Thomas Keneally

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 10:11

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

This week, our castaway is the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, who was winner last year of the Boecker Prize with Schindler's Ark.

Presenter0:39

Now, Tom, we're going to send you to a very small island, a deserted one, with a small parcel of eight records. Is music an interest of yours?

Thomas Keneally0:49

Yes, it is an interest, but I have a very inchoate taste, very unrefined taste, so I should warn people now at this stage. People have been warned.

Presenter0:57

This state.

Thomas Keneally0:59

Do you make music yourself? Do you play an instrument? No, I but I do sing, and have always sung, with a particular passion for singing folk songs, generally in remote settings, because uh other members of the race don't seem to show much tolerance.

Presenter1:17

Now, did you find it a very difficult job to choose just eight records to last for a long, long time?

Thomas Keneally1:24

Well, of of course it is an enormously difficult job.

Thomas Keneally1:28

I think that if you were on a desert island and you had chosen eight records, after a year and a half you would start to curse your earlier choice and think of many others that you also made.

Presenter1:40

Possibly. What's the first record you've chosen?

Thomas Keneally1:42

The first one is the King's College chapel choir from Cambridge singing the carol once in Royal David City, and the reason for choosing that is that

Speaker 11:52

And the rem

Thomas Keneally1:56

It reminds me of Australian Christmases, which are totally different from English Christmases. You are sitting with the doors open, waiting for the subtlety to arrive. It's very humid. The beach is down below. You've probably been for a swim.

Thomas Keneally2:11

One Christmas Eve I saw a magnificent sports car roll down to the surf pool, four people in evening dress two men, two women get out, strip off, dive in. That hedonism is more characteristic of um an Australian Christmas perhaps for climatic reasons than than an English Christmas.

Thomas Keneally2:33

In the midst of all this humidity and hedonism, as you wait for the children to fall asleep.

Thomas Keneally2:40

You switch on the television, you see that dreadful miracle on 32nd Street, whatever it is, for the 15th time, and then God bless the BBC.

Thomas Keneally2:49

The King's College Chapel comes on, all these angelic, pale, cherubic faces of the of the choristers singing this extremely evocative carol.

Presenter4:00

ONCE IN ROYADAVID CITY BY THE KING'S COLLEDGE CHAPPELCHOIR, CAMBRIDEG. TOM, whereabouts in Australia were you born?

Thomas Keneally4:07

One.

Presenter4:07

Uh

Thomas Keneally4:08

I was uh born and spent the first part of my childhood about three hundred miles north of Sydney in a particularly beautiful valley founded by a man from

Thomas Keneally4:19

uh Warwickshire, a man called Rudder.

Speaker 14:21

A man crossed

Thomas Keneally4:22

And at the beginning of Australia's involvement in World War Two, or the beginning of the Japanese threat to Australia, we moved down to Sydney and my father joined the forces and we stayed in Sydney. Keneally, of course, is an Irish name. Yes, County Cork. One of a big family? Not myself. My grandfather, who came to Australia from Newmarket outside Cork, did produce a large family, but there was very little to do in the bush. I see what you mean.

Presenter4:53

I see what to me.

Thomas Keneally4:55

What was your first ambition? What did you want to be? I wanted from the start to be uh a writer.

Thomas Keneally5:02

I know that because I used to fill little exercise books with stories.

Thomas Keneally5:07

Preposterous stories, even more unpublishable than most of the stuff I write now.

Thomas Keneally5:13

I can remember that these ambitions were mixed up with sporting ambitions.

Thomas Keneally5:19

All Australians have sporting ambitions. So my ambitions were a mixture of rugby league, cricket, and writing. In fact, you studied for the priesthood. That's right. Yes.

Thomas Keneally5:31

Belong to a big Irish Catholic community in Australia. Australia was probably the most Irish country outside Ireland. It is possible for a Sydney sider of that period to look at the news reports from Ulster and to understand a little the internecine, closed-minded strife that's going on there.

Thomas Keneally5:56

Therefore, in that atmosphere, many Irish Catholic lads in Australia went to study for the priesthood, as many as there are Jews in New York who went to the yeshiva. And it's remarkable now, of course, we all left Roy, we didn't last the distance. The girls on the beach and the strong beer got to us, but there's recently been an article about the failed priest mafia in Australia.

Presenter6:21

How near did you get to ordination?

Thomas Keneally6:23

I got quite close, and uh I think both the Church and I myself were lucky that I didn't get closer. But I did spend six years.

