Patrick Flanery

A brutal race

A Long Way Home relentlessly skewers the government’s racial policies towards Aborigines

issue 13 January 2018

More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, which circles the globe before concluding with a long interlude in the Australian outback. While the film was in the mode of speculative science fiction and Carey’s captivating A Long Way from Home is a fiercely realist story set in the 1950s, this new book nonetheless shares both that earlier work’s fascination with outsiders whose lives spin off in unpredictable directions, and as a profound reverence for Australia’s interior and its people.

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