Why is Oz PM Tony Abbott so scared of a woman in veil, asks Thomas Keneally

This was the first edition of the International Writers and Readers’ Festival (IWRF) in Goa. What was it like for you? 
Before I answer, let me tell you of something I came upon in the morning. We were out in a crowded market square where there was a cross installed several hundreds of years ago. Around it were swirling crowds of Hindus and several other faiths going about their daily lives. This melting pot nature has always made Goa very special. It is special that that IWRF is happening here. True, like all first efforts it had its hiccups but I’m hoping it’ll grow to become a movement. 

You’ve written over 50 novels, histories, memoirs, plays and children's books. At 79, what does it feel like to look back at your journey? 
Its wonderful to be asked this at a time when my first book’s celebrating its 50th anniversary. You know, there’s a couple of weeks' bewilderment at the end of each novel, and these subjects circle above you and then one alights. It's not a very active process in choosing what you're going to write next. It's almost as if a dazzling coloured bird just lands on your railing and you choose to feed it.
If I live to be 100 and don't go gaga I reckon I wouldn't run out of stories to write. There are awards and recognition that come along but at the end of the day one wants to simply tell stories. 

Your latest novel Shame and the Captives recounts the escape of Japanese prisoners of war in New South Wales during WWII.
I experienced this as a nine-year-old. My father was serving the army in the Middle East and I remember how scared I was. Asia and more specifically Japan was at a great peril from 1942 onwards. The politicians then wanted to enforce their own racial theory of an all-white Australia.

We didn’t know anything about Asia or Japan. On the night of August 5, 1944, more than 1,000 Japanese prisoners of war attempted an escape from the camp on the edge of Cowra, expecting to be killed and preferring death to the disgrace of capture. But the Australian military guards were unprepared and about 350 prisoners escaped into the bush. It was scary to think of the Japanese soldiers at loose in the bush. During the next week, they were all rounded up; 107 were wounded and 231 died, along with four Australian soldiers. Later as an adult I learnt that the motive of those Japanese POWs who threw themselves in front of trains or committed suicide by hanging were driven by the shame of being caught by the enemy. The Cowra breakout was a big event of my childhood. My aunt lived nearby and she was very scared. She was a very sturdy woman and she slept with an axe, but the proposition behind that was they were coming to get us.

And what’s the Japanese reaction been like?
The book looks at the whole Cowra episode as a figure of speech for Australia’s attitude to Asia both before and after WWII. I just hope I got it culturally right, because I'm not into the cultural offence business though I began with a very primitive, war-induced view of the Japanese. Having said that, I do hope Shame and the Captives could one day be translated into Japanese.

Your iconic Schindler's List which you self-effacingly insist is not your best, happened by accident?
I was on a book tour in Beverly Hills and my brief case came unhinged. I went out to buy one from a shop owned by one Leopold Pefferberg. There were problems and it was taking a while to swipe my credit card. In hindsight that seems like a great thing. Leopold and I got talking and I found he was a Schindler survivor. He took me to the back of his shop where a lot of memorabilia related to Oskar Schindler including the list with all the names of survivors were kept in a cupboard in the repair room. Hooked, I later visited other archives in Jerusalem and Munich and met other survivors to research the book with Paul Deck. 

You also wanted to also act in Schindler’s List.
Yes. I’ve played parts like a lecherous cook and the man who sleeps with the main character’s wife in other films. Here was a film that really appealed to my sensibility and I wanted to play Rabbi Menasha Lewartow –eventually played by Erza Dagan - and suggested as much to the casting director Lucky Englander but never heard from him.  

What was it like working with Steven Spielberg?
I understood that there can be no room for nuanced stuff in a movie. Not many writers have stood outside studios with a sign saying –‘He’s violated my dream.’ I guess when (Chuckles) you’re offered good money you might say, ‘I can make the novelist in me behave.” On a more serious note Spielberg is very generous and consultative with his work. 
In a way I’m glad he’d been told you can’t win an Oscar with furry animals. You have to tell powerful human stories for an Academy award. (Laughs) Something like an Oscar for Oskar. 
I remember how the studio bosses rolled their eyes, shook their heads and squirmed when Spielberg first announced that he wanted to make the film in black and white inspired the newsreels of yore. And yet, today one can’t think of any other way the film would have worked at all.

