Tom Keneally on his 2022 Historical Novel Society's prize-winning story 'Corporal Hitler's Pistol'

Good Reading Podcast

How did Corporal Hitler's Luger from the First World War end up being the weapon that killed an IRA turncoat in Kempsey, New South Wales, in 1933? When an affluent Kempsey matron spots a young Aboriginal boy who bears an uncanny resemblance to her husband, not only does she scream for divorce, attempt to take control of the child’s future and upend her comfortable life, but the whole town seems drawn into chaos. A hero of the First World War has a fit at the cinema and is taken to a psychiatric ward in Sydney, his Irish farmhand is murdered, and a gay piano-playing veteran, quietly a friend to many in town, is implicated. Tom Keneally tells a compelling story of the interactions and relationships between black and white Australians in early twentieth-century Australia. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Tom Keneally about what brought him back to the Kempsey of his childhood, the four strands of history that this novel explores, and the power historical fiction to add new perspectives on where we've come from as individuals and as a nation.