on earth with the potential to develop into the Thomist conception of the I deal
State.
I n the Keneally corpus, generally, there is much psychological analysis with a
pronounced Jungian inclination. I n so many instances Keneally presents the reader
with characters who exhibit distinct Jungian psychic processes or who are motivated
by unconscious drives. The corpus also contains symbols and archetypal themes,
endless corridors of fantasy and feeling which seem suddenly to unfold their
mysteries before dubious witnesses; creative as well as destructive forces within the
individual which other individuals and social institutions ignore at their peril.
A Victim of the Aurora, based on the story of the second Antarctic expedition
in 1910 of Captain R.F. Scott – an event in history that has been mythologized –
and in the same genre in setting as The Survivor, might be seen to incline,
thematically, to a more universal eschatological or messianic view. The Survivor, is
concerned with the enduring guilty conscience of an individual, Alec Ramsey, but
the associated elements in that story include the perennial Keneally obsessions,
homosexuality and cannibalism, the destruction of the human body and spirit, and
some sort of alternative medium or mediator between humankind and the ineffable,
in this case, the Priesthood of Antarcticians (Keneally, 1969:206). Nevertheless, the
framework had been established for the more elaborate and admirable, A Victim of
the Aurora. Given Keneally’s bardic penchant and the fact that he was over-awed by
the Antarctic milieu, it was to be expected that he would use that landscape again
to chant his craftier theology and this can be intimated from some Survivor
passages such as:
One is nearer God’s heart in Antarctica... We humanize landscapes
with gardens and humanize the unknown with rituals... So
Antarctica is a sacrament of the absolute, the same as all deserts
are. I t’s a place for prophets... (Keneally, 1969:178).
The dedication of the work to Bob Hawke and the fact that it was published
two years after the sacking of the Whitlam Labor Government alerts the reader to
look for undertones, political and social, in the subtext. I t is significant that Barry
Fields, the Australian member of the expedition, is of greater perception, moral fibre
and humanity than the others. Barry Fields perhaps represents the I rish-Australia
that remained spiritual for nearly two hundred years or so while Europe experienced
devastating change. Perhaps Australia too, in the Keneally canon is a ‘sacrament of
the absolute’, where one is, nearer God’s heart.