Does it strike you as odd, that the Israeli state established by those who fled cruelty, persecution and annihilation chooses to do the same with Palestinians in Gaza?
Sadly for us, it’s the wisdom of the world and a lot of governments would do exactly what Netanhyu has done. But in the process he’s not done much for abiding peace. Certainly the Holocaust doesn’t justify what Israel’s doing. Perhaps without intending to, by killing Palestinian children and civilians, its ending up helping recruitments for the ‘enemy.’ Palestinians who feel they’ve no hope for peace and respect from Israel may want to join the other side. I know rockets are landing on Israeli territory, but the retribution is absolutely disproportionate as the ruin of Gaza and the death of so many people shows. Its just not justifiable. 
Instead of saying - We nearly obliterated you, so don’t obliterate the Palestinians – the West needs to keep reinforcing that Israel needs to be a just state and how Palestinians have as much right to be there without being encircled by Israeli settlements.  

Why are so many of your works inspired by 20th-century wars?
Though I'd like to be a pacifist, my hypocrisy is, I like to write about human conflict. If everybody was nice to each other, novelists would’ve little to write about. As a child, even though I lived far from WWII, I knew several people in it. My father was away in North Africa. He’d send back cake tins full of Nazi memorabilia. So I was only a degree separated from the Third Reich, in my Sydney suburb home. The Japanese bombing of northern Australia and the submarine attack in Sydney harbor—all that occurred at an impressionable age. 

Why we go to war at all is a great mystery to me. Not all my books are about war, but they're about what divides. If properly conditioned, would I do what the young men in the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto did? These people weren’t mad. They were from ordinary blokes who’d been sold a very strange, sophisticated line of indoctrination. I often wonder how I'd behave in those situations. I don't think I'd be as competent as the sisters (The Daughters of Mars) and I don't think I'd be as effective as Oskar Schindler was, because Oskar was an operator. I fear a lot of us, when we see present horrors, say, ‘Oh, how appalling. Why doesn't NATO address it?’ We sign a few online petitions but ultimately do little. It's often unexpected people who do the housekeeping of humanity, which is what Schindler did, and of course these girls are doing the housekeeping of humanity, too. It's horrifying housekeeping, but it definitely needs to be done.

One’s own moral fibre casts up as a question when it comes to war. In the 19th century how would one behave racially? I've written a lot about the clash between Aboriginals and settlers, which was like the clash between Native Americans and the settlers—except Aboriginals never had access to rifles, so they were even more disadvantaged. But I often wonder how I’d behave in the 19th century as a land-starved Irishman riding into these illimitable pastures that no one is going to stop me occupying except members of the oldest culture on Earth. It's the sort of question I can't help teasing away at as I’ve come to realise that literature can be an epiphany without which life would be barbarous.

Given your views on the clash between Aboriginals and settlers, what do you make of the xenophobia being whipped up by the likes of current Australian PM Tony Abbott?
As if Australia choosing to align itself with the US-led coalition in the war against the Islamic state wasn’t bad by itself, within a day - when young Muslims in Australia fear that they’ll be attacked by bigots who want to paint the whole community with the same brush of hatred, when cohesion is under considerable pressure – Abbot says he finds the burqa confronting. This erosion of human rights in the name of misplaced ideas of safety is appalling and a criminal version of leadership. He knows that if he appeals to the idiots he’ll do well at the polls. And what could be so wrong about the hijab. I was raised by Irish nuns who are also covered head to toe (Laughs)? All of us need to amplify our signals to Muslim youth and women that they belong and it is the bigotry of the likes of Abbot that doesn’t. But why am I talking about a monarchist with limited imagination and fraternity who’d like us to be tied to the apron strings of royalty or be at America’s bidding. How terribly weak must he be to find a woman in a veil threatening? But then again this xenophobia is becoming a pattern with Australia...

