Thomas Keneally

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand seven.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is the writer Thomas Keneally. As a novelist he's been telling stories for over four decades. With more than thirty titles to his credit, he's one of our most distinguished authors. In nineteen eighty two his fame spread beyond his homeland of Australia, when he won the Booker Prize with his historical novel Schindler's Ark.

Presenter0:47

It was made into the landmark movie Schindler's List, and for many the extraordinary true story of one man risking his life and losing his fortune to save more than a thousand Jews was a uniquely powerful way of understanding the horrors of the Holocaust.

Presenter1:01

Religion and war have been themes throughout much of his work, and indeed his own life. Growing up, his father's absence during the Second World War helped to create a serious minded child who latterly trained for the priesthood but, after six years in the seminary, and just weeks before his ordination, he quit, coming to regard the Church as a cold and largely self interested corporate institution.

Presenter1:26

Thomas Keneally, there is so much more than just Schindler's ark to talk about. But let's start there. It's a good place to start. At the moment when you won the Booker Prize, what went through your mind?

Thomas Keneally1:35

Well, I felt stung by a cattle prod, but a delightful cattle prod. I was delighted that it happened, except that I'd drunk my publisher's cognac as well as my own.

Thomas Keneally1:51

Because I was convinced I had no chance because of the nature of the book.

Thomas Keneally1:57

When I received the booker I thanked them for their recklessness.

Presenter2:02

You say the nature of the book. There had been a great deal of quite heated debate about whether or not it qualified as a novel because it was based on such concrete historical facts.

Thomas Keneally2:11

Yes, and indeed the characters in the book, except for Oscar himself, who had deceased.

Thomas Keneally2:18

The other characters all read their story and commented on it and made corrections, and so it was a documentary novel, I suppose you could call it. But the controversy was wonderful. It was like being denounced from the pulpit by an archbishop, which is not enough archbishops do that service for literature any more.

Presenter2:42

We should remind ourselves, then, Schindler was this German industrialist. He had made a fortune supplying armaments that were in fact made by Jewish forced labor. He then became possessed by, I suppose, the desire, if you like, to protect these people who he'd been exploiting. And he reunited families, eventually moved his entire production plant to Moravia to safeguard them. I mean, in a truly extraordinary, a a humbling story.

Thomas Keneally3:05

And also the great benefit which I sensed immediately was that huge human indecencies like Stalin's twenty million or more dead these huge tragedies are lost by the sheer numbers. Stalin himself said one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. And Oscar was a lens on every aspect through which he could look, and you could see at a human level

Thomas Keneally3:38

Every aspect of the Holocaust.

Presenter3:42

When you owe a debt to history for, um, if you like, the budding of your storytelling, you have to then be true to that history. I know that when it came to Schindler's Ark, uh, you you spoke to the Schindler-Juden as they're known, the Jews who were saved by Oskar Schindler. To hear their stories must have been incredibly affecting from their mouths, the people who had been there, who had seen it.

Thomas Keneally4:02

Yes, and in particular those who'd been children. The former children were the ones in which the pain was closest to the surface. And I'd felt that I was

Thomas Keneally4:14

Messing with wounds that I was intruding on trauma.

Thomas Keneally4:19

And that's why all the major characters read the book after I was finished it, which doesn't happen in normal fiction.

Presenter4:26

Did they require you to change anything? Did they plead with you or ask you?

Thomas Keneally4:29

No no, they I I did everything they suggested. Uh for example, Oscar's old girlfriend was uh now an American granny, and she wanted me to use another name than hers so that her grandchildren never found out what a fast mover she'd been when she was young.

Thomas Keneally4:52

Tell me about your f

Presenter4:52

Uh

Thomas Keneally4:52

First piece of music

Thomas Keneally4:54

Oh, the first piece of music is Let Me Weep, Permit Me to Weep, and it's from Handel's Rinaldo, which is one of my favorite operas. Handel was the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day, and and this is a wonderful, ineffable aria.

Speaker 25:45

We Christmas freely.

Speaker 26:08

Uh

Presenter6:11

La Shakio Pianga, Let Me Weep from Handels, Ronaldo. It's interesting how few Australian writers one is able to name worldwide. But of your generation, I'm thinking, I mean, people like Jermaine Greer or Clive James, you know, both went abroad to find fame, to feel appreciated. Were you aware of that when you started writing?

