Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006
Burdens of Inheritance
By Sarah Kerr
Theft: A Love Story
by Peter Carey
Knopf, 269 pp., $24.00
It amuses and repels Peter Carey, but above all stirs his angry empathy, to remember that his country was founded in a cruel experiment. The first citizens of what came to be known as Australia were mainly convicts and paupers, tossed from Britain starting in the late eighteenth century, shipped to an unfathomable land of crumbling stone, and forced into labor. Starvation was a periodic threat. So must have been grief, paranoia, and bleak feelings about the murder of aboriginals that from this distance are hard to imagine. Rum figured prominently in these early years. When Captain Macarthur rose up against Captain Bligh and took control of the rum supply, Carey relates in his idiosyncratic 2001 travelogue 30 Days in Sydney (a travelogue because Carey has lived since the early 1990s in New York, and wrote as someone returning), he might as well have commandeered the national mint.
Review, 2348 words
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