Free Homebush Boy by Thomas Keneally Page A

During a meeting of the athletics team, all ages, he said, ‘Ah … stand up young Keneally. Now you see, boys, you don’t have to be a champion like Peter McInnes to make a contribution. There’s a boy who’ll never be a champion but who has a fine time running and training and can get placed in inter-school events for us and even occasionally win one.’
    The smaller boys looked at me. An average hero. I didn’t feel offended at all. There was something that suited the Australian self-image in such a definition. I was a battler. If all the conditions were right, my chance of a 220 or 440 yards victory had been pronounced on by Dinny.
    â€˜Black, black, rickety rack,’ the younger members of the athletics team would chant in the event of a chance win,
    SPC is on the track,
    Blue black, blue black gold …
    Dinny did understand now that I was so good on GMH because I was neglecting the broader sweep of writers. Curran was doing Honours English too, and when I talked to her on the train to and from concerts, it was obvious to me that she was covering the field. ‘Have you done much on the Gothic novel yet?’ she asked me. It was clear she had, under the tutelage of some analytical Dominican nun. She was also covering the main eras of English poetry, and reading a few representatives in each case. The same with the novel. Whereas I tended to get fixated. I wasn’t covering the whole pelagic expanse of literature. I was diving deeply enough to get the bends in a few places.
    To console myself, I wrote on the flyleaf of my copy of GMH, Michael K., Professor of Hopkinsian Idiosyncrasy .
    I made sure I knew all I could find out about Hopkins’ ‘sprung rhythm’, and when I found myself reciting it according to what the Kenyon critics said it should sound like, I discovered that the only way to read Hopkins’ poetry was in a sort of incantatory voice, in an intonation a little sub- or supra-human.
    Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty,
    voluminous,… stupendous
    Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all,
    home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
    Once Dinny McGahan played us a record of Dylan Thomas reading his Poem in October , and Dylan Thomas seemed to know all that, even though he was an alcoholic about to die. Welsh intonation, which I’d never heard before in my life. That – I told myself – was the intonation for reading Hopkins. A bardic intonation.
    I already knew that novelty gave you a chance in literary contests. I would put up this incantation theory in my essay, padded out with a lot of plagiarized critical jargon. And beyond it all, I would strain to utter the grandeur of what Hopkins was trying to do.
    With: Our evening is over us; our night whelms,
    whelms, and will end us.
    Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask
    the tool-smooth bleak light …
    Curran though seemed to think Hopkins was just another interesting poet in the Honours English course. I dreamed I would read something of him to her one day, and she would be transformed.

IV
    In line with being a Celestial, I did not seem to myself to have changed much physically since the week or so in the first year of high school when I first began to understand Latin declensions, and simultaneously, in a flash, like falling in love, understand Pythagoras’s Theorem after a long stand-off with it. That first year of high school was the year when from being an infant sleepwalker I first became a serious academic contender and got to like the feeling of moderate scholarly success. Now, in my sixteenth year I was a far more turbulent spirit, and felt that something massive was about to descend upon me, but I saw the turmoil not as sexual but as utterly spiritual and aesthetic. I was not aware of any increase in erections, which I was still and for whatever reason too innocent to take for what they were. I was not aware of the surge of testosterone. I may have been a