Thomas Keneally6:24

Yeah.

Thomas Keneally6:27

That's right.

Thomas Keneally6:32

Yes, I was, and I was intimidated by it as well. We were raised with the idea that all literature occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, so you had to be in the Northern Hemisphere to produce literature. It came in with the finished goods in the ships from Europe. And thus, when I began writing, I had a strong sense that our job description was to win cricket, participate in foreign wars, and grow wool. But I had a genuine question as to whether Australians could write.

Presenter7:07

Let's explore that in a bit of detail then, the the culture you grew up in. You were born in nineteen thirty-five. Paint a picture for me of the sort of Australia you experienced as a little boy.

Thomas Keneally7:16

It was a very masculine Australia. Even though I was an asthmatic, I played rugby league and I ran and I wanted to be the first

Thomas Keneally7:27

Nobel laureate who played five eight for the Australian Rugby League team. But I had writing yearnings from my earliest childhood because the books were the only luxury we had, and my mother, who was a girl from the bush, forced books on us.

Presenter7:46

But you felt a strong sense that to be a young Australian boy one had to be physical, you had to express yourself in this way.

Thomas Keneally7:51

Yes, and and I thought that to attract women you had to do it.

Presenter7:55

Let's talk a little more about your childhood, because it was a it was a fascinating childhood. You you were seven when your father joined the Air Force. Uh do you remember him going?

Thomas Keneally8:04

Oh, yes, I I do remember the cold night. We see him off at Central Station. It's a cold night, early in the war, and there everyone's weeping, and uh my mother is trying not you know, is is weeping a bit. She's only a young woman, and I said I'm trying not to cry.

Thomas Keneally8:27

Now, I said that because it was the sort of thing I saw in the movies. Little kids said cute things like that. So I thought, I'm in a movie now, so I'd better say the right thing.

Thomas Keneally8:39

So I'm trying not to cry, and that broke her heart. But I was actually quoting from a movie. So, you know, sometimes children aren't as distraught as their words would indicate, and sometimes, of course, they're more distraught.

Presenter8:54

Did it fall upon you to take on the role of being the the male of the house then?

Thomas Keneally8:57

Yes, it did, and particularly since my little brother was seen. My mother was pregnant. So I'm impressed with those tough girls.

Thomas Keneally9:08

Are of the Depression and the War, and there were similar girls here.

Presenter9:13

Much to talk about there. Let's take a break right now for your second piece of music. What have you chosen?

Thomas Keneally9:18

I've chosen a song which is an encyclopedia of love, alienation, and then insult and regret. And I've been married forty years or more, so I know about all those. The song begins also with the irresistible line,'Twas Christmas Evening in the Drunk Tank. And of course, it is an enormously lyrical song by a bloke who can't sing.

Thomas Keneally9:48

There was

Speaker 29:48

It's Christmas Eve, babe.

Speaker 29:53

And the drunk tank

Speaker 29:57

When a woman said to me.

Speaker 210:01

On say another

Speaker 210:05

Dance through the night The boys of the Envoy Mini Coil were singing all the way back

Speaker 210:12

And the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

Presenter10:17

The Pogues with Christie McCall and Fairy Tale of New York. So you went to a Catholic secondary school that was run by monks. What was that like?

Thomas Keneally10:25

Look, it made a man of you, let me tell you. And I never experienced any of the horrors that have come out about the church recently. Indeed, what the Christian brothers did in Australia was that they went into obscure suburbs like Homewood Strathfield and they yanked the Irish Australians who were in danger of becoming a bit of an underclass by the bootstraps. They thrashed them into the professions in one generation.

Thomas Keneally10:58

And they were a great engine when you look at them as a social force. They were a great engine for social equality. And the Christian Brothers were saying, remain non-questioning Catholic, but make sure you get into the professions, and be careful of Protestant girls or agnostic girls. And I noticed how many, even when I was from 13 on, how many good-looking agnostics and heretics there were.

Presenter11:27

We'll talk about the good looking

Thomas Keneally11:28

The good looking.

Presenter11:30

We'll talk about the good-looking heretics in a moment. I want to ask you about that. You were part of a little band of brothers called the Celestials, this little group of boys. What was that about?

