>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Today, I have the pleasure of introducing the Australian novelist, Thomas Keneally. Mr. Keneally is probably best known in this country as the author of "Schindler's Ark" which became the Academy Award-winning movie, "Schindler's List". But he has, for 50 years, been one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers in the world. He is the author of more than 30 novels including "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" which won the Booker Prize in 1972. It also became a celebrated movie as well as much-admired novels about subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc and Stonewall Jackson, two great generals. Mr. Keneally has also written almost 20 books of nonfiction including a biography of Abraham Lincoln that the Prime Minister of Australia presented to President Obama in 2009. Lesser things [inaudible] from Australia at that. So they've gone over. His new novel, the "Daughters of Mars" tells of two sisters who are nurses. During the First World War, they accompanied the Australian Army first to Gallipoli and then to the horrors of the Western Front in France. A Post reviewer called the "Daughters of Mars" as bludgeoningly powerful, unforgettable and Homeric. And I might add that I think the book looks to me like one that would make another great movie or mini-series. It's a pleasure to present Tom Keneally. [ Applause ] Hello. This book concerns two sisters who become nurses in World War II, World War I rather. They come from far and in many ways, young places. Australia at that stage was a young nation and yet, of course, it has the oldest aboriginal culture. I was writing a history of that period and I started to read the journals of nurses and stretcher bearers and orderlies. But what struck me was first of all, the struggle for status that these young women had. The idea that Florence Nightingale triumphed over sexism and that everything was fine with nurses from then on was not validated in the experience of Australian nurses. And so, the book is about two sisters and their colleagues struggling for status. For example, the Australian nurses during the Gallipoli campaign were put with British and Canadians. Boy, it's good to have an audience that's trapped by rain. [ Laughter ] But they were put on Lemnos with Canadians and British nurses to deal with the tide of damage coming from Gallipoli. The Australians were treated at best as skivvies. They were badly housed. They were badly fed. They were required to scrub the dysentery wards rather than to treat men. One of the sisters becomes particularly a leader in the struggle for recognition to an extent that her papers are marked, "Never to be promoted" and she is sent back to Australia on a repatriation ship. But on the repatriation ships, of course, she has to struggle to stop men from killing themselves. Some have -- one of the great problems of World War I and World War II before the discovery of antibiotics was socially transmitted diseases. Sexually, sorry. I suppose socially and it's the same as sexually [laughter]. Sexually transmitted diseases so on the boat, a compartment, a closed ghetto of young sometimes virginal men who are going home carrying this intractable infection. And then there are men who have lost their face literally. And then there are amputees. There are men altered by shell shock and suicidal. And so that ship that she returns on becomes a ship of suicides. I have to say that I found this tragic and fascinating as well and something to write about. The other thing about women that I wanted to write about was their capacity to deal with successive cases of trauma concentrated into the flesh of young men aged between 17 and 25 and not to crack. Now, I was influenced both by the journals and there's an obscure book of mine called "To Asmara" and it's about the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, a very unjust war, an appalling war, not very much reported in the west. I went with my wife there once. She insisted on going on one of the trips and we made a documentary for London Weekend Television on the war. One night when we were traveling, we met a party of nomads who held up their hands and the truck stopped. They had in a satchel on the side of a camel, a young girl of 15 who had trodden on a Russian landmine. She had this wound or this series of wounds inflicted many days before. Her condition was such that I became a gibbering wreck. It was too much for me to handle and the soundman similarly. The soundman was just serially sick at what we saw. But my wife, a former nurse, used the truck's first aid kit which was more extensive than most first aid kits in the western world and dressed some of her wounds and then we took her to a hospital in a cave, an operating theater in a cave at a place called the Erota. Since the soundman was still hopelessly wiped out, my wife did the sound and joined the operation and operated as the scout nurse around the outskirts of the theater. That's what women are good at. I don't mean menial jobs. I mean they're good. This is a woman who if one of our daughters had a messy room -- in fact, one of the daughters who had