Presenter6:33

What did you turn to instead?

Thomas Keneally6:35

Well, I did the thing that most nascent writers are supposed to do. I travelled round the countryside and worked at a number of things. You wanted to be a barrister for a while. Mm-hmm. What went wrong with that?

Speaker 16:45

What's that wrong with that?

Thomas Keneally6:47

Well, it was my innocence about publishing that led to my becoming a full time writer, because if I'd known more about the economics of publishing I would never have become a full time writer.

Presenter7:00

You're jumping ahead a bit, Tom. You you were in the army, too, weren't you? That was the same thing.

Thomas Keneally7:04

Very b very briefly, I was simply in the militia.

Thomas Keneally7:07

Math

Presenter7:07

Let's have your second record. What shall that be?

Thomas Keneally7:09

The second record is a Percy Granger folk song revival called Shepherd's Hay. And Percy Granger was a very strange boy from Melbourne who was a sort of cultural Dennis Lilly who came to Europe because he felt the Europeans needed him, that music in Europe wasn't taking the right direction. But one thing Percy did was that he

Thomas Keneally7:35

contributed enormously to the folk revival in Britain.

Thomas Keneally7:40

Of course, his contribution to the

Thomas Keneally7:42

Music of Benjamin Britton and Vaughan Williams and so on is enormous. Well, there's a recording you have there with.

Presenter7:50

Benjamin Britton can

Thomas Keneally7:51

Doctor.

Presenter8:53

Percy Granger's Shepherd's Hay. So, Tom, three careers the church, law, and the army left by the wayside. What was the fourth?

Thomas Keneally9:02

Yeah.

Presenter9:02

Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas Keneally9:02

Yeah.

Presenter9:02

Well

Thomas Keneally9:03

The fourth was uh teaching. Uh the army wasn't really a career, uh it was simply a stint.

Presenter9:05

Uh

Thomas Keneally9:10

in the militia. But the teaching was uh an important experience on my way back from the monastic existence into the

Speaker 19:11

But

Thomas Keneally9:21

Well, let's call it the real world. What were your subjects? History and English, of course. And uh.

Thomas Keneally9:28

I um gave that

Thomas Keneally9:31

Up, although I knew I could always go back to it to become a full-time writer once more.

Thomas Keneally9:36

I felt uh once I got one book published that makes you a writer.

Presenter9:40

So you were writing while you were teaching, during vacations?

Thomas Keneally9:44

Yes, that's right. The the first novel is an absolute disaster because um

Thomas Keneally9:50

I wrote it over a summer holiday and when the holiday ended I artificially sawed all the limbs of the novel off. I killed people off, dissolved relationships, anything to get it finished and send it off to uh to England. How many publishers did you send it to before it was accepted? That was the remarkable thing about the sixties. I sent it only to two.

Thomas Keneally10:15

and the second one accepted it. They were palmy times in the sixties when lots of novels were published. Immensely harder for first novelists to be published now.

Presenter10:28

And then you wrote a book about your childhood. Did the same publisher take that?

Thomas Keneally10:31

That's right, yes.

Presenter10:32

Yeah.

Presenter10:33

You've since disowned.

Thomas Keneally10:35

Both those Yeah.

Presenter10:36

But it b

Thomas Keneally10:36

Uh

Presenter10:36

Books.

Thomas Keneally10:37

Well, I think that most writers do disown their early books, and even some of their later books, because they're the crimes of your childhood or of your adolescence. They're like the passions of adolescence, which you now look back on and feel

Thomas Keneally10:56

embarrassed about.

Presenter10:57

Now you'd crammed those two books in in into school holidays. When did you decide that you were going to be a full-time writer or bust? When did you give up teaching?

Thomas Keneally11:06

December sixty five. I'd just married Judith. So there were responsibilities. Indeed, yes. Well, Judy is an enormously supportive woman, and uh

Thomas Keneally11:18

She had that same Australian give-it-a-go attitude that that I had, I suppose, and uh

Thomas Keneally11:27

Also

Thomas Keneally11:29

I must reiterate that our ignorance of the economics of publishing made it made us set ups for trying it on, tr seeing if we could last. Well there you were, giving it a go, so let's break off at that point for your third record. The um third record is from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and it's the uh Largo from The Winter Movement performed by Itzhak Perlman and the London Philharmonic.

