Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s sentence lands like an accusation disguised as a travelogue: sectarianism wasn’t born in Australia, it was imported, crated up with luggage and doctrine, then “unleashed” with the casual cruelty of someone opening a kennel door. The verb choice matters. “Brought on the ships” evokes the foundational mythology of settlement and migration, but he twists that origin story into a contagion narrative. This isn’t the romance of arrival; it’s the uglier cargo that survives the voyage intact.

The line’s sly power is in how it reframes Australian innocence. By pointing to Glasgow, Liverpool, and “of course” Ireland, north and south, Keneally sketches an Anglo-Celtic circuit of grievance: industrial port cities with hard class edges, and an Irish sectarian divide so notorious it barely needs explanation. Australia becomes less a fresh start than a downstream estuary where Old World antagonisms pool. The subtext is political as much as cultural: nation-building doesn’t erase inherited identities, it can intensify them when institutions, churches, unions, and neighborhoods sort people into rival camps.

He also implicates polite society. “Unleashed in the society” suggests a collective failure to contain these loyalties, even a willingness to weaponize them. Keneally, a novelist with a historian’s eye for provenance, is diagnosing a national habit of treating imported conflict as quaint ethnicity until it hardens into exclusion, patronage, and suspicion. The sentence refuses the comfort of distance: if sectarianism came by ship, it can still be shipped out - but only if Australians stop telling themselves it was never really theirs.