Natalie Quinlivan
Natalie Quinlivan is an Arts lecturer and tutor at Western Sydney University College. She is a current PhD candidate at the University of Sydney researching the collected writings of the Noongar writer, Kim Scott and has contributed to A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott edited by Belinda Wheeler.
All essays by Natalie Quinlivan
Carey’s Race: A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey
A Long Way From Home is a novel that seeks to start a conversation about what Australia stands for—who we are as a nation and what stories we want to retell and remember. It is Carey’s attention to the construction of Australian identity that is both the strength and weakness of this novel. For all its clever metaphors and allegorical flourishes, A Long Way From Home sits somewhere between a meaningful novel about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identity in Australia and a novel of well-meaning gestures. In writing about the silenced Aboriginal history of this country and appropriating Aboriginal voices and trauma to do so, Carey is wading into an ethically and politically fraught arena.