Thomas Keneally11:37

What was that about? Well, there was a brother who's still alive, and blessed be his name. His name was Jimmy McGlade. And he had a collection of modern literature in a locked press, like banned books, at the back of the classroom. And he would have musical evenings to which any of us could go, which he played as Beethoven and Mahler and so on. And this.

Thomas Keneally12:03

opened the sky to me.

Presenter12:05

It's a curious contradiction though, isn't it? Because if on the one hand your soul was being enriched and nurtured and broadened by all of this literature and music, and on the other hand the monks were telling you to to keep your head down and don't look at certain things and certainly don't I mean I imagine don't acknowledge the physical self because therein hell lies.

Thomas Keneally12:17

And certainly don't I mean I imagine

Thomas Keneally12:22

That's right. And that tension was always enormous, of course, even when I was not conscious of it. I had a mate who was put back a year. He he'd been at university and seen those good looking Protestant girls, and he had a huge influence on me too. So I was being torn into. Tell me about your third piece of music. Well, this is a Bach Cantata, part of which we had for my elder daughter Margaret's wedding, which was a very joyous occasion because we didn't think either of our daughters would come out of the bars long enough to get married. Judy and I have always loved Bach, so Bach had to be at the wedding.

Speaker 113:01

Yeah.

Speaker 213:32

What did you do?

Speaker 213:36

So it made this beam.

Speaker 213:48

The spirit goes to time and sigh.

Presenter13:56

The opening chorus of Bach's Cantata 147, Herz und Hund und Tat und Leiben, Heart and Mind and Deed and Life. So, before your eighteenth birthday, Thomas Kingley, you seemed to have a sense that you could choose either between this physical life or the life that was lived very richly in your head, and a sort of spiritual life. What did you choose?

Thomas Keneally14:13

Tips

Thomas Keneally14:16

Well, I I chose the spiritual life and I got a remarkable education in there. It was the great age of vocations when many uh Catholic boys everywhere in the world went into seminaries, even in rough old Australia. And I saw it as a central task. I mean, I saw the social working aspects and the cause espousing aspects of the priesthood. I wanted to do good.

Presenter14:44

It was social justice. Yes. Was it social justice more than religion? Did you feel a calling? Did you feel that God had spoken to you?

Thomas Keneally14:51

No, I I was interested in

Thomas Keneally14:54

The Latin as interested in the the sacraments, the sacrament of the mass, the vestments, as interested in all that gear.

Presenter15:03

The theatricality of the theatre.

Thomas Keneally15:03

The theatricality life was a bit dull. That's the Australia that Clive Jaynes escaped from. And the church was very dramatic still. And you could get in contact with Europe through the church.

Presenter15:17

But what about divine revelation? What about ecstasy? What about

Thomas Keneally15:20

But yeah and I was into all that too, the uh attempt to make contact with God through meditation, all that w had me by the shortened curlies.

Presenter15:21

Trend

Presenter15:33

It was intriguing when you spoke about this scene that you painted of you and your mother on the train after you'd said goodbye to your father, and you said that your sadness was in in a sense a theatrical contrivance. It was like something you'd seen in a movie. And when you say I was into all of that, it sounds as if there was something of the the romantic, something of the writer of you quite enjoying playing the part in the story of the boy

Thomas Keneally15:53

Yeah.

Presenter15:55

Uh

Thomas Keneally15:55

Cool.

Presenter15:55

It was to become

Thomas Keneally15:55

Yeah.

Presenter15:55

Yeah.

Thomas Keneally15:55

Yeah. That is true. That is certainly true. And I wanted to be all the priests I admired were the literary ones, the cool ones, and they were my model. But I did believe it.

Presenter15:55

But that's

Thomas Keneally16:08

The whole package.

Presenter16:09

And was it a very austere life? I mean, what was your room like? What was meal time like?

Thomas Keneally16:13

Oh, it was some.

Thomas Keneally16:15

austere, rather cold for such a warm country, but meal times were sometimes allowed to talk, and sometimes we had readings. We never had a woman

Thomas Keneally16:28

except the serving nuns in the refectory. And the first woman to enter that refectory was Baroness von Trapp and her strapping daughters, who visited Australia and were such bona fide Catholics with their own chaplain that when they insisted on singing for the seminarians, our miserable rector couldn't keep them out. About thirty blokes left in the next couple of weeks once they saw Von Trapp's strapping daughters. So that was the first time women sat at the high

Presenter17:05

Table of the Reventry. And what women they were. And your next disc is not from the sound of music. Tell us what it is.

