The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, at its most sublime level, is a Catholic Logos interpretation of racial conflict. Set in Federation era New South Wales,  it articulates a vision in which the male face of the occult – Freemasonry-- and the female face – primal Aboriginal belief – are set in an amphitheatre of dialectical conflict, a conflagration that can only be extinguished through the annihilation of the weaker by the stronger or by people choosing to live the challenge of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is written “obliquely” so that at the level of appearances, it is simply a story of racial hatred, injustice and revenge. At  a deeper level, this didactic parable “obliquely” explores the metaphysical essence of fallen human nature and redemption in terms of  the Catholic ontology of Theotokos – Mary the Christ-bearer.

Through the person of Jimmie Blacksmith, an Aboriginal half-caste, Keneally explores the “culture shock” experienced by the black inhabitants of Australia in the face of the encroaching white ascendancy. Throughout the novel, the white, British ascendancy is presented as a clique driven by a dichotomy of carnal desire and enfeebled good will, in which narrowness of vision, lack of universal love and selfishness result in ruin for others.  Behind this secular edifice  lurks the controlling occult reality of Freemasonry.  Grand-Master Hyberry, Mr Healy’s resemblance to the Duke of Clarence, McCready’s Masonic beard, Newby’s exposed phallus, the shooting of Mort’s left eye,  alongside  Toban’s and Dowie Stead’s connections to the masonry surrounding the Squatters’ Club, echo loudly the thematic design of Keneally.  

Whereas the primal female spirituality of the Aborigines is intuitive, accepting and fatalistic, the spirituality of the white ascendancy is assertive, aggressive and domineering.  Keneally represents the Aborigines in their primordial setting as knowing love instinctively, naturally and without effort. White society, which is the apparent Christ-bearer, lacks this sublime reality, beyond a superficial veneer.  Faith is skin deep. Freemasonry, which mimics Christianity in its rituals and beliefs, and exists in both structured and ethereal form, permeates the secular consciousness of the emergent nation.

Jimmie’s creed of “home, hearth, land and woman” is itself a reflection of this spiritual hypocrisy, namely that behind the edifice of Christianity hides the true totem of Mammon.  Things British, the Queen and the emerging Australian nation are portrayed as reified consummations of these principles – abstract personas of individual spirituality. Jimmie learns the two rights of passage of white society:  the art of building and the art of war.  Both have their season:  Jimmie builds the kingdom of his four carnal virtues but is not allowed to succeed in the face of white obfuscation; the whites build their dreams, in the process cruelly stamping out those of the Aborigine.   Jimmie declares war on the Newbys; the British declare war on the Boars – one is seen as an axe-murderer, the latter are feted as heroes.  However, the luster of this delusion gives way to the reality of an army decimated by death and disease – a pregnant metaphor of the dark side of  the newly born Australian nation.

The novel is brought to its metaphysical epiphany in an Aboriginal initiation ring in the mountains north of Taree.  Mort, Jimmie and McCreadie climb the long slope to the top to be met with an Aboriginal stone-henge – a metaphorical adumbration  of Keneally’s spiritual message.  A sacred site, reduced by defacement and upheaval, tells the story of an Aboriginal people violated by their white brothers.  Albeit, its polyvalent mystic symbolism reaches beyond this.  

The eight foot high molars can be viewed as the mouth of the “lizard”, the totemic embodiment of primordial evil.  Incongruously, it is also the womb of rebirth:  the mystery of Christ’s passion enshrined in the veiled mysteries of Aboriginal rights of passage.  The entrance to the womb is from the north, past “The Moonstone” in which McCreadie sees the resemblance of a one-eyed idol, a statuesque presentiment of the occult “All-Seeing Eye” and the Nordic legend of the god Woden who sacrificed one of his eyes to buy occult wisdom.  Within is the “embryo” facing to the east.  To the east is the sea, a sign of liberation, as previously prefigured in Jimmie’s ruminations, his prescient hope of boarding an ship at Port Macquarie and escaping to America.  From the summit, he glimpses the sea through “an inverted triangle between two headlands”, symbolic of Jimmie’s journey towards spiritual freedom still conditioned by his occult consciousness.