Q21. I s place significant to you in terms of your identity and if so in what ways?
(Place can mean your home, a foreign country, an imaginary place, a place in
literature or a place in your daydreams).
Places experienced early are very significant in this way: the first house I
knew, its rooms, its dimensions, its light, the kind of Queensland house it was, with
verandas and an under the house. Also Morton Bay where I went as a child most
weekends and where the sea was always an element.
Q22. What effect, if any, do you think that places have on individuals or groups of
people?
Houses seem to be an important influence on the way small children learn to
read space and map the world: light, heat, weather conditions at particular times of
the day and in the seasons as they affect play. Weather, of course, determines
much of what becomes cultural habit. Places too may play a part at particular
moments in our lives so that they come to stand for, and even embody, particular
emotions as we associate them with events. A lot of this is what the writer draws
on and which constitutes what the reader sees as the particular world and
atmosphere of his writing.
(c) Thomas Keneally’s Responses:
Thomas Keneally preferred to answer the questionnaire during a telephone
conversation of over two hours duration taking a conversational tone with many
digressions and sometimes an answer that related to two or more, or an out-of-
sequence question. However, this resulted in deeper, richer responses.
I began by describing to Thomas Keneally (TK) my belief that something like
Julian Jaynes’ idea of the bicameral mind and participation mystique was the state
of mind accessed by creative individuals. To prompt him I quoted from his novel,
Bullie’s House (1981):
When the world was still one thing, before everything was
shattered into pieces, this piece getting labelled ‘politics’ and this
piece ‘love’ and another piece in the corner ‘culture’, and another
piece ‘religion’. When poetry was something that happened
‘outside’ the covers of books, when song was magical and shook
the sun, when art was an habitual process of the body like
breathing and excreting, and when death – of which I happen to
be ridiculously scared – was a passageway and not a brick wall
(Keneally, 1981:65-66).