Wit & Attitude Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally is doing something sly here: he turns a culture-war abstraction - “pluralist Australia” - into a bodily appetite. “I got a taste for” makes multicultural democracy sound less like policy and more like a lived pleasure, acquired the way you acquire a liking for strong coffee or noisy cities. That’s not sentimental; it’s tactical. He’s framing pluralism as ordinary, habituating, and therefore hard to demonize without sounding puritanical.

The punchline arrives dressed as a theological argument: he “can’t believe” Australians are damned for telling “a good dirty joke.” It’s a deliberately lopsided image - sex, humor, and hellfire in the same breath - meant to expose how moral absolutism collapses under the weight of everyday human behavior. The dirty joke stands in for a whole class of vernacular life: larrikinism, irreverence, the messy social glue of pubs and backyards. Keneally’s target isn’t religion per se so much as a punitive, gatekeeping moralism that declares belonging conditional on purity.

The repeated “I like, I like” matters: it’s not polished rhetoric, it’s insistence. He sounds like someone pushing back against a tightening national mood - the kind where identity gets policed and difference gets rebranded as decay. As a novelist, Keneally’s instinct is to defend character over doctrine: people in the round, not people as categories. The subtext is a warning: a country that can’t tolerate its own jokes is a country preparing to stop tolerating its own citizens.