Homesickness
I have come to this novel rather late, having read Eucalyptus when it was released in 1998 and, I must admit, nothing by Murray Bail since (re-reading Eucalyptus to teach doesn’t really count). Homesickness was published in 1980, and I have found a second-hand, first paperback edition from that era. His other books are Holden’s Performance (1987); The Pages (2008) and The Voyage (2012). For a writer like me who churns out a novel every ten years, Bail’s pauses between novels are almost encouraging. My main reason for reading this novel was to see how it dealt with themes that might be said to connect with the expatriate experience. I read that Bail lived overseas at the end of the 1960s in India, and then in England and Europe from 1970 to 1974. Although Homesickness is a 1980 publication, it is most assuredly a 1970s book; one can almost taste the stale Qantas food and touch the (probably) too-proud wallpaper in Australia House in London, where two of the characters