Presenter12:57

The second movement of Winter from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Itzak Perlman, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter13:05

You've never been a man to get into a rut with your writing. Every book you've written has been something completely different.

Thomas Keneally13:13

Yes, and I don't know why that is. I think it's a temperamental thing. A book takes so long to write that you get heartily sick of it by the time you've spent a year on it, rewritten it two or three times, and

Thomas Keneally13:29

I find that a

Thomas Keneally13:31

Sort of native impetuosity makes me move on to new subjects.

Presenter13:36

Novels and historical Your first historical novel, Bring Larks and Heroes, was about the early penal colony days of Australia. There was a time when that period was too sensitive a subject to be written about.

Thomas Keneally13:50

That's uh true, because um

Thomas Keneally13:52

There was a time when to have uh convict ancestry in a family was a deep and deadly secret, and uh people didn't want to confess to it.

Thomas Keneally14:02

And uh now of course people

Thomas Keneally14:05

Hire genealogists to find a convict in their back.

Presenter14:09

And this is really something. Yes. Bring larks and heroes. That is a genuine historical quote. Well, it's a quote.

Thomas Keneally14:18

A quote from a poem which I composed for the book. Novels are the only places where I'm game to compose verse and pass it off as one of the characters.

Presenter14:29

By a rough count you've written, I think, sixteen or or seventeen books, and we we can't talk about them all. But you did write a novel inspired by your years of studying for the priesthood.

Thomas Keneally14:39

Yes. In the late sixties, when the Catholic Church was in ferment and there were rebel priests and so on, I wrote a novel about a rebel priest.

Presenter14:49

I suppose with that we could couple a later book, A Study of Joan of Arc, Bloodred Sister Rose.

Thomas Keneally14:55

Yes, although uh the Joan book was somewhat different. Uh I felt that Joan wasn't a pallid maiden in the George Bernard Shaw pattern. I felt that she was a revolutionary.

Thomas Keneally15:10

and a very earthy and very strong, very vitriolically tongued woman, and I wanted to show the true earthy, thick fibered Joan. Considered her one of the major figures of European history.

Thomas Keneally15:29

Particularly in her relationship to the English and to the English monarchy of the day. And

Thomas Keneally15:37

I was interested in the way some people get taken up by a demon, by a force which drives them to do extraordinary things, and then it seems to dump them. Joan was dumped. Suddenly her voices no longer spoke to her again. Once the king was crowned, she was dumped both by the royal party and also by her voices, and she was at a loss and she was ultimately captured and died that miserable death. And the same thing happens with Schindler in Schindler's ark. He's taken up almost by a divine force. He saves all those Central European Jews. He runs rings round the SS, makes fools of the SS. But after the war, once the war ends, he becomes something of a hollow man. He becomes dependent on the people he saved. He goes bankrupt twice, and he never achieves the panache.

Thomas Keneally16:37

the moral grandeur that he achieved during the war. So

Thomas Keneally16:41

There's more of a connection between the Joan of Arc and the Schindler than between the Joan of Arc and the earlier priesthood book.

Presenter16:44

Yeah and the sh

Presenter16:49

We'll come back to Schindler in a minute, because that was the book with which you won the Booker Prize and a very important event in your career.

Presenter16:57

In the meantime we got to record four. What's that?

Presenter17:00

Uh

Thomas Keneally17:00

Record four is another Christmas carol, the Boar's Head Carol. It's for all my old British friends and all the rather remarkable Australians who have decided to settle here.

Presenter17:11

And it's also for you on your desert island.

Speaker 217:14

With dollars bedecked with a gay garland, let us serve irrecon.

Speaker 117:15

Must be decked with a gay guy.

Speaker 217:24

Cabot every day far away, Red and Slovak garment on Cabuda Bay Ferraro. Uh

Thomas Keneally17:37

Grab.

Thomas Keneally17:39

Play stars. Oh man.

Presenter17:42

The Boar's Head Cattle by Steele Ice Bam

Presenter17:46

Tell me about your writing discipline. Do you work set hours every day?

Presenter17:52

Yeah.

Thomas Keneally17:52

That's right. Yes, I uh

Thomas Keneally17:54

begin work dependent on whether I drive the girls to school or not. We've got two daughters. Yes. Two daughters. Two daughters. And uh we divide that labor, my wife and I.

Presenter17:59

You've got two daughters.

Thomas Keneally18:06

And uh if I

Thomas Keneally18:09

drive them, then I start work about nine o'clock, and I work till about one one thirty.

