In 1960, trainee priest Thomas Keneally abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney鈥檚 North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than medieval Latin.
His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing. This was both Keneally鈥檚 attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the 鈥渕adness and melancholia鈥 of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him for six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its 鈥渁nti-human moral code鈥.