But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.

Based on an actual incident. Keneally has said he would not now presume to write in the voice of an Aborigine but would have written the story as seen by a white character. He entered St Patrick's Seminary Manly to train as a Catholic priest.

Thomas Michael Keneally AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist playwright and author of non-fiction. The book would later be adapted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.