Presenter17:12

It's uh my wife, J.

Thomas Keneally17:14

Judy's favorite song. Uh Judy is a uh beautiful and forthright older woman and she has an equally forthright sidekick called Jan. And between them Judy is the Capa di Cape of Avalon village. I'm sure they collect protection money from all the businesses in town, and Jan is the concilieri. And this happens to be the favorite song of both of them.

Presenter18:14

Kiri de Canawa and Vilaro. So the doubts started to creep in there. I mean, you'd had your head turned, not just by the Von Trapp girls, but the was there a sense inside your head that you couldn't quite in the end buy into it? You couldn't

Thomas Keneally18:31

I came across instances of

Thomas Keneally18:35

Not that I'm a perfect person and haven't been guilty of the same, but institutional lack of charity, particularly to people who left or people who got tuberculosis in there. And some people did get tuberculosis in there in the 50s in a smiling land like Australia. And those people were then let go.

Thomas Keneally18:57

Their parents picked up all the expense of their illness. And similarly with men who went crazy or had breakdowns. And I think in the end I had a breakdown. I think it had probably had a lot to do with sexuality, but I was not aware it was an underground river underneath it all. It was a river that had been sent underground. What I was most aware of was doubts which seemed to be accelerating. It seemed that if I went ahead and got ordained, these doubts would accelerate.

Presenter19:38

Did you try, along with your uh your teachers and with the people there who who presumably as well as in education were there to give you some sort of emotional sustenance, did you try to discuss with them your the the subversion of your sexuality, the the emotions that you were going through, or was that a no go area?

Thomas Keneally19:55

That was a bit of a no-go area, but also, to be fair to them, I don't think I could have expressed myself adequately. I.

Thomas Keneally20:06

belonged to a system that believed if you prayed enough everything could be negotiated. I felt that I had failed in prayer somehow, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of failure when I left.

Thomas Keneally20:21

And when I was leaving I asked the rector could he say I'd been a good student for s six years and he said to me, with his dancers clacking, Oh, the church doesn't give references. So I felt absolutely bereft of resources.

Thomas Keneally20:42

So I took a job with my uncle in a town named Hain, and um I don't want to sound like a sob sister in talking about what happened then, but I was very low

Presenter20:55

Oh. You don't sound like a sob sister. I I want to ask you about your uncle, because something remarkable happened that through all of these years of

Presenter21:04

Essentially, being separate from real life, living in this rarefied atmosphere. Your salvation, if you like, if I can reasonably use that word in these circumstances, came through a very physical realization. What happened with your uncle?

Thomas Keneally21:16

Well, I went out to the town of Hay, which is very flat and very hot, and when it's not hot, it's very cold. It's big sheep and cattle country, huge properties. And they were tough guys who'd been through World War Two. And of course they were profane and earthy and very much at ease wi with with sex when they could get it. You know, they took it when they could get it. And uh

Thomas Keneally21:43

I felt

Thomas Keneally21:44

Torn because I felt I had to go back to keep faith with the people who'd supported me in the seminary, but I knew in my water that I couldn't go ahead with it.

Presenter21:53

Let's take a break for your fifth piece of music.

Thomas Keneally21:56

Well, this is a wonderful Australian folk song about shearing. It's called The Lachlan Tigers, and Lachlan Tigers are really top gun shearers from the days when Australia rode on the sheep's back.

Speaker 222:13

My curse upon our taffarees, never on our side To share a piece of Camille boys and final public shrine A lot of London tigers to claim the CB

Speaker 222:25

I'm a little ringer and loud because I'm

Speaker 222:31

Number one by swift those locks away and come up.

Presenter22:40

The Bushwhackers and Lochland Tigers remind you of that time when you were out with the wild boys.

Thomas Keneally22:45

Yes, I shore on the riverine, that's where they lived. They'd all shorn on the riverine.

Presenter22:51

We've managed to come this far, Thomas Keneally, which is pretty remarkable, and not really talk about writing. How did we manage? I mean, when did the writing start?