Thomas Keneally18:16

And then I try to take a long break, and if I had any sense, that's all the work I'd do for that day.

Thomas Keneally18:23

But I've got a good working class um conscience about work, and therefore I go back in the afternoon and try to work again. You work on a typewriter? Generally long hand or a dictaphone. I find that the typewriter is impossible. But

Thomas Keneally18:41

You can't really write creatively more than three or four hours a day, and I find what keeps me sane is that long lunch time break. I live near the beach and generally swim at lunch time in the early afternoon, especially in summer.

Thomas Keneally19:01

It is a quite beautiful beach.

Thomas Keneally19:04

But the water isn't always as warm as you'd expect of the South Pacific. It is fed partly by an Antarctic current, and one of the great stimulations of swimming at our beach is often the joy of actually getting out of the water.

Thomas Keneally19:26

Do you take a long break between books? No, I don't, unless I can help it. You do a long break.

Presenter19:30

You do a lot of travelling.

Thomas Keneally19:31

Yes, uh that's the the sort of break I end up taking.

Thomas Keneally19:36

Travel is uh one of my passions, too. It's a very um

Thomas Keneally19:42

expensive passion to have for a writer.

Thomas Keneally19:45

but uh fortunately there are enough invitations around that I can travel.

Thomas Keneally19:51

uh a fair amount and um it's when you're traveling

Thomas Keneally19:56

And particularly when you're travelling and are in a restaurant or a pub, that writing seems easiest.

Thomas Keneally20:03

And that the future looks rosy. It's when you get back to the desk.

Thomas Keneally20:08

and that blank enormity of the page, it's then that writing seems impossible.

Presenter20:11

Okay.

Thomas Keneally20:15

Let's have your fifth record.

Presenter20:16

Yeah.

Thomas Keneally20:16

Well, the fifth record is uh Elga's Enigma variations and specifically the Nimrod variation.

Thomas Keneally20:25

And I can remember years ago when we lived in London for a few years, seeing the Royal Ballet's wonderful production of the Enigma variations, and the choreography and the music were an experience which I've never forgotten.

Presenter21:47

Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations, Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Presenter21:54

I should think your association, Tom, if association is the right word, with the Booker Prize must be unique. You've been on the short list four times and won it once. Nobody else can compete with that record.

Thomas Keneally22:03

One at once.

Thomas Keneally22:07

That's right. In the Australian press they were describing me as the Pom's permanent bridesmaid.

Thomas Keneally22:14

Yeah.

Presenter22:15

What was the first book you were on for?

Thomas Keneally22:17

The first was The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, which was a book about Aboriginals. When was that? That was nineteen seventy two. That was the year of the scandal when the winning author gave half the prize to the Black Panthers. Ah, yes.

Presenter22:17

Yeah.

Presenter22:22

When was the

Thomas Keneally22:32

The second one was, I believe, Gossip from the Forest, which was a a book about the signing of the armistice in the forest of Compiègne. A not very reverent book about that that armistice signing.

Presenter22:46

Signing

Thomas Keneally22:47

Well, I think that they could have done a better job for all our benefits and in honour of all those young men who who perished in that war. And I think they could have saved many of the young men and many of the Central Europeans who perished in World War Two if they'd been wiser in that carriage. Then the next one was a book about the South. I got involved when we were living in America in the question of the South.

Thomas Keneally23:18

and uh I found Southerners, warts and all.

Thomas Keneally23:22

less pretentious than the Yankees, and more like Australians. I got interested in that other South, the South

Thomas Keneally23:30

of the ordinary farm lad, the one who wasn't.

Thomas Keneally23:36

Rhett Butler, or who wasn't Scarlett O'Hara, and I began to read journals and letters of that period, and ended up in my folly writing a book about it. But that was the third one that was short.

Presenter23:48

The bat was

Presenter23:50

A long book, a vast book, about the Civil War Confederates. That was in nineteen seventy nine. And then last year, eighty two, Bingo,

Presenter24:00

You got the prize. Yes, Schindler's Argue.

Presenter24:03

An enormous book in sales, and of course you got the big cash prize of ten thousand pounds. But you didn't get it all because you had laid a bet on another book, hadn't you? Yes, will you?

Thomas Keneally24:15

Tim Boyd.

Thomas Keneally24:17

knew that my book wouldn't win because although I felt it was a novel, all the characters in it were real people and people who had existed or who still existed.

