Ken Gelder

Trollope came to Australia too around that time, and he features in the novel as a minor figure.

I mean, the sons of novelists and, of course, the sons of many other folk as well would come out to Australia and sometimes stay for a while and sometimes stay for a long while.

So Prawn stayed in Australia.

He remained in Australia until he died, I think, aged 47.

So he died relatively young.

and wasn't particularly successful either.

I think his older brother, Alfred, was more successful as a farmer, as a squatter.

Well, I think this novel is a tribute to Dickens.

I think you get the sense that Tom Keneally is a great admirer of Dickens.

This is a historical novel in the sense that it wants to try and recreate the experience of Dickens' youngest son, Plorn, as he comes out to Australia, begins with emigration, and tries to make his way in the colonial world.

It's quite different to, if people know it, that novel by Peter Carey called Magwitch, which is about the convict in Great Expectations who...

disappears from Great Expectations for a while and then reappears again.

And it turns out that he's been transported to Australia and makes his fortune there and then comes back to England to give Pip, the young boy in the novel, a massive inheritance.

That novel by Peter Carey is a redrafting or reconfiguring of the character of Magwitch, about which not much is said in Great Expectations.

But Tom Keneally's novel is not a reimagining or a reconfiguring.

It tries to give a fairly authentic account, I think, of Plawn's life.

Of course, it's reimagined as a novelist reimagines things and bits and pieces are added.

But it's really connected very strongly to Plawn's actual relationship to his father and his mother and his aunt.

And so there's a lot of letters and

you know, correspondence between them in the novel.