Thomas Keneally22:58

Soon after I left, even if I'd been a priest, I would have tried to write too. So I wrote my first novel, but it's interesting that I met my wife through that book, because my wife was the night nurse to my mother when she had an operation. And my mother gave it to the night nurse to read. And the night nurse said to her, I can't wait to go back to the nurse's station and read your son's book. So I had the courage

Presenter23:29

To ask her out.

Thomas Keneally23:30

Uh

Presenter23:31

You find this pretty quick success. It was well received, and um you were around about thirty then when you published that first novel.

Presenter23:39

Yes. And you then there was this sort of series of literary awards. I I mentioned a little while ago that there were the three bookers that you were nominated for before you actually won.

Thomas Keneally23:47

For what you actually want

Speaker 123:47

One

Presenter23:49

Did it come very easily to you? Did you feel entirely that you were at home, and was there any time when you thought the writing

Presenter23:55

Might not come, it might dry up.

Thomas Keneally23:57

Yes, uh writing is an exercise in controlling your fear. Um above all the fear that you're not a writer. And that doubt is always there, but we are addicted to writing. Writing is like dope. It's like alcohol to the alcoholic. You can't do without it. And alcohol makes alcoholics miserable, and writing makes writers sometimes miserable, but writing delivers a sort of transcendence sometimes. Yeah.

Presenter24:31

That transcendence, that divinity, if you like, you reached that through writing in a way that you never could through. Yes, indeed. So tell me about your next record.

Thomas Keneally24:38

Well, the next piece of music is from the Chieftains and a guest artist, but this is a song called Red Is the Rose, and I practiced, as a folky monkey, I practiced to sing it to my wife, the male version, on her 60th birthday. And at the most earnest pleading of my daughters, I didn't go ahead. So this now in a good voice is for Judy.

Speaker 125:07

Red is the road to yonder garden goals.

Speaker 125:15

There is the lily of the valley And clear is the water that flows from

Speaker 125:30

My love is fairer than it.

Presenter25:36

The Chieftains with Nancy Griffith and Red is the Rose. Your singing didn't sound too bad to me during that. You were singing along, Thomas Keneally. You have written very many well-received books and very many very successful books, but of course the one you will always be known for worldwide, and probably more than any other, is Schindler's Ark. How did you come upon the story of Oscar Schindler?

Thomas Keneally25:59

In October 1980, when I bought a briefcase in a luggage store in Beverly Hills, and because my credit card was held up for about fifty minutes, I got to know the owner, who was a very exuberant fellow called Pauldek Pfefferberg, and he was a Schindler survivor, and he had a Schindler archive at the back, where there were many testimonies and many original documents, including the famous list on which he and his wife were listed.

Presenter26:29

When you started to listen to what he was telling you, did you know it was a story you must write?

Thomas Keneally26:36

Yes, I I mean all the best stories are on the

Thomas Keneally26:41

fault lines between races and cultures, that love or fraternity across the lines of culture that love in situations where people have been induced to hate

Thomas Keneally26:56

There's always a great story there. And of course the great stor aspect of Schindler is that on a human level, on an imaginable level, he reflected, as I said earlier, every aspect of the Holocaust, from the dispossession of property, the dispossession of businesses, the ghettoization, the forced labor camps and the destruction camps.

Presenter27:21

What is uh notable one of the many notable things indeed about the book Schindler's Ark is that you don't shy away from Oscar's many flaws. You know, the drinking, uh the womanizing in his later years he came to depend on the people he'd saved to sort of shore him up emotionally. He is a very human hero.

Thomas Keneally27:39

Yes, and he's also a hero that has one season of grace in his life. Before the war, he was, you know, a local provincial, bit of a shyster, bit of a chatter-up of women, kind of unreliable. And then he becomes a businessman and a black marketeer, and he loves the black market. He loves having pockets full of diamonds to trade. He he loves all that. He doesn't like

Thomas Keneally28:14

The Dreariness of Legitimate Business

Presenter28:17

How difficult for you is it to be defined so heavily, so identified with one piece of work? Well, by.

Thomas Keneally28:24

My fiction is in all sorts of genres, but you've got to choose to take everything as a blessing. I am a little annoyed by that ungrateful young scamp, Spielberg, who has not made all my novels into movies as good as Schundler's List, but I am lucky to have any book I'm known by. I mean, I'm a boy from the Maclay River and then Homebush. What made me ever think I had anything to write about? And so I look upon it as a kindly challenge to produce

Thomas Keneally29:04

Something that is so superlative that it will outschindler Schindler.

