Everyone, she says, can relate to those things, whether the character is a mill worker in Manchester in 1819, an astronaut in 1960s America, or even a Australian teenager living through the 2020 global pandemic.

For the moment, though, Keneally's literary niche is populated with strong women, and has so far dated back a couple of hundred years.

Her first novel, Fled, published last year, was based on the life of convict Mary Bryant - a woman forced by poverty to become a highwaywoman, who is transported to Australia, and hatches a plot to escape back to England.

Keneally likes to joke that it was the first novel she wrote "without adult supervision"; she has also co-authored the first four in a series of historical crime novels with her father, Tom Keneally. The Monsarrat Series is also set in the 1800s, and the pair have committed to 12 volumes.

But in amongst these, she has found the time to publish a second novel, The Wreck, featuring another feisty, convict-era woman.

"It's not so much that specific period I'm fixed on," she says.

"It's more that I really like stories of women who buck the trends and kick over the traces, and I love stories about female leadership in an era when female leadership wasn't welcomed.

"You could argue we're still in such an era, but more in the 19th century, and stories of women who do extraordinary things and show extraordinary courage."

The Wreck tells the story of Sarah McCaffrey, who finds herself on a ship bound for Sydney after fleeing from her part in a failed rebellion in 1820s London.

Rising from desperate poverty, and watching people die needlessly on the streets of London, she and her brother become what can only be described as terrorists. She's part of a plot to overthrow the government, with violence.

But when she finds herself the sole survivor of a shipwreck on the rocks of Sydney, she determines to make a new life for herself.

It's a gripping and glorious book; based loosely on true events, it's vivid and visceral - entirely foreign but, for any Australian who learned about convict history in school, strangely familiar. Although she finds it almost impossible to put herself in such a woman's shoes - "I'm a very timid person, I would be totally dead if faced with these situations!" - Keneally says she's drawn irresistibly to adventure on the page.

She has, of course, caught the bug from her father - the author of Schindler's List and The Daughters of Mars, among many others - and a childhood spent being dragged resentfully around historical sites.

"I was more interested in music and clothes," she says, of her teens. But later, amid a diverse career that has encompassed public affairs, editing print and radio journalism and financial services, she learned to pay attention to history, to reimagine the people she was reading about into stories.

For The Wreck, there were four historical threads that piqued her interest, and that she has woven into the novel, creating a single character to witness all four.

The first is the Peterloo Massacre, in 1819 in Manchester, during which tens of thousands of people gathered to listen to the famous orator Henry Hunt talk about parliamentary reform. Authorities, alarmed by what they saw as shades of the relatively recent French Revolution, read the Riot Act, and mounted police arrived to disperse the crowd, killing and maiming many.

"It was essentially a violent overreaction to a peaceful protest," she says. "But I've always found that event fascinating because of what it says, of how terrified the authorities in Britain were of a revolution, because the French Revolution was within living memory, and they just had these kneejerk reactions."

The second thread is the Cato Street Conspiracy, a failed rebellion involving news of a Cabinet dinner to be held in a posh home, and a group of disaffected rebels planning to infiltrate the dinner and behead the Cabinet members.

"That's always fascinated me as well - I've always been really interested in the link between oppression and terrorism," she says. "When she's with the rebels, Sarah McCaffrey is essentially a terrorist."

The wreck of the Dunbar is another historical event that has always seemed alluring for a work of fiction - a ship driven into the cliffs near Sydney Harbour in heavy rain in 1857. Just one person survived, and it remains NSW's deadliest maritime disaster. Keneally sets her story a couple of decades earlier, and makes Sarah her sole survivor, but she was lucky enough to be able to read contemporary accounts of the wreck, told breathlessly in a printed pamphlet that was bought and read avidly by many at the time.

"It's always struck me as a very heartbreaking event, because can you imagine you've made it all the way from England to Australia, and you're less than a kilometre away from your destination?" she says.

Finally, Mary Reiby was nowhere near the kindly, grandmother figure we now see depicted on the Australian $20 note. Convicted of stealing a horse in Lancashire and sentenced to transportation in 1791, she married a former East India Company man who owned several farms in traded in corn, wheat and cedar.

After he died, leaving her with seven children and a business to run, she expanded the family empire and was one of the richest people in the colony. Sarah's employer and protector, Molly Thistle, is inspired by Mary's story. Ultimately, the story highlights one of the elements of early colonial history that isn't quite emphasised enough in modern-day high school history lessons. Life in the colonies was tough, especially for women.

Never mind the voyage itself - the sights, the sounds and smells, whales and dolphins in the waters alongside them, the hardship, the uncertainty - imagine what it would have been like stepping off the ship into 1800s Sydney? There would have been koalas dotting the dusty street trees, kangaroos bounding through the shrubs, and half the buildings were still just wattle-and-daub huts.

"Sometimes, when I watch a documentary about spaceflight, for example, and I look at the astronaut looking out of the window, and watching earth below them, I think how terrifying must it be to be that far from everything that you know, to be that incredible distance away," she says.

"And I think being transported must have felt something like that as well. I wonder if many people even had a sense of exactly how far away they were from from home? There must have been quite a bit of mental struggle in coming to terms with that."

Her next novel, although historical, will be departure from colonial Sydney - Keneally was thrilled recently to stumble across the story of the Last Queen of Tahiti - a story that has yet to be told in novel form. It's a boon and a bargain for someone who has always been drawn to "a good rollicking adventure, one which has something deeper to say about human nature and the state of the world in which the characters live and so forth. So that's what I try to write."