An escape from New South Wales

Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from a camp in New South Wales. This intrinsically thrilling incident, triggered by a fascinating clash between mutually uncomprehending cultures, is an obvious gift to a writer. There may be some who claim that any novelist could therefore have produced an interesting fictional version of it; but this is like saying that anyone could have made a landscape out of the fine park at Blenheim. Keneally spotted both the tale and its possibilities, which in itself is a truly enviable talent.

His imagination is fired by the incongruities of the camp in the small town of Cowra, here fictionalised as Gawell. It consisted of four areas, containing European (chiefly Italian) PoWs in compounds A and D, a quarrelsome mix of Japanese officers and merchants, Taiwanese, Koreans and Indonesians in compound B, and a sullenly uncooperative mass of Japanese warriors in compound C.