The question “what is it about” when applied to a book that is a novel is generally much easier to answer than when applied to a book of short stories. That does not qualify in the case of the stories collected in Archie Weller’s Going Home. What is the book about is a question that translates into what is the predominant theme unifying the individual stories not naturally connected by recurring characters? The answer is simple: Going Home is about the Aboriginal experience in Australia and the ways and means by which they, as a group, have been forced to evolve to withstand the pressures of being the strangers and outsiders in a country which they are the only descendants of native inhabitants.
The stories within present the full gamut of what it means to be a member of the indigenous population of Australia. The narrator’s sister in “Fish and Chips” has married a white man and disconnected herself from the other members of the Aboriginal family, yet he predicts that her return home is nothing less than inevitable, suggesting that full assimilation into white society is doomed to failure. Situated at the other end of the narrative structure is “Herbie.” This story presents a perspective of Aboriginal life from the most extreme of outside points of view: a young white racist boy whose favorite pastime is picking on a the only “boong” to attend his school. Between those two polar opposites can be found a variety of stories occupying the middle ground which consistently reveal a pattern of abuse on the part of the white power structure and passivity from the oppressed minority. The result is a dramatic tension which refuses to place the blame for the situation entirely upon the bullies while also reminding readers that there are perfectly logical reasons why the bullied don’t fight back.
Those reasons are no nebulous or philosophical or left to ambiguity. This book is a story of the oppression of Australia’s Aborigines that is violent and brutal. Death brings on the climax in over half the stories while others end in a prison cell. Families are left devastated and the truth is brought home in unflinchingly portraits of reality. The brother has good reason to believe his sister will come home in “Fish and Chips” and it is a belief that may be unstated but is certainly held close in the other stories. Eventually, what the dispossessed have to hold onto is each other. Even when family dynamics or romantic love goes awry or turns out less than perfect, the unit is still there sharing the same trials and tribulations. Despair and a sense of hopelessness seeps through the stories like hairline fractures in the plumbing, but in the end though it may be as come through the faucet as forcefully as one would like, it can still engender a sense of hope. As long an oppressed class has not been turned against each other, collective hope remains potentially a potent force for change.
