The opening pages of My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin insist that it is an Australian tale; not a romance, nor a novel but "simply a yarn - a real yarn". On its publication in 1901, Henry Lawson, another Australian author, described it as "born of the bush" and a book "true to Australia - the truest I ever read."
On first reading, however, there doesn't seem to be much to set it apart from the nineteenth century English classics. Despite declaring that she is "only a common little bush girl", Sybylla Melvin, the young protagonist and narrator, seems as though she would fit right in with the headstrong yet sympathetic heroines of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
In the same way, when I arrived in Australia it immediately felt very familiar. Constrained by time and getting tired, I've stuck mainly to the major cities, and with the "weird witchery of the mighty bush" hidden underneath concrete and behind tall buildings, it's hard to believe that I'm geographically further from home than I've ever been. When you can get a decent cup of tea, you feel you must be close to home.
As My Brilliant Career progresses, however, you start to realise that Sybylla is no typical heroine. Lizzy Bennett was never called upon to help put out a bush fire. Jane Eyre never lifted a cow. And when Harold Beecham - "a tall grand man, and honest and true and rich" - proposes and the time comes for Sybylla to put aside her notions of independence and get married, she cracks him across the face with a whip. Sybylla is a "child of the mighty bush" and she will not be tamed.
Similarly, despite all the home comforts, there is much about Australia that is weird and wonderful. I've been scuba diving with a fish almost as big as I am, and with sharks much bigger (and fortunately much further away). I've petted kangaroos and koalas, and been creeped out by enormous snakes and crocodiles behind glass at the zoo. After about ten minutes at Bondi beach, sipping flat whites in the sunshine and watching surfers drift in the waves, I understood completely why my two cousins have forsaken Northern Ireland to live here instead.
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The problem with Australia feeling so familiar, and with it being my last stop after so many weeks on the move, is that at times it's made me desperately homesick. In many ways, that's appropriate for a visit here, a land largely built by people from somewhere else. I feel homesick for England and Ireland because so many people here before me have been too, and have created Australia in the image of the homes they left behind.
Longing for home is an overarching theme of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictionalised autobiography of Ned Kelly, the notorious Australian outlaw. Kelly comes from an Irish peasant family, his "brave parents... ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history" leaving "every dear familiar thing... abandoned on the docks". Although the novel covers his criminal exploits, it makes it clear that his motivation is always his desire to restore his family and fulfil their dreams of creating a stable home for themselves, to possess land they "could walk on from breakfast until [they] saw the last kookaburra marking its boundary across the evening sky". But, sent away at thirteen and never really able to return, Ned remains a "boy without a home", moving from place to place, from hidden den to hidden den, never fully attaining the one thing he truly wants; a "place on earth to call his own".
Unlike Kelly, I've been in self-imposed exile. It's been my choice to roam, to go walkabout, to see radically different things and do things I wouldn't usually do. It's been amazing. But it takes its toll. And though I'm now in fairly familiar surroundings, with friends and family, and most of the home comforts I'd been craving, I've realised that there's nothing quite like being in a place you can call your own.
I'd like to go home now.
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Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (1901)
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