The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally

First published: 1972

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: c. 1900

Locale: New South Wales, Australia

Principal Characters:

• Jimmie Blacksmith, the protagonist, a half-white, half-aborigine social climber and murderer
• Mort Blacksmith, his half brother
• Tabodgo (Jackie Molders), his uncle
• Peter, another kinsman
• Gilda Blacksmith, his white wife
• Wallace Hyberry, the public hangman
• The Reverend Mr. A. J. Neville, Jimmie’s Methodist mentor
• Constable Farrell, one of Jimmie’s employers
• Mr. and Mrs. Healy, Jimmie’s employers and eventual victims
• The Newby Family, Jimmie’s first victims
• Miss Graf, a schoolteacher and guest of the Newbys
• Dowie Stead, Miss Graf’s fiance, the “national product,” the prototypical Australian male
• Mr. McCreadie, a schoolteacher who becomes a hostage

The Novel

Although the novel is ostensibly about the “chant” of Jimmie Blacksmith, that “chant” is both ironic and symbolic. Since Jimmie consciously rejects his tribal roots and never “chants,” as his half brother Mort does, he cannot articulate his suppressed rage and frustration in a ritualized manner. Instead, his “chant” becomes his life, the actions which physically express his inner life, but that violent expression of physical language is only the result of unarticulated motives that have to be supplied by Keneally. By adopting a third-person point of view, limited, for the most part, to Jimmie Blacksmith, Keneally supplies the motivation and suggests that Jimmie’s heinous crimes are caused by a repressive white society which drives him to the very behavior that society half expects, thereby confirming its preconceived notions about “lower ways of life.” The true story (as well as the folktales that have accrued to it) of Jimmie Governor lies behind the novel, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith represents Keneally’s attempt not only to account for the actual historical crimes but also to place the onus on the white society.

Rather than focus on the murders and Jimmie’s subsequent flight, Keneally divides his novel equally between causes and effects: The first murder occurs halfway through the book. In effect, the first eight chapters, which form the prelude to the murders that occur in 1900, account for Jimmie’s alienation from the aboriginal culture, his assimilation of white cultural values, and his unsuccessful attempts to gain “home, hearth, wife, and land” and to learn the “rites, motives, and notions” of the white society. Ironically, it is the well-intentioned efforts of the Reverend Mr. Neville, who considers Jimmie to be his “protege,” that make Jimmie turn against the aboriginal society, which he comes to consider inferior because of its “shiftlessness,” alcoholism, and sexual immorality. Neville advises Jimmie to get a job (Keneally heightens the cultural conflict by adding that there is no word for “job” in Mungindi, Jimmie’s language) and to marry a white woman, thereby gaining access to white society. Jimmie finds, however, that the only jobs available to him are fencing for parsimonious Mr. Healy (who cheats him out of twelve shillings), tracking for Constable Farrell (who sodomizes black prisoners and gives Jimmie less than three pounds of a three-hundred-pound reward), and working as a sweeper on a sheep-shearing operation. He is equally unfortunate in his matrimonial ambitions, for the white woman he marries is a “very stupid” servant who is carrying not his child but the white cook’s. Even the “proper” Methodist marriage involves white exploitation, for the minister’s wife insists that he first cut and stack “a terrible heap of redwood” or be arrested. To compound his problems, Jackie Smolders (known by his native name, Tabidgi), Peter, and Mort Blacksmith, three kinsmen, arrive at the Newby farm and drain Jimmie’s meager financial resources. Their exploitation of Jimmie also provides Mr. Newby with an excuse to cheat Jimmie, who protests and is ordered off the farm.

Newby’s action precipitates Jimmie’s brutal murder, with Tabidgi’s help, of the Newby women and Miss Graf. Although Jimmie flees with his entire entourage, he soon leaves Gilda and her child behind, and when Tabidgi proves to be an impediment, Jimmie leaves him with Peter. Despite Jimmie’s naive attempts to protect his uncle, Tabidgi is eventually hanged. While she is cleared of any charges, Gilda is not “freed” because she is relegated to the care of two Sisters of Mercy. The remainder of the novel concerns the adventures of Jimmie and his half brother Mort, who are hunted by three thousand men, including Dowie Stead and his friends.