Presenter29:10

Let's take a break for some music.

Thomas Keneally29:12

This is from the great film composer John Williams and the great violinist Itzak Perlman. And the unjust thing about film music is the first time I saw Schindler with my wife and daughter on the morning of the premiere we were the only occupants of an entire theatre in Washington I barely heard the music for the force of what was on screen. But Schindler has one of the most glorious soundtracks of any film.

Presenter30:14

Itzak Peirlmann playing the opening theme from Schindler's List. A criticism that's made of a lot of current novels is that they are too micro, too small scale, rather than the macro, which is where you seem most at home painting on this great historical canvas. How comfortable would you be with putting your own life down on the page? I mean you you very intimately

Thomas Keneally30:35

I would be now, but I wasn't when I was young. That's why I went for the big scene. You have a feeling that you won't give away what a nasty, narrow little sod you are by writing about big things.

Thomas Keneally30:50

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You can't escape.

Thomas Keneally30:56

Revealing yourself, whatever you write about.

Presenter30:59

You seem to have a determination as a writer to to to write people in the round, all three hundred and sixty degrees of them, flaws and all, and to say that, yes, you know, we are imperfect, we all are. Does that come from your experience of at one point in your life trying to achieve a sort of divine perfection?

Thomas Keneally31:16

Indeed, indeed, it does come from that, uh and from a sense that we're a flawed species and um

Presenter31:25

And is there glory in that, then? Is that what you enjoy more than the perfectionist?

Thomas Keneally31:28

Yes, if we were not a flawed species we wouldn't be as much fun. I if we didn't die, and if we were not imperfect, and if beauty didn't fade, the novel wouldn't be as interesting. So human imperfection is essential to the novel.

Presenter31:46

After all those years that you spent trying to find a religious peace, a religious truth, and after all the years you've spent being a writer, have you now, in your early seventies, found a a sense of inner calm and peace?

Thomas Keneally32:00

Yes, indeed, and it has been brought to me, amongst other things, by my grandchildren. I was not expecting to be

Thomas Keneally32:11

a dopey grandparent, but something chemical happens to you, and I have found that they've brought an enormous calm to me. I just know I'm on the conveyor belt now. I'm on life's great conveyor belt. I owe it.

Thomas Keneally32:29

ultimately to the earth to perish.

Presenter32:33

Tell me about your final piece of music.

Thomas Keneally32:34

I thought the movie Waking Ned Divine was a little bit cute, but that it had a magnificent soundtrack, including that old Irish song The Parting Glass. And Judy and I have both chosen it. We're going to have Bach and Mozart and so on if we can afford it. We'll have all that, but also The Parting Glass for The Recessional, because it's a very gracious sentiment from.

Thomas Keneally33:03

A comrade who's going home, it's a very gracious sentiment from someone who's just died.

Speaker 233:12

Give me the pouching glass, And drink a health whatever be falls, Then gently rise and song me home, Good night, and joy me to you all

Presenter33:35

The parting glass from the sound track to Waking Ned. We give you the Bible, of course. I would it be useful to you on this island, the Bible? It certainly would. Right, and along with it the complete works of Shakespeare, and you are allowed to take a book of your own. What would you like to take?

Thomas Keneally33:49

I think I'd take the collected plays of George Bernard Shaw, because not only are the plays fascinating, the stage directions are fascinating. So I think the wit and wisdom of George Bernard Shaw can go a great distance. You may have that.

Presenter34:04

You may have that. And of course, to make life a little more bearable, you know, too, that you're allowed a luxury. What would your luxury be?

Thomas Keneally34:10

The luxury would be a

Thomas Keneally34:14

Can

Thomas Keneally34:16

of Savruga Caviar.

Thomas Keneally34:19

and a spoon, and a tin oak.

Presenter34:23

Well that you may have. And if I were to ask you to choose one of the eight discs that you've chosen, which one would it be?

Thomas Keneally34:28

It would be the Bacantatus.

Presenter34:30

Thomas Keneally, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Thomas Keneally34:34

Thank you.

Presenter34:34

Yeah.

Presenter34:41

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.