Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s line does what good novelists do in public speech: it catches itself mid-performance. He starts with the civic brand name, “the pluralism of Australia,” then immediately corrects course: “sorry the sectarianism.” That “sorry” isn’t mere politeness; it’s a self-edit that signals how national stories get laundered in real time. Pluralism is the comforting abstraction. Sectarianism is the messy, historically accurate noun he can’t quite avoid.

The most pointed move is the scene-setting: school uniform on, sectarian identities rigid; uniform off, the hostilities “stopped” - at least “to an extent.” He’s invoking a specific Australian past where Catholic-Protestant divides, class codes, and immigrant suspicion were rehearsed daily in institutions that claimed neutrality. The uniform becomes a prop for the myth of sameness: it’s meant to erase difference, yet it also marks which school you attend, which neighborhood you’re from, which tribe you’re assumed to belong to. The line suggests sectarianism didn’t vanish so much as it was scheduled, contained, made into a school-hours practice that adults could deny.

Keneally’s intent feels double: to puncture the feel-good idea that Australia’s diversity was naturally easy, and to describe how social peace often relies on small rituals of forgetting. “In practice” matters here - he’s less interested in what the nation said it was than in how people learned, as children, when to perform division and when to pretend it wasn’t there.