Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s gag lands because it flatters and insults in the same breath, then traps you with a punchline about loyalty. “In a way Australia is like Catholicism” is deliberately mismatched: a nation compared to a faith, geography to doctrine. That absurdity is the point. He’s framing Australianness not as pride or patriotism but as a lived, inherited attachment you can gripe about and still not shake.

“The company is sometimes questionable” needles the myth of the easygoing, morally uncomplicated Aussie bloke. It suggests a social world full of larrikin charm and compromised ethics: mateship that can slide into tribalism, conviviality that can excuse roughness, a national habit of tolerating the dodgy as long as it’s familiar. Then “the landscape is grotesque” refuses postcard prettiness. It’s a nod to Australia’s harshness and strangeness: beauty with teeth, an environment that doesn’t care if you’re sentimental about it.

The closer, “But you always come back,” is the real Catholic move: the return to the institution you criticize because it formed you. Keneally, as a novelist who has spent a career scrutinizing Australian history and conscience, knows the country’s self-image runs on this cycle of complaint and recommitment. The line reads like an immigrant’s or expatriate’s confession, too: distance sharpens disgust, then nostalgia reasserts itself. It’s not national pride; it’s a complicated, almost liturgical habit of belonging.