Winner of the Heinemann Award in 1973 and the basis of an effective 1978 film adaptation, this novel is a tale of cultural conflict in Australia between descendants of English colonialism and an Aborigine who tries and fails to become integrated into the system of cultural values mouthed by whites. The novel fictionalizes the historical case of Jimmie Governor, hanged for murdering whites at the turn of the century.
Keneally uses a third-person omniscient narrator to present the story of Jimmie’s rising ambition to fit into the white world and of the effects on him of repeated frustrations and humiliations from both whites and natives. Jimmie Blacksmith is half white, half Aborigine; from birth, he straddles these two worlds—not because his white father has a hand in his rearing, but because a white minister, Mr. Neville, makes the effort to mold him to white values.
Although Jimmie undergoes the traditional Aborigine initiation into manhood, entitling him to participate in the ancient system of exogamy by which the men of his tribe acquired mates, he chooses to marry a white woman in a Methodist church service. Under the guidance of Mr. Neville, he has sought marriage and employment with whites, but in spite of his sincere efforts at emulation, he is repeatedly abused and cheated. Employers such as Constable Farrell, who uses Jimmie as a tracker, and farmer Healy, who hires him to build fences, cheat him out of wages his labor has earned fair and square. His wife, Gilda, it turns out, was pregnant with a white man’s child when she married Jimmie.
Worse for Jimmie is the betrayal he experiences from his own people, who are crippled by the white man’s alcohol and entrapped in the white man’s institutions of patronage. The system of tribal and family obligations that he tries to honor leaves him disadvantaged in the white world where time and money are interdependent. His uncle Tabidgi takes his money for drink, and when Jimmie is pushed beyond endurance by the humiliations he endures from whites, Tabidgi helps him in killing the women of the Newby family.
On the run, Jimmie and his half-brother Mort take revenge on the Healy family. Soon the hue and cry has raised a small army of white men in pursuit of the two brothers. As these events unfold on the local scale, in the larger world Australia is suing to earn its independence among the nations of the world and sending soldiers to the doomed cause of the Boer War in South Africa, where another consequence of colonialism is creating a violent upheaval.
Jimmie’s story winds to a tragic ending that does not deprive him of his dignity, although it suggests that there is little hope where two cultures so mismatched, so divided, come into violent conflict. Keneally arouses sympathy for the Aborigines, blaming white practices for the degradation of the Australian natives, but he also demonstrates that Aboriginal values contribute their share to the destruction of Jimmie Blacksmith. With neither side free of blame, the long-term prospects for mutual accommodation are bleak.
Bibliography
Hamilton, K. G., ed. Studies in the Recent Australian Novel. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978.
Pierce, Peter. Australian Melodramas: Thomas Keneally’s Fiction. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995.
Ramson, William Stanley. “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith: Taking Cognizance of Keneally.” In The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels. Canberra: Australian National University, 1974.
Categories: Australian Literature, British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
Analysis of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm
You must be logged in to post a comment.