![]() He stifles their plans, causing Irene to surreptitiously push for Titch to switch to General Motors Holden (GMH). Despite Irene’s efforts, the couple and their family are unable to escape the provocative and manipulative chest-beating of Dangerous Dan. His dream is to establish a Ford dealership and it is Irene’s intention that the move away from Dan will allow this to happen. ![]() He is kind and humble and dearly loves his wife. Upon their first meeting, Irene tells us, Dan Bobs thought, ‘I was a beauty, a bobby dazzler until, in the hallway by the coat stand, he gave me cause to slap his face.’ Irene detests her father in-law and fears the hold he has over her husband. Enter Irene and Titch Bobs, a young in-love couple, who move to Bacchus Marsh, a small town in Victoria, in order to escape the oppression of Titch’s ‘lurking’ daredevil of a father, Dangerous Dan Bobs. The possibility of success and infamy that hang in the air create an atmosphere in which mythologies based on masculine adventurism can flourish. ![]() This was when the infamous rivalry between Ford and Holden emerged, a rivalry that Carey uses as a metaphor for Australia’s uncertain desire to distinguish itself from foreign influence. The novel is set in a time of automobiles and air travel – a time for modern exploration of Australia by modern men. Holden versus Ford to be precise and one of the first Redex round-Australia reliability trials in 1953 which passed through Brisbane, Rockhampton, Townsville, Darwin, Alice Springs, Adelaide and Melbourne before returning to Sydney. The canonical representations of Australian identity that we revisit in A Long Way From Home seem, at first, unusual narrative subjects for Carey. It refuses to celebrate the physical feats of exploration without remembering the atrocities enacted against Aboriginal people both in the process of conquest and in the subsequent construction of the Australian nation. A Long Way From Home does not whitewash Australia’s past with stories of white masculine heroes. This latest novel wades into the history wars that have been raging since Paul Keating and John Howard’s divergence of opinion in the mid-nineties on what constitutes Australian history. In 1985, Carey focused on Aboriginal dispossession and terra nullius in Illywhacker he does this in A Long Way From Home too – but here he also confronts another type of dispossession, that of Aboriginal Australia’s cultural identity. A Long Way From Home changes this position. Yet Carey admits that despite his ambition to ‘acknowledge the peculiar circumstances of invasion, colonisation and immigration that have made us who we are’ he has always ‘avoided direct confrontation with race, and the question of what it might mean to be a white Australian’. Indeed, Carey’s fiction has always been concerned with iconic events and characters that have shaped Australia’s identity: Dickens’ representation of Australia in Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997), the Ern Malley affair in My Life as a Fake (2003), Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and, most recently, the overthrow of the Whitlam government and the leaking of classified information by Julian Assange in Amnesia (2014). In his author’s note for A Long Way From Home (2017), Peter Carey explains, ‘I have spent my life writing about my Australian inheritance, interrogating our colonial past, or possible futures’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |