The Peter Tobin Oration honours the contribution of the late Peter Tobin OAM to the commemoration of the Eureka Stockade. This year’s speaker is one of Australia’s most respected and best-known writers, Thomas Keneally AO.
In this talk, Thomas positions the uprising at Eureka as the last of the great European revolutions of 1848, which, despite their failure, altered the future of humankind. From 1848, the demand for liberal democracy, as opposed to feudal or autocratic government, grew throughout the world. Many of the Eureka rebels and activists had taken part in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe. So why did the Eureka rebellion bear such civic, judicial, and parliamentary fruit while many 1848 uprisings across Europe were savagely crushed? Thomas will give special attention to the Irish struggle, which had a profound influence on the Eureka ethos. He will also scrutinise the way Australian history was written to present the development of our rights as sentimental indulgence by the Mother Country, thereby diminishing the extent of Australian activism in many reforms.
Thomas Keneally AO is an acclaimed author of more than 30 novels, dramas, screenplays, and books of non-fiction. In 1982 he won the Booker Prize for ‘Schindler’s Ark’, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film, ‘Schindler’s List’. He holds several national and international honorary doctorates. In 1983 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his services to Australian Literature, and in 1997 was declared one of Australia’s ‘100 Living Treasures'.
