Hitching outside Kinvara on a wet October's day some years ago, I was rescued from imminent drowning by Thomas Keneally, who stopped to give me a lift. We were some miles down the road to Galway and in the middle of an animated discussion about his Irish ancestors and views on Ireland before it dawned on me who he was. He was in Ireland at that time to research a travel book, Now And In Time To Be. By a bizarre and almost fictitious coincidence, it just so happened that I was hitch-hiking around the Irish coast to write a travel book as well. A year later, we ended up as characters in each other's books.
Once again, I find myself talking about Ireland with Thomas Keneally. He has been invited here by the Institute of Ireland to give its inaugural lecture, entitled
Republics Past and Future. Given that the word "republic" is as loaded as a linguistic grenade, I am curious to find out what or where is the place Keneally defines as Ireland.
His replies to this question make me feel as if I am trying to chase a herd of nimble and energetic goats. He skips hither and thither, covering the Young Irelanders, Fenians, the deportation of his wife's ancestors and his own education by the Christian Brothers. On my fourth attempt Keneally eventually says "It depends on the context". This is an answer worthy of a politician, which is indeed partly what he is, being one of the foremost campaigners for a republic of Australia. He agrees that his definition of Ireland is one which sometimes commutes across the State border. It's only after the interview that I remember an exchange from our previous meeting, one which now seems particularly apposite. During that drive up to Galway, we came to a crossroads at which there was no signpost. "This is the mythical element of journeying in Ireland," Keneally had laughed. "Guessing your way along."
Declan Kiberd says that inviting Keneally to speak on the theme of a republic will give the term a "global perspective". Kiberd describes himself as a member of "Mary Robinson's Ireland. One which has no boundaries - literally a global outreach." He is anxious that Pearse's house, and the establishment of an Institute of Ireland within it, is seen in a wider context than the obvious ones that come to mind when Pearse and Ireland are mentioned simultaneously. "In Ireland, the meaning of the word republic has been narrowed," he says. "When you try to open a space for debate, there are others trying to close it."
One of the aims of The Ireland Institute is to create "an open space in which literally anybody could debate with anybody". (I can't work out whether it is fortunate or unfortunate that this description brings the image of a pub firmly to my mind.)
With all this discussion of spaces and boundaries, I ask Keneally what effect the Australia landscape has had on him as a writer. "The physical land becomes important when you're considering its freedom from sovereignty. You have to find validity from inside your own community." He's currently finishing a book entitled The Great Shame, a study of the Irish in 19th-century Australia, which will run to well over a thousand pages. "The identity of those Europeans who came out first was shaped by the landscape. Australia was a vacancy. It hadn't been mapped." He points out that a non-European environment occupied by Europeans saw artists superimposing one remembered landscape on the other, with the result that painters were originally trying to render the vast unknown horizons around them as picturesque. He is certain that the Australian landscape has influenced his own sensibility. I'm an animist. I always knew there were different gods in the landscape to those I learned about at school."
He thinks that creative artists of all genres in Australia have tried to find their "own republics" within it and cites the world of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda as an example.
IN the speech which Keneally will give this week, he says "It is apparent to me as a visitor that the citizens consider it [the Republic of Ireland] still in the process of being achieved." How is this apparent? "For a modern republic, a co-operative community is more important than nationalism," he says firmly. "There must be equal opportunities of education and dignity within the society." He thinks there are too many economic and social divisions within the country for it to be a true republic of the people who live in it. The one comment of the interview that he doesn't deliver with his customary grin is: "RTE shouldn't be ringing Angelus bells on its airwaves. That's sending out a sectarian message." When he talks about Dublin and Belfast, he says that each city seems to have the other "below the radar screen".
Keneally hopes that Australia will become a republic by 2000, when Sydney hosts the Olympics. Apart from anything else, it would be a PR dream. "I've been to two Olympics and for every journalist there to cover an athlete, there are three more to write about the host country." He would prefer not to see Australia enter the new millennium as "a colonial icon".
Commenting on the British monarchy's disastrous handling of its response to Princess Diana's death he says dryly "It demonstrated how out of touch they are. A head of state who can't manage to speak to the citizens of her own country - what hope does she have of communication with people 16,000 miles away?"
As we get up to leave, I ask if he feels at home here. Keneally beams. "Absolutely. I walk into a bar and I see the face of my old uncle Danny mirrored all around me." He peers more closely at me and tells me I remind him of a long-gone Laura Keneally. It's a strange moment of parting, feeling like a ghost of the diaspora.
Thomas Keneally gives the inaugural lecture of the Ireland Institute/ Institiud na hEireann at 7.30 p.m. at the James Ussher Hall, TCD. Admission Free.
Rosita Boland's travel book on Ireland, Sea Legs, is published by New Island Books.
