chapters and dad had done a few chapters when he broached the idea with me.”
Tom handed them to Meg so she could inject her voice into them.
“I didn’t do that because I didn’t feel I had the right,” she said.
“I felt I was finger-painting over a Da Vinci.”
Their agent said the chapters featured Tom’s distinct voice with something else humming away underneath.
“She suggested I write from scratch and bring dad back in later in the process,” she said.
Iraq-born writer, director, comedian and spoken word artist Osamah Sami will share his life experience and love of writing at Dandenong Library at 11am on Friday 1 September as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.
Several artists will share their thoughts, ideas and stories on what comes after today at an evening of spoken word at Dandenong’s Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre at 6.30pm on Saturday 2 September.
Bookings are essential. Visit greaterdandenonglibraries.com for more information.
