The story:
Billy Woodward has been attending college in Perth. He has gained success not only in football but also as a painter. After an absence of several years he is now coming home to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. He picks up a hitchhiker who recognises him and informs him of his father’s death. When he returns home his brothers implicate him in a robbery and the police throw both him and his brother in the back of a van to take him off to jail.









About the author:
Archie Weller (born 13 July 1957) is an Australian award winning writer of novels, short stories and screen plays.
Weller was born in Cranbrook, Western Australia, and grew up on a farm called Woonenup in the South west of that state.

The title story in the collection Going Home deals with the complexities of the Aboriginal identity in Australia. It is set in the 1980s and the protagonist has succeeded at university. He excels at sports, studies art and does paintings that are admired by the white community. But in achieving this acceptance he has turned his back on his home and his family. He feels white, but at the same time he is proud to be black. On his 21st birthday, nostalgia for his roots leads him to return to the camp of his birth, only to discover that his new "white" identity is invisible in the darkness of ignorance and prejudice. In contrast, another story in the collection, "Herbie", is about a white boy named Davey who witnesses the killing of an Aboriginal boy and though he is cruel to the boy and offers no resistance to the boys who eventually result in his death, the boy sympathises with Herbie's mother and shows remorse. In this story he portrays a boy who at the time has no empathy towards Herbie, an indigenous boy. It portrays bullying and brutal behaviour in a schoolyard with fatal consequences.


Buchdaten:
Taschenbuch: 160 Seiten
Verlag: Klett (Oktober 2010)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 3125791227
ISBN-13: 978-3125791220
ISBN: 3125791227
Preis: € 7,99