Although Jimmie has sworn vengeance on all the other whites who exploited him, he and Mort succeed only in killing the Healys before they become the passive hunted. After they kill the Healys, their only victim is Toban, one of Stead’s friends, and his death is an “accident,” not a premeditated murder. In fact, Jimmie and Mort spare the lives of several whites who, despite their apparent vulnerability, manage to gain the psychological upper hand over the two outlaws, who are depicted by Keneally as bringing “deliberate crises on themselves.” This self-destructive impulse is used against them by McCreadie, the schoolteacher/hostage who becomes their “master” and eventually “emasculates and sunders” the two brothers. Once the brothers are separated, a farmer shoots Mort; after being wounded by a gunshot, Jimmie ironically takes refuge in a convent, where he is captured. When it is politically expedient, Jimmie and Tabidgi are hanged by Wallace Hyberry, whose political ambitions are thereby finally realized.

The Characters

As an aborigine, Jimmie Blacksmith is, almost by definition, a victim like his half brother Mort, but Jimmie’s plight is exacerbated by his mixed parentage. As Keneally depicts him, Jimmie soon loses his “black core” and even symbolically baptizes himself as a white man. Since white society is closed to him, however, Jimmie is a “hybrid,” a man “suspended between the loving tribal life and the European rapture from on high called falling in love.” When he turns against his heritage and embraces white values, he is the victim of failed expectations, but though he “resigns from the white cycle,” he cannot return to his past. Before his death, Jimmie is “lost beyond repair somewhere between the Lord God of Hosts and the shrunken cosmogony of his people.”

Tabidgi and Mort Blacksmith also serve as symbols of white suppression. Jimmie’s uncle, who belongs to the past, has nevertheless been corrupted; his motives for visiting Jimmie include not only the altruistic desire to return Jimmie’s initiation tooth but also the baser goal of receiving free liquor from his nephew. Mort, who chants and paints his face with white clay, clings to the past, and because he has not been tainted with white aspirations is an “innocent” who finally is “possessed” by Jimmie. As a tribal man, Mort does not want to shed woman’s blood, which is associated with tribal taboos; Jimmie, on the other hand, has directed his rage at the women who have become unattainable symbols to him. Only when he kills Toban does Mort feel close to his tribal role of hunter/warrior.

Keneally’s white male characters are, for the most part, indistinguishable: The farmers are parsimonious, suspicious, and prejudiced; the ministers are well intentioned, naive, and ineffectual. Many of the males exploit Jimmie financially, but the exploitation of the aborigines is also sexual. The novel is rife with white males, including the Reverend Mr. Neville, who lust after aborigine women, and Jimmie is the product of such a liaison. In fact, it is the desire that both Dowie Stead and his father feel for Tessie, an aborigine woman, that motivates the guilt-ridden Dowie to pursue Jimmie across New South Wales. Dowie is not atypical; rather, he is, according to Keneally, the “national product,” and the twin themes of sex and violence are joined in his character.

Keneally’s white female characters are equally undefined and symbolic, at least to Jimmie, for whom Neville has created an unattainable goal, the white wife. To Jimmie, Mrs. Healy, one of his victims, becomes a “symbol, a state of blessedness, far more than a woman”—in effect, “an archetype.” Not only can he never truly possess a white wife, but also white women represent authority to him. Miss Graf, the schoolmistress, dies because Jimmie wishes to scare her “apart with his authority, to hear her whimper,” to make her see him as a man. Gilda, his white wife, is a parody of his goal: She is a reject, like Jimmie, and her exploitation of him becomes infuriating when he fails to impregnate her.

Critical Context

Since he wrote his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964, Keneally has been a prolific writer with several novels, a few plays, and even some children’s fiction to his credit. According to him, however, his work really began to mature with the publication of A Dutiful Laughter (1971), a novel with an Australian setting; that novel marked his first extensive use of fable and legend. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith appeared the following year, and it, too, relies on legend and myth. In fact, in many respects the novel is of a piece with most of Keneally’s later work, which has been characterized by impressionistic and symbolic, rather than realistic, setting; by a blending of history and fiction (Blood Red, Sister Rose, 1974, a novel about Joan of Arc, for example); and by a concern about guilt-ridden people and the consciences of people outside the Establishment.

Much of the strength and appeal of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith lies in the novel’s universality, in its account of one culture’s decimation of another culture (with the obvious parallels to the American experience with Native Americans and blacks), and to its delineation of an individual’s motivation for outrageous acts of violence. In this respect, the novel resembles such American classics as William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), both of which indict society as well as the criminals.

Bibliography

Amirthanayagam, Guy, ed. Writers in East-West Encounter: New Cultural Bearings, 1981.

Hamilton, K. G., ed. Studies in the Recent Australian Novel, 1979.

Ramson, W. S., ed. The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels, 1974.