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’.
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