a messy room is here today, I think, one of my daughters [laughter]. If my daughter had a messy room, Judy turned into a fair replication of Medusa [laughter]. But when it comes to damage to other people and even a succession of damages to other people, she was so competent. That's what astonished me about the journals of these young women that they were nave. They were certainly trained. They came from new world shires and municipalities. Their experience of the big world was not prodigious but they could process in two days an entire convoy of wounded so that the dead were buried on the opposing hill and all the others went back to the base hospitals and recovery. The other interesting thing is that these women were able to do this while burdened by a sense that this war would not necessarily end until their middle age. They became convinced that every man they knew, brother, uncle, lover in the trenches would perish. They had the proof every couple of nights that it was so, that everyone got it in the end, got some horrifying life-redirecting or death-bringing injury up there. Even though they believed therefore that the race of young men with whom they've grown up was not going to have very many members left, they were still able to sustain themselves. There's one woman who has a fianc at the front and he carries a letter from her in his pocket or so she fears. He's obliterated by a shell. We know he's been obliterated but she keeps on pretending that he's missing and he might turn up. What distresses her is that there's a letter from him in his -- from her in his tunic. She doesn't want that private letter read by any German orderly or German sergeant and perhaps mocked. We know there's no such letter but she is demented enough to believe that A, he survived and B, that the letter therefore survives. It is when therefore women know intimately who is undergoing the damage, of course, that things become shaky as they do for males as well. But as for processing these young men, the young women of 23, 24 were extraordinary and I wanted to celebrate that female competency. These girls come from the bush and they come from the same town as the Keneally's come from in the bush after my grandparents left Cork. They are aloof Protestant girls, Methodist girls. I don't know where they came from because all my life, I've tried to hang around with loud Irish girls [laughter]. But they are the most adorable women. They have collaborated, however, in the mercy killing of their mother. One has stolen the morphine. The other, as far as we know, has injected it. They become war nurses almost as an instinctive means of putting their prime into the context of damaged rising tide of damaged young men. They have no idea though the extent of the damage either numerically or physically that they're going to meet. In Eritrea, the wound that shocked me worst most, apart from amputation and so on, was the removable of the face by part of a high explosive shell, shrapnel or whatever. There is a man in this book who is a young man who is unfortunately in that position. Like Honora Slattery with the letter, he concentrates not just on the face. In fact, his face is gone. In fact, he distracts himself by being annoyed at the rumor that's going around that he's the first Australian to be wounded in France. That's what he can't stand. He concentrates on the minor instead of the massive and this is the way many people eke their way through this book. There is an English noblewoman in this book and I don't carry a flame for the English nobility. But there is an Australian actor called Bryan Brown who's the quintessential Australian actor. He was in a mini-series with a beautiful English rose of a girl called Rachel Ward who is also a member of the British aristocracy of the Dudley family who've been acquiring property with an occasional beheading since the Elizabethan era. Rachel Ward's great-granny, Lady Dudley, came to Australia with her husband as Governor General. Now, Lord Dudley was a dolt. He got on very well with horses but he couldn't get on with us. This is before World War I. But his wife, Lady Dudley, founded the Bush Nursing Service which sent nurses out into remote Australia to help women with their giving birth on the frontier. That organization lasted for many, many decades. Now then she decided when the war started, that she'd start an Australian voluntary hospital in Boulogne. No one wanted her to. So again, you've got a woman who's a natural stroppy; stroppy is an Australian term for inventive impudence, who is stroppy enough to stand up to the hierarchy which was very strong then and to start her own hospital. She suffers, the younger sister, sorry, the older sister, Naomi, works with her. She finds it very hard to establish the voluntary hospital against the wish of the military hierarchy but also, she has a surgeon, Major Darlington, with whom she falls in love. He's in an interesting situation. She lets him have a pathology lab and he starts taking swabs from the throats of nurses, orderlies and surgeons in an attempt to prove that everyone should wear masks. This was a very disputed question at the time, the wearing of masks in operating theaters. At