Australia as an (in)hospitable home in Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (2017)

Abstract

The concepts of “house” and “home” constitute two poles of experience which negotiate the space between economic and emotional safety. Associated with material well-being and personal rela-tionships, they may serve as litmus-paper tests to probe the economic and personal situation of people living on a given territory. The last to-date novel by the Australian novelist Peter Carey, A Long Way from Home (2017), takes up the issue of Australia as a metaphorical home to diverse groups of people: the white descendants of British colonisers, post-WWII survivors and immigrants, and the indigenous Aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. Employing the plot of the all-around-the-country car race, the novel shows how the land, seemingly homely and open to everybody, may be read as a palimpsest of trauma and pain, and quite inhospitable to many of its inhabitants. Referring to the concepts of the picaresque and chronotope, this article will argue that both the metaphoric and the literal meaning of the concepts of house and home are employed in the novel to disclose and discuss the internal and immigration policy of the Australia of the 1950s.