Half a century since he was first published, the Booker-prize winning author is still energised – about first world war myths, asylum seekers and the ‘transcendental joy’ of writing

Australia should “apologise to the ghosts” of young soldiers who survived the first world war but had to fight for compensation when they returned home traumatised by the horrors of the battlefield, says the author and historian Thomas Keneally.

In an interview ahead of the Perth Writers festival, where he will be celebrating 50 years since the publication of his first book, Keneally suggests that ceremonies marking the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war should avoid jingoism and spurious myths, and instead confront the “terrible tragedies of shell-shock and high explosive and burial alive”.

“I hope it’s celebrated in the spirit of what these young men really went through, and the fact we let them down when they came back – we denied the shell-shock, we were niggardly with compensation,” says the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark. “We’re very hot on praising the diggers, but we should apologise to their ghosts for the lack of justice we gave them.

“I also hope no one says ‘Australia was born at Gallipoli’. Australia was born in 1901, and there needs to be a certain amount of de-mythologising. Let’s hope the historians win out over the politicians, who strike me as fairly jingoistic.”

Although somewhat mellowed by age – he no longer frets much over bad reviews, for instance – Keneally has clearly lost none of his vigour. Last year, he co-edited with Rosie Scott (and contributed to) A Country Too Far, a collection of writing on asylum-seekers. Speaking at his home in Sydney, he rails against “politicians becoming their own shock jocks” and whipping up “racial hysteria” against those making the perilous voyage here by boat.

The book world has undergone seismic change since Keneally’s first novel, The Place At Whitton, was published by Cassell in 1964 – a life-altering event for “a lost soul” trying to find his way back into society after six years studying for the priesthood.

While his work has, naturally, evolved – “I think it’s got somewhat technically better; whether it’s retained the fire of the early years, I’m not sure” – he still writes for the “transcendental joy” of it. “Once you’ve felt that, the sense of the book being larger than yourself, it’s something that nothing else can give you,” reflects the 78-year-old, who quit St Patrick’s seminary, in the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly, shortly before he was due to be ordained.

By a piquant irony, after selling their family home on the northern beaches, he and his wife, Judy, moved to an apartment block a cassock’s swish from the former seminary, now an international management college. Tony Abbott spent three years at the same “priest factory down the hill”, as Keneally calls it. Nicole Kidman married Keith Urban in a neo-classical chapel on the site.

Having donated his extensive library to the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, Keneally now works from a small study, maintaining the same frenetic pace that has produced a staggering 50-odd books, including 30 novels. “I think it’s just a temperamental thing,” he says. “I have an impulsive nature, which is both good for getting the work done and carries with it the risk of rushing things too much.”

The study is decorated with photographs of his beloved Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles, and a framed front page of the Australian from the night Steven Spielberg swept the 1993 Academy Awards with Schindler’s List. The novel on which it was based won the Booker 11 years earlier. Shortlisted on three previous occasions, Keneally hasn’t heard from the judges since.

“I’ve been wondering what’s been keeping them in a few cases,” he remarks with a characteristic cackle. “I thought Daughters of Mars [his 2012 novel about two sisters who volunteer as nurses during the first world war] might have a chance. But these prizes are like horse races, they depend on so many imponderables.”

What exercises him more about the advancing years – and he is not exactly unrecognised: as well as winning the Miles Franklin award twice, he also has five international awards on top of the Booker – is “all the books that will go unwritten”. Reaching for one of his notebooks, Keneally hunts for the list of stories currently jostling for his attention.

One is about “an old bugger my age” who embarks on a quest to buy a gun in western Sydney. (”That would be relatively dangerous research, I think, knocking on the door of the Bandidos.” Another cackle.) Another is set against the 1950s British atomic tests in Australia. He is “just toying” with a book about a priest accused of child sexual abuse. And he is keen to accompany Sea Shepherd anti-whaling activists to Antarctica, for a novel exploring Australia and Japan’s “mutual cultural incomprehension”.

“There are so many stories one could tell. I mean, each story is just a lens on your view of humanity and of the world. Last year at the Australian Society of Authors I gave a talk in which I enumerated a number of novel plots which I’ll never write, and passed them on to the audience.”

Writing imparts “a kind of agelessness”, he observes. “Everyone in your novels is younger than you, they’re having affairs and so on ... They’re archetypes that are driven by all the aspirations that characterise vigour: by ambition, by compassion, by love, by the most vivid hatreds.”

Keneally says he is “not game” to re-read The Place at Whitton, which is being republished by Random House this year, half a century on, “because I know it will be technically imperfect, but also because ... it’s like an infatuation you have when you’re young – you don’t have a lot of interest in revisiting it”.

Acknowledging that e-books have transformed the publishing business, he notes that, “there are many cultural phenomena that are no longer technologically necessary but still exist because of the kind of social, tactile animals we are.” He points towards cinemas, sports stadiums and universities. Physical books, Keneally suspects, will survive.

Certainly, he is no Luddite. A prodigious researcher, he mines online archives (the third volume of his acclaimed history of Australia will be out in November), and he is a prolific tweeter. From Twitter I learn that a play of his (Transport, about four female Irish convicts, produced by his cousin, Nina Keneally) is opening in New York; that 2014 will be the Sea Eagles’ year (”not kidding”) and that he recently went parasailing at North Head, above Manly.

Parasailing? “Yes, I love it! I’d always wanted to do it,” says Keneally, revealing that he also kayaks in Sydney harbour, is a keen cross-country skier and has accompanied his granddaughter down the slides and tubes at Manly Waterworks theme park. He keeps fit by walking a six-kilometre trail at North Head every afternoon.

As a young writer he found criticism hard to stomach, he admits. “You’re writing for a living, and someone can wreck your living in 600 words. My attitude now is that I’m astonished that the literary pages still have room for me, so you’re lucky to get a bad review. You know, even for a neurotic I’m getting more glass half-full than glass half-empty as I get older ... because if you don’t, you’re an even sillier old bastard, and anyway, what does it really matter?”

• Thomas Keneally will be appearing at the Perth Writers festival on 21 February, at the Dolphin Theatre