the start of the war, no one did. He is trying to prove that the risk of streptococcal infection from the throats of those who are treating the wounded can turn the wound sour, can make it septicemic or gangrenous. When he submits his research, it is discounted because he comes from this particular hospital of lesser repute. So he's in love with Lady Tarlton, as she is in this book because people have more sex in novels than they do in real life [laughter], even novels written by 77-year-old's. He is torn between acquiring a repute by leaving Lady Tarlton's hospital and acquiring her love by staying. This is something you'll have to read on to find out about. This is one of the little mysteries of the novel. The intimacy of the Western Front is something which astounds these women and the Australians, who like the Americans, came from the new world and came from big and remote places, many of them big places dotted across a large map. Sally becomes close to an infantry man who is a would-be artist and who has encountered the Impressionists. He says two interesting things. He says, "The Impressionists are up here in the gloom of Northern Europe so France has all the talent and we're down there with no talent and all this sunshine. If only we could get the two together, we'd have a huge explosion of light and talent." But he also says that it amazes him that between the Louvre and the Salon d'Automne and all the other galleries of Paris and the body-impregnated, gas-impregnated, rat-infested trenches between those two expressions of European culture, there's only 70 or 80 miles which is barely a walk in the park in Australian or American terms. It is this proximity of glory and barbarity which Europe has always been involved in which has fascinated me. It's there. It was one of the reasons I wrote, to drag in the Schindler book. It was one of the reasons I wrote it. People said, how come an Australian wrote a book like that? I said, "Well, if you forgive me. I did come from a far place but my father was for three years in North Africa and he was up against the Afrika Korps and he used to send me cake tins packed with Nazi memorabilia taken off various battlefields. I didn't know that it tragically came from the dead and the young. I just thought it was very cool, that it was like the pictures as we called them in Australia, the movies." So I was only one degree of separation from the Third Reich, even though I lived in Sydney as a child. Even with him, he was fascinated by how much glory and how much barbarity there was in these places. I think that I have therefore picked up on the story of Schindler which is a story set largely in a most beautiful city, Krakow, but with the most Gothic -- Baroque to contradict myself, European evil incarnated in that camp at Plaszow on the edge of Krakow. So this is what my girls, my young women, the two sisters are involved in. They're discovering how close packed the savagery and the glory of the old world is. While they're doing it, they are dealing very calmly with a succession of damage and on a scale that they never faced in their country hospitals and they are coming to terms with the great conundrum of European culture and European brutality. Having reached such a sentence, I should stop and let you ask questions. [ Applause ] Any questions first? >> Hello Tom. I gather that one of your characters is based closely on a real person. Are the others composites or do they sort of come from your research and you can't really identify their progenitors? >> Well, you know you write characters -- you encounter characters when you read other people's journals but they get transmuted by your subconscious. So they are composite or they're created characters that come from places that I cannot [inaudible]. I think the act of writing engages the subconscious to an extent that characters just arise. As I said, when I said that about aloof Methodist girls, I haven't known anyone like them and yet they came from somewhere. It's even like names in the novel. The names come by instinct too. You don't sit down and look up the telephone book generally. They just come up, ding, like a price on one of those old cash registers. So that's the story of the characters. General Monash, a very interesting Jewish general, commander of the Australian troops in France. He's a real character. He's the rare case of a real character here. >> Yeah, just after I read your book, I also read "Light Between Oceans" which is following World War I in Australia as well. I think it's kind of interesting. There's a number of war books now coming out about World War I than it used to be. But my question is about what's referred to in both of the books about the fact that on Australian, they were very proud that they had no conscription. Could you share a little bit more about that history? >> Yes, we had no conscripted soldiers. We had an army of 375 of which two-thirds -- 375,000 of which two-thirds were casualties of one kind or another. The government tried to introduce conscription but it was voted against in two referenda. Now, it's an interesting moment when the nurses come to vote. Should they vote for conscription and thus not put the