What Thomas Keneally got wrong about Jimmie Blacksmith
Thomas Keneally wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith from the perspective of an Indigenous man he could not hope to understand.
Before starting this essay, I went in search of a ghost: the ghost of Jimmy Governor. I went to the place where he took his last breath. The old Darlinghurst Gaol is now the site of the National Art School. The gallows are gone. But, behind the high sandstone walls, it is not so hard to imagine what it was like back then. I was taken through the timeworn corridors, past what once were cold prison cells.
I turned a corner and stopped suddenly, like something – or someone – had grabbed hold of me. I looked up and my tour guide said, “That’s where it happened. Exactly there,” she said, where I was standing, is where Jimmy was hanged. Above me was where the trapdoor would have been and where the hangman would have placed the noose around Jimmy’s neck. Jimmy Governor was executed at 9am on 18 January, 1901. The newspaper reported that he had slept well, had a good breakfast and walked to his death smoking a cigarette.
A priest walked with him. Jimmy took the cigarette from his mouth; threw it away before the white hood covered his face. He tilted his neck – just slightly – to make it easier for the hangman to attach the noose. Death was instantaneous. There was hardly a tremor in the body, the reporter wrote. Jimmy Governor’s clothes were burned. He was buried beyond the prison walls. Jimmy Governor killed children. He killed women. He took an axe to a family and then went on a rampage of theft, rape and murder. Nine people, he slaughtered – for slaughter it was. The most hunted man in the country.
Jimmy was executed less than three weeks after Federation, and here I am searching for him still, looking back into the past to try to make sense of who I am. More than a hundred years later, Jimmy Governor still casts a shadow over this nation.
Jimmy Governor haunts me and he haunts Australia. (He) was a grotesque murderer who took an axe to the skulls of children, I know he is beyond sympathy … and yet. I can never get one image out of my mind, when I think of Jimmy Governor. It is taken from the diary of one of the wardens who guarded Jimmy’s cell. In the prisoner’s last days, the warden wrote, Jimmy alternated between singing native songs and reading aloud passages from the Bible. What a vision. Mythic. Poignant. Poetic. Cinematic. To the storyteller it is profound: a man between sin and redemption, between a Christian god and the spirits of his ancestors. It reads like the final scene of a film. The distant sound of didgeridoo and clapsticks, a nasal, droning voice, a lament in a language itself facing death as surely as the prisoner. Cut to a man on his knees, hands folded in prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done …” A cross nailed askew to the cell wall. Close-up of a prison warden’s eyes through a keyhole.
There, in Jimmy’s cell, is the struggle for my own identity: I exist somewhere between the Enlightenment and the Dreaming; propelled by progress and liberalism and yet also reaching back to keep a hold on something eternal. God, sin and redemption, black and white, war and peace: this is what drew Thomas Keneally to Jimmy Governor. Like me, he has peered through the keyhole into Jimmy’s cell searching for something of himself and his country.
Jimmy haunts Tom as he haunts me, as he haunts our country. He is the spectre that will not let us bury our history; he holds modernity – its promise of freedom and liberty – just out of reach. (But) Keneally’s Jimmie is stripped of Governor’s complexity. He is a paler facsimile; a parody. Governor was defiant and proud – he was known to say he was “as good as a white man” – the son of two Aboriginal parents: his father, Tommy, wore the chest scars of a tribally initiated man; his mother, Annie, the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and an Irish stockman. Jimmie, however, is an often obsequious half-caste; at times a grinning Stepin Fetchit, bowing and scraping for a white man’s approval, lusting after the fat wives of white farmers, then brooding with resentment at each rejection or insult. It is his own blackness Jimmie seems to despise, as much, if not more than, the whites. Jimmie wants to get as far away as possible from his black family, telling the Methodist missionary: “That mob make me feel sick, Mr Neville.” It is another example of how Keneally fails to see who we are. His Jimmie must escape his blackness to seek acceptance from the whites, and there is no doubt some Aboriginal people made those choices. But there is nothing in the real Jimmy Governor’s life to suggest that he despised himself or his people. Tom Keneally could not possibly understand Jimmy Governor – as he could not possibly comprehend my father – so he invented his own Aborigine: Jimmie Blacksmith. Tom is an outsider – he has said that is the reason he writes – and in Jimmie he creates the archetypal outsider. I don’t think I’m wrong in seeing black Jimmie as Irish Tom’s mirror image: swap Fenian grievance for Aboriginal resentment, the Dreaming for Catholic ritual, and Indigenous sovereignty for Irish republicanism. Jimmie Blacksmith is a memory without memory, a faint trace of the real Jimmy Governor, now existing in the inner eye of the white author who can’t see him as anything more than a man trapped between worlds. Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith is stripped of modernity’s great promise: progress. Jimmie is a man without telos.
I have to say the way Keneally writes about black women disturbs me. He seems to reserve a special venom for them. They are contemptible creatures. I know he is reflecting the times in which the book is set, when white men preyed on black women, but I can’t help recoiling from the language. Black women sing “shrieking welcomes” to the “white phallus, powerful demolisher of tribes”. Jimmie lies down “with a scrawny gin called Florence” who, Keneally writes, “barked and barked and dredged blood from beneath her lips”. Compare that to how Keneally describes a white woman whom Jimmie sees passing by, who “had an aura of being delicate” with fat acquiescent lips, distant eyes; “full and ripe”, she is Jimmie’s fantasy: “a symbol, a state of blessedness”. By contrast, the black women are the work of the devil: immoral vessels, devoid of any virtue and dwelling in the worst of rooms of hell. I want to extend to Tom the rights of literary licence, but I am horrified and offended at the way he describes women who could have been my great-grandmothers. I knew my great-grandmother and I have photos of black women of that time, women of dignity and bearing. They bear no resemblance to the vile, wanton, rutting wenches of Tom’s novel.
Keneally cannot extend to Jimmy Governor the same fullness of existence that he gives to his most famous “creation”, Oskar Schindler. The member of the Nazi party and saviour of so many Jews can live on the page with all his contradiction, all of his humanity and his name. Schindler contends with the bureaucratic philosophical nightmare of Nazism, and exercises his freedom. Keneally can see in Oskar Schindler what he can’t see in Jimmy Governor: a man of modernity. He can’t tell the story he wants to tell with Jimmy Governor, so he invents his own Aborigine. I don’t believe in Jimmie Blacksmith anymore. I am not doomed. I am not caught between worlds. I have outgrown Tom’s novel. But thank you again, Tom, for writing it. Because of it, I see my country clearer. I see what you thought of us: that we were to be pitied, lamented, defended even; but that we were doomed. I am not doomed.
This is an edited extract from On Thomas Keneally by Stan Grant published as part of the Writers on Writers series by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria. Grant and Keneally will appear at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.