A Long Way from Home was published by Penguin Books Australia in 2017. Irene Bobs and her husband Titch enter the Donatello Trial, a fictional car race around the perimeter of Australia in the 1950s, accompanied by their neighbor Willie Bachhuber, a quiet quiz-show champion who navigates. The race becomes a journey into the interior — both geographically and psychologically — and what begins as a comic road novel becomes a devastating story about the Stolen Generations: the Australian government’s policy of removing Aboriginal and mixed-race children from their families and placing them in institutions or white foster homes.
The revelation of Willie’s Aboriginal heritage — hidden from him by the very policies designed to erase it — transforms the novel from a picaresque adventure into an indictment of the racial violence at the foundation of white Australian identity.
Collecting A Long Way from Home
First edition (Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, 2017): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Australian first edition, fine in jacket: $15–$30
- UK first edition (Faber): $10–$20
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
The Redex Trial
A Long Way from Home (2017) is set during the 1954 Redex Trial, a gruelling car race around the perimeter of Australia. A suburban couple — a car salesman and his wife — enter the race and discover, as they drive through Aboriginal Australia, truths about race, identity, and the country’s hidden history that their comfortable suburban existence has concealed. The novel uses the race as a metaphor for Australia’s journey toward reckoning with its treatment of Indigenous peoples.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Redex Trial? The Redex Around Australia Reliability Trial was a real automotive endurance event held in the 1950s, in which ordinary Australians drove their cars around the continent on largely unpaved roads. It was a national phenomenon that took suburban Australians into the outback and confronted them with the vast, largely unknown interior of their own country.