Motherhood Quote by Thomas Keneally

A name is supposed to pin you down; Keneally uses it to show how slippery identity gets inside family and community. The line starts with a clean fact - "Thomas was my true name" - then immediately undermines the idea of a single, authoritative self. The world edits him into "Mick", a nickname that sounds casual, even blokey, the kind of social shorthand that turns a person into a familiar type. But the mother refuses the edit. She "knew" him as "definitely Michael", and that adverb is the tell: this isn't just preference, it's a defensive insistence that the core version of her son still exists and can be asserted by sheer certainty.

The comedy is dry and pointed. "True name" sets up a solemn register; "everyone knew me as Mick" punctures it with everyday reality; then the mother arrives as the final twist, not restoring the "true name" but replacing it with another. Keneally is quietly mocking the bureaucratic fantasy that names are stable identifiers. Even the person who birthed you participates in a private act of renaming, as if motherhood grants a proprietary right to the "real" you.

Contextually, it plays well with Keneally's Australia: a culture where nicknames are social currency, smoothing hierarchies and signaling belonging. Against that egalitarian compression stands the maternal "Michael", a more formal, perhaps more aspirational identity. The subtext is affectionate but unsentimental: who you are depends less on what’s printed on paper than on who gets to say your name, and with what kind of certainty.