You mean the way they treat asylum seekers coming on boats from Vietnam?
Yes. Its appalling to think of how they are treating asylum seekers in detention centres. Its terrible because they’ve not only sold their soul, but are also spending far too much money on keeping desperate, bewildered and disoriented people locked up. Refugees are just humans like us. Their motives may be open to interpretation, but above all, they’re driven by fear of tyranny. 
And certainly the introduction into the debate of pejorative words, of insults isn’t helping. You know, under the Australian immigration law, it's not illegal to seek asylum and yet we have a Immigration minister arguing and ordering his department that boat arrivals should be called illegals, should not be called clients. And similar verbal abuse has been used, and I think most of us can't understand why there has to be such verbal abuse. We know there's a problem and 1,000 people drowned at sea is a terrible tragedy, particularly since many of them are the old, women and children. But we wonder at the same time as trying to work out how to deal with this worldwide crisis why they have to be insulted..

Is your pacificism a throwback to the six years you spent at Patrick's Seminary studying to be a priest? 
It could be. Before becoming a teacher, law student and then a writer, I studied to be a priest for a while but I had trouble believing in the concept of the Virgin Mother. Maybe that’s what she told her husband you see (Chuckles). I found that the church rarely practised what it preached about being compassionate. It was a very legalistic organisation and so I became disenchanted. In the end, given how much faith I’d left in the institution, to save myself from going completely mad, I had to leave. 

My first novel, The Place at Whitton, which set a Gothic murder mystery against the tensions of the cloistered community despite being an absolute technical mess saved me being a fairly total failure. Ashamed about leaving the seminary, my social life was in ruins, facing the normal half-life that afflicted many former seminarians. When that book was published, I sensed that it was my ticket into Australian society and maybe even into world society, and that it was a flimsy instrument but, if I clung to it, it was the deck chair on the Titanic which would wash me in interesting directions. By the way I don’t know how much credit I should give ‘the priest factory’ for my politics considering the dickhead Tony Abbot studied there as well (Cackles)...

You’ve said you toyed with idea of a book on Subhash Chandra Bose…
When I visited Kolkata I was fascinated to find the airport named after him. Bose had, at least from the British point of view I imbued, chosen a worse bed-mate than India already had. In fact, offended with Japanese militarism, Gandhi once said that Bose was dumping one imperial master for a more sinister one.
Also its wonderful to have mystery in fiction. Given the number of questions about his death, one could probably write 2-3 endings to his life and ask readers to compare.

As an increasingly large number of popular writers both in India and elsewhere get panned for really bad writing, what do you make of such writing?
You mean like a Dan Brown or some other Indian writers who’ve become very popular? I can’t say. I wish I had their success but they write fantastically atrocious stuff. A novel like Gone Girl for example is very well written from a craft point of view by Gillian Flynn who is far greater writer than Dan Brown can ever be. Unfortunately its sad but true that you can do well but remain mediocre. I know people who’ve written great books which don;t get them attention or money so they go and write a pot boiler. Henry James once made such an attempt and wrote to his agent when he sent it across: ‘Is it bad enough to sell?’ In the end you have to find your own true voice and write in it. Then it may not work as mass market literature but stand the test of time as quality work. 

Many call this the best times for Indian writers in English. Do you follow any of their work?
Anita Desai and Rohinton Mistry who are exceptionally fine writers come to mind. Also (Bhabani) Bhattacharya who wrote He Who Rides A Tiger which I hope did very well in India. I was absolutely enchanted with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children which was some really serious work of imagination. As for Seth like some other English writers emerging from China his work is quite exotic and fascinating. 

You often compare the cruelties that Britain unleashed on both Ireland and India during their respective famines. 
Its difficult not to considering both were inconvenient fall-outs of British policy. The Bengal famine was in many ways not unlike the Irish one. Chruchill was vindictively callous. While his concerns were more with the war and priorities for British shipping, it will be wrong to say this was not about racial supremacy which made the British feel they were meant to rule. Here was a democracy which had engineered a famine. And here was a leader who talked about freedom and democracy to the world outside when he was denying the same to this vast colony. Churchill didn’t want others like Roosevelt to find out about this so the British went to great lengths to negate the Bengal famine and keep it under wraps…

What are you working on now? 
My novel inspired by an exhibition in Melbourne of Napoleon's relics owned by the Balcombe family –is getting wrapped up. It which should be out next year. The Balcombes were neighbours to the exiled emperor on the British island of St Helena before coming to Australia. The story focuses on the playful and fraught relationship between Napoleon and the teenage Betsy Balcombe, which was probably not sexual.