men they know in the situation of having to be wounded, recycled, sent back and so on; or should they say, should their attitude be, "No, we don't want any other more young men to face this horror"? It's an interesting conundrum for them as well. But both conscription referenda were voted down and so even the great uncle of, sorry, an uncle of mine in the trenches voted against it. That is the truth, yes, as you say. >> When you mentioned the conundrum of European culture and European brutality that the nurses faced, I was curious. Don't the nurses come from -- I mean, I don't know as much about Australian history as I ought to but wouldn't the nurses come from -- they'd be descended from European culture? So why would they be encountering it as something that they're not familiar with? >> They were encountering it in the sense not of ideas or institutions but they're encountering it in the form of great and ancient cathedrals and earth that had been farmed for centuries and palaces like the Louvre Museum. So they were encountering European antiquity in a physical form. There were no such. They are astounded when they walk from the Louvre to Notre Dame, that they use the same feet that they do to walk to the post office at home. It's almost as if they should have a different and more angelic set of feet to do it with because home is banality. This is glory, built glory. >> Thank you. >> The ending of the book is a very unique literary device that you used and it's foreshadowed in the beginning. Did the process bring you to the ending and you rewrote the beginning? Or did you have that in mind all the way through the novel? >> Yes, the beginning -- the end, I write about what would have happened It turns out that one of them didn't survive but I write a possible future for one of them and then I write the real future for the other, set in 1922. I thought that it was valid. It wasn't -- it was more than just a trick because Sally feels throughout that she's a succession of beings, that there's a central spike on which a number of Sally's have been impaled version after version. When their hospital ship is sunk in the Aegean, she feels that there was a Sally who drowned there. It is a huge trauma for her, of course, and she feels that there's a Sally who drowned there. She was on a ship that the British had suitably decided to put a regiment of men and pack horses and artillery horses. So as the ship goes down, she is surrounded by the screaming of drowning horses, of horses about to drown. She feels that somehow, there is a Sally who drowned as well, so all the contingencies of the world, all the possibilities for parallel universes which were very strong in World War I. There is a case taken from a real case of a nurse where she's escorting a stretcher with a severe shock case on it. Not shell shock but shock from a wound and two stretcher bearers, this shock case and herself at night. One of those intermittent World War I bombings occur from a very low altitude. The bomb drops and there's no patient, no stretcher, and no bearers but there's her. Again, she gets the sense that there was a Sally who died there and so parallel to the one that extraordinarily lived. This sort of made it possible to write parallel universe endings to the book. I make it clear which one is the actual and which one is the parallel because otherwise as the Washington Post review said, you'd be asking for your money back [laughter]. So that's the story. >> Thank you. >> Australia's national identity is inexorably attached to Gallipoli and to a far lesser extent than America is attached to its wartime exploits. America's national identity is far more connected to ideas than Australia is. Do you think Australia suffers to some degree from a focus on a fairly dark chapter in our history in some ways as opposed >> Yes, there are -- the Great Australian War that our imagination is just turning to is the battle for pastoral land in the 19th century and for resources with aboriginal people who believe that it belonged to them and they were correct. But this war -- we federated in 1900 peaceably. A country that was from London to Moscow plus another couple of hundred kilometers, we federated without a battle. We all got together and became federated Australia. It's almost as if we're disappointed we did it peaceably. So along comes World War I and there's this great slaughter of Australians at Gallipoli and we've never stopped celebrating. It's a bit, I think -- don't tell them back in Sydney but I think it's a bit weird [laughter] because we say Australia was born at Gallipoli and Gallipoli is in Turkey. If we're born in Turkey, it's the biggest ectopic pregnancy And then we somehow think it's a victory. If former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who was a great character, when we won the America's Cup, he said, "Oh, this is the biggest Australian victory since Gallipoli." And an aide said, "Bob, we didn't win at Gallipoli." [Laughter] "Oh! Oh, bugger me! We didn't win. Oh, yeah. I thought we did." [Laughter] And so, [laughter] this book is partly you will see, subversive of that view. One of the things Australians say is that 10 Australians are worth -- one