Thomas Keneally24:32

And uh

Thomas Keneally24:33

I thought that the judges would be very brave indeed if they gave it to my book.

Thomas Keneally24:39

So when I arrived in England and knew that Ladbrokes were running a book, I thought uh why not make your trip worth while and take home a gambling win with you? So I put fifty quid on William Boyd, who is a a grand

Presenter24:50

Uh

Speaker 224:50

Yeah.

Presenter24:51

Uh

Thomas Keneally24:55

English novelist and we'll go on to Even grander work and who will certainly win the booker.

Presenter25:01

Well, we'll talk about Schindler's Ark in more detail in a minute. In the meantime, regretting the fact that you only got nine thousand nine hundred and fifty pounds instead of the full ten thousand, let's go on to your next record. What's that?

Thomas Keneally25:13

Well, the next record is an Australian folk song performed by the good old Seekers, now all private citizens in Australia, I think. And it's uh a gold mining song called With My Swag All on My Shoulder. And I'd like to indulge in a little bit of ancestor worship because I had a grandfather who was a berserk gold seeker. He was supposed to be a farmer, but he kept on going out trying to find reefs. Did he find any? Never found anything. That's why I had to be a writer. And the whole thing is, though, that had it not been for the lore of gold, I may never have been an Australian.

Speaker 226:01

When first we left Old England shore such yands as we were told.

Speaker 226:06

Uh

Thomas Keneally26:06

Ask how folks in Australia could pick up lumps of gold. So when we got to Melbourne Town, we were ready soon to slip.

Thomas Keneally26:17

And get even with the cowboy

Thomas Keneally26:21

We scumble from the shoe.

Presenter26:23

With my swag all on my shoulder by the seekers.

Presenter26:26

Now Schindler's arc.

Presenter26:28

The book that won the Booker Prize about the Jewish Holocaust. Based on fact. Where did you come across this story?

Thomas Keneally26:36

Well, I was in Los Angeles about to go home to, um

Thomas Keneally26:41

Sydney to begin work on a uh documentary with the B B C and uh I went round the corner from the hotel to buy a couple of prescriptive T shirts, prescriptive for my daughters, and um

Thomas Keneally26:57

I was being put up in unaccustomed grandeur by the publishers at a big hotel in Beverly Hills, near Rodeo Drive it was, and in Rodeo Drive it's hard for a proletarian writer to find T shirts that cost less than eighty five dollars. So I walked a little way till I found the sort that I could afford, and then I crossed the road from the T shirt shop and looked in the window of a baggage store, because I'd broken my briefcase. The hinges on my briefcase had come unstuck.

Thomas Keneally27:28

And the man who owned the shop, being a good Central European, came out on the pavement and said, Sir, what can I get for you? Can I help you? and so on. Come into the shop. I can get you a brief case. I can give you a discount so on.

Thomas Keneally27:43

And he did produce a very good briefcase. And while I was waiting for the charges to be cleared on my credit cards, they're very slow.

Thomas Keneally27:53

To clear Australian credit cards of notice is the convict reputation. However,

Thomas Keneally27:59

While I was waiting he began to talk to me

Thomas Keneally28:02

About his wartime experience. He knew I was a writer, and he said, I've got a book for you. I was saved, but so was my wife saved from Auswitz by an extraordinary German, big, handsome, Hitlerite dream of a man, called Oskar Schindler. I have many Oscar Schindler documents, he said. In the nineteen sixties, a movie was nearly made on Oscar, and while we're waiting for your

Thomas Keneally28:30

credit card to be cleared, have a look at this material and he

Thomas Keneally28:34

told his son to mind the shop,

Thomas Keneally28:36

and he took me up to the bank on the corner, uh open on Saturdays.

Thomas Keneally28:42

And uh he

Thomas Keneally28:44

Talked them into running off photocopies of all this material. And it was remarkable material. And at once.

Thomas Keneally28:52

I understood that here was a most astounding European character. Schindler was dead. Schindler at that stage had been six years dead. He died in october seventy four, and he's buried in Jerusalem.

Presenter29:08

Spielberg is going to make a film of the book. Are you working on the script?

Thomas Keneally29:12

That's right. I've worked um on the um first draft and I'm about to start on the

Thomas Keneally29:20

Second, what's your next book?

