Peter Carey tackles the fraught and shameful parts of Australia's Aboriginal history – violence, subjugation, land lost, and a stolen generation – in his latest novel, A Long Way From Home.
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For many years, Carey didn't feel it was his story to tell, but came to realise 'white guilt' serves no purpose.
He tells Kathryn Ryan that it's time all Australians – especially the priveleged – do whatever they can to help ease pain and correct injustice.
In A Long Way From Home, the central characters are driving across the country in the brutal Redex car rally of 1953 – in the midst of the White Australia policy.
“They’re not living in a diverse society as far as they know, they’re living in a very white Anglo corner of the Empire ... a part of the Empire that has a White Australia policy. When it wants immigration it selects people from the Baltic states, really on the basis that they have fair hair and pale skins.”
In the 1950s, Australia was obsessed with race, Carey says.
“It took a long time, it took [then-prime minister] Gough Whitlam’s arrival before we got rid of the White Australia policy.
“We had atrocious immigration tests. We had a dictation test. We could administer a test in dictation we could give it in any European language. And so if you were Dutch, we could give you a dictation test in Greek. Which you could fail and you would probably fail it because you were of the left.”
Carey remembers the rally coming through the Victoria town of Bacchus Marsh where he grew up.
“The Redex trial came through our town at three in the morning and we at PS Carey Motors stayed open all night in case a Holden needed some help. We were there in the street, and the cars were coming through – it was dreamlike.”
The two-time Booker Prize winner now lives in New York.
“Being a visitor [to Australia], continually one is always struck by the degree to which the issues of the land – whose land is it and what injustices have been done and what to do about it is a continual subject.”
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“Knowledge and conversation” are the only way forward, Carey says.
“People do like to talk about guilt, and it’s often used in a pejorative sense – 'white guilt' – and white guilt it seems to me is a sort of code for an unmanly response to a conquest, a victory.
“Guilt is such a wrong word. The useful word is, I think, responsibility. We, all of us, are Australians and if some Australians are suffering, if some have been severely disadvantaged – a great many of us have benefitted hugely from the situation that’s created that disadvantage – then it’s our responsibility to deal with that and do whatever we can to ease pain and correct injustice.”
Although he's lived for many years in New York, Carey says he sees the world through the eyes of an Australian.
“I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all – even if it does continue to terrify me.”
Being Australian brings with it certain truths, he says.
"You’re living in a country that’s not really yours and you know it’s been stolen, and you know there are people who can survive it better than you can. You know there are situations where you will die and indigenous people will live.”
Carey has a family in New York and says he’s unlikely to return to Australia, despite the current political climate in the US.
“When I went to live in New York I didn’t mean to stay there, but here I am. I’m 74 years old, I’ve got a British wife with a career in New York. I’ve got two sons who I have no plans on leaving.
“I never understood why people didn’t leave Nazi Germany before it was too late – and now I understand.”