Australian is worth 10 British you know, and even probably three Americans. Well, he's not. He's not worth if he's standing where a shell falls. He's just as susceptible to high explosives. That's the sort of nonsense that there's going to be a lot of nonsense spoken in our homeland and in Britain about World War I in the next few years. That wasn't my motivation for writing this but I did take the opportunity to be subversive about it and to mention the fact that the first wounds the Australians suffered were the wounds of Venus in the brothels of Cairo and these poor kids being sent home with syphilis from which they never recovered. If they recovered physically, they were terrified of the recurrence. Indeed, Lincoln delayed his marriage for a similar reason. He never caught the terrible disease but he thought it might break out because of some associations he'd had in Illinois. I'm sorry to tell you that [laughter]. I'll make the sign of the cross immediately [laughter]. Yes, sir? >> You've been so prolific. Can you tell us something about your writing techniques? >> Yes, well whether -- I lived a number of years in America where I was supposed to teach writing and did my best to. I served Australian Chardonnay at every graduate class and was amazed what an impact it had on one's pedagogic repute [laughter]. But whether in America or at home, when I get up, I find it hard to have breakfast because that's when I feel it most urgent to start writing. The world doesn't need books from a 77-year-old from Australia but I still feel that urgency and then I calm down and enjoy the day. But yes, I write, answer emails. I write industrially. My parents had a great sense of industry and I brought to writing a sense of, "Okay, it's your job and if you don't do it, you're going to feel guilty." The dread of guilt makes you write. I don't take the psychological stress as seriously as I used to. I've got four grandchildren and I use them shamelessly for therapy because they're people who don't give a damn whether your book's going well or even if it's any good. They just want to go to the special park or the museum or bowling or swimming. That's a tremendous relief. But yes, generally I like to go for a -- where I live now is on the North Head of Sydney Harbor. It's a national park. It's also Gatsby's mansion in the Great Gatsby, in the new version. But it's so altered that the place we live is Gatsby's mansion but it's so computer generated. It's generated to a splendor it does not possess [laughter]. Baz Luhrmann is an Australian, of course. I go out for a walk in the bush behind Gatsby's place, just give him a wave and then about 2:30 start work again and generally work until about 7:00 or 7:30. Work and read for work, research for work. I do tend not to like to go out for lunch. Some nights, we go out anyhow so I don't work as late as 7:00 or 7:30 but that's the sort of day that is quite a normal day. So I've got five minutes, I know. >> Hi, thank you for your presentation. So you write fiction but historical fiction. I was wondering what your research process is and then kind of how you fact check a piece of fiction or if there's any fact checking involved? >> Well, you tend to use everything you can get hold of. I was attracted by the humanity of these nurses' journals because it was the big experience of their lifetime so they kept very full journals. But then I realized, I didn't understand the medicine. So I was sucked in by the humanity in the general experience but then I realized I had a great deal of research to do on the medicine. Now, fortunately, I remembered that fortuitously I've married a former nurse. A nurse from the 1950's but she said -- or 1960's but she said, "That's not so far away from World War I." So she was a help and then the British War Memorial and the Australian War Memorial had official histories of the surgical procedures and the special surgical and medical problems of World War I. The Australian one is very well written and it's three volumes. It deals with everything from shell shock to how to treat wound shock, how wounds were irrigated, how wounds were treated because they had to be served. That was a great help. I fortunately had a brother who was a brilliant -- the brilliant boy of the family and he was a doctor and he was -- I acknowledged him at the end. I dedicate the book to my wife and my sister-in-law, two nurses and my brother, Dr. John Keneally, made a member of the Order of Australia for his services to child anesthesia and analgesia. During the writing of this book, he took time in the midst of a severe illness to do a very thorough medical and general edit of the manuscript. He was really a scholar and he knew his medical history and even, you'll see there's an episode in which Sally, as happened to nurses, becomes the anesthesiologist in an operation -- well, in a series of operations. So it's the journal. It's the official histories. It's the non-official histories and it's the people around you. You're sometimes lucky enough to wake up to find that actually you've married someone who's done this stuff, yes. [Applause] Oh we're done! Oh good! Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.