Thomas Keneally29:23

Well, I have a book which has recently come out in Britain about the Australian Outback. It is an anecdotal book. It's a book about journeys. The Northern Territory is an amazing place and

Thomas Keneally29:37

both the Aboriginal uh culture of the Northern Territory and the European mode of life in the Northern Territory are larger than life.

Thomas Keneally29:48

And the journeys that I undertook to gather the material for this book were revelations to me as an Australian, and I hope they're revelations to the English reader. A lot of barbarous things happen up there, but with increasing goodwill, there's a lot of cooperation now between Aboriginal clever men and doctors and European doctors, and a lot of cooperation even between some police officers and the mysterious Aboriginal tribal executioner, only one of whom I've ever met, the Kadaicha man, the man who wears eagle feather and grass shoes, which make the same track whichever direction he's moving in, and who is filled with spirit power and who goes around the tribal earth and even goes beyond the tribal boundaries, executing the wrongdoer. The territory is a rich source of material, and it was delightful to travel there.

Thomas Keneally30:49

Let's have another record. Number s

Presenter30:50

Simple.

Thomas Keneally30:51

Well, number seven is Blossom Deary, whom I've never met, but I think she has the most remarkably feminine voice.

Thomas Keneally31:00

And she's the one whose voice I would most like to take.

Thomas Keneally31:05

With me to a desert island. And not only that, I think they should record her for all recorded messages on telephones. What's your singing? I'm Hip.

Thomas Keneally31:15

Gettin' my kicks, digging arty French flicks with my shades on

Thomas Keneally31:21

Cause I'm too much, I'm a gas I am anything but middle class When I hang around the bell

Thomas Keneally31:29

Popping our thumbs, digging the drums.

Thomas Keneally31:32

Squares don't seem to understand I flip They're not hip

Thomas Keneally31:37

Time to give it to

Presenter31:38

Doo doo doo ba peano

Thomas Keneally31:40

Uh

Presenter31:43

Blossom Deary

Presenter31:44

Tom, you list your recreations as swimming, sailing, and hiking. Do you think you'd be all right? An efficient castaway.

Thomas Keneally31:51

I I think I could just about get by.

Presenter31:54

Are you good at fishing?

Thomas Keneally31:54

Well, adequate at fishing. I don't fish much any more. Um

Thomas Keneally32:00

Roy, I've gone more in the direction of uh swimming and crosswords now.

Presenter32:06

But

Thomas Keneally32:07

Death.

Presenter32:07

Well, you can get plenty of swimming and had to make your own crosswords in the sand. Could you build a craft to escape?

Thomas Keneally32:14

No, no, a rotten sailor. The times I've sailed I've been cook.

Thomas Keneally32:21

and reserve foreign hand. I would not trust myself to build a seaworthy boat.

Presenter32:28

All right, well, if you haven't faith in your own navigation, your own craft, you better stay where you are, and let's have your last record.

Thomas Keneally32:35

The last record is uh an Australian folk singer, Eric Bogle, who wrote a remarkable song about all the

Thomas Keneally32:45

Aussie lads who were killed in World War One or who participated in World War One, it's called No Man's Land.

Speaker 232:52

Well how'd you do, private William McBride? Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside? I'll rest for a while in the warm summer sun. I've been walking all day, Lord, and I'm nearly done.

Speaker 233:13

And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen When you joined the Glorious Fallen in 1916.

Presenter33:23

Eric Vogel singing No Man's Land.

Presenter33:27

If you could take only one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

Presenter33:30

Yeah.

Thomas Keneally33:31

It would have to be Vivaldi's forces.

Presenter33:32

Yeah. Right.

Presenter33:34

And one luxury to take to the island, one object of no use whatever except to look at, to touch, to have about.

Presenter33:42

Uh

Thomas Keneally33:42

It would have to be a

Thomas Keneally33:44

Collection of Times Crosswords.

Presenter33:46

Oops.

Presenter33:48

All right. One every morning. You'd ration yourself. Indeed. We'll give you some pencils as well. And one book.

Presenter33:54

You've got the Bible and Shakespeare already on the island.

Thomas Keneally33:57

Yeah.

Thomas Keneally33:58

Well, off the top of my head, and to remind me of the civilization I've left behind, I think Philip Larkin's Oxford book of twentieth century English verse. Right, the.

Presenter34:09

Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English First, edited by Philip Larkin.

Presenter34:13

And thank you, Tom Keneally, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Thomas Keneally34:17

It is very much my pleasure. Thank you.

Presenter34:19

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 134:46

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