The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a novel by the Australian author Thomas Keneally, published in 1972. It is set in nineteenth-century New South Wales and tells the story of Jimmie, an Aboriginal man.

Jimmie is caught between his family and his culture on one side and white settler colonialism on the other. The novel is written from his point of view, and it follows him on a mission of revenge that becomes a trail of destruction.

The story is a fictionalised retelling of the life of the bushranger Jimmy Governor, and it takes the form of an account of an Aboriginal worker who rebels against an overbearing employer.

Keneally has said that if he were writing the novel today he would not write from within a black consciousness, which is a remark about the distance between the author and the voice he used. The novel was written from Jimmie's point of view, and the author has since spoken in public about that choice and the problems it raised for him.