So
here I am, I’m going: it happens to us all. There is no rhyme
nor
reason. Even when you’ve sucked the fingers of the hand that
feeds you it can still turn around and grab you by the throat.
One morning, without warning, our narrator wakes into a
nightmare. He and his female companion are put in a caravan and driven
to a football oval in a faraway country town. There they join scores of
other caravan-dwellers in a seemingly closed community. They are
divided into groups, given their tasks. Then our narrator
‘escapes’, to an abandoned school in a big country
town…
Wayne Macauley has a gift for storytelling. He can, and cannot but
help, spin a yarn. It is this continual shifting on of our attention
through the description of the particulars of a scene that gives his
writing such a weird intensity.
Examining the darker side of our manufacture and manipulation of
culture,
Caravan Story
is a deeply unsettling and at times hilarious read. With
Macauley’s inexorable narrative logic we are held in its
thrall
until the sparkling, if muted, transfiguration of its ending.
In an era when many Australian
novelists are playing it safe... Wayne Macauley is an ambitious talent
worth watching.
Emmett Stinson, Wet Ink
ISBN 9781876044534
Published 2007
168 pgs
NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE - PLEASE VISIT TEXT PUBLISHING FOR RE-PUBLICATION EDITION (2012)
Caravan Story book
sample
Back to top
PART ONE
Chapters one to five
PART TWO
Chapters one to four
Back to top
Reviews
Caravan Story
Radio New Zealand, ‘Nine to Noon
’, 17 August 2012
For the audio of this review click here:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2528420/book-review-with-louise-o%27brien.asx
Back to top
Caravan Story
Tali Polichtuk
Australian Book Review,
No. 298, February 2008
In his lauded
début novella, Blueprints
for a Barbed-Wired Canoe
(2004), Wayne Macauley charted the development and demise of a badly
planned and hastily constructed outer-suburban housing development.
Luring city-dwellers with cheap housing and a promised highway to
enable quick access to the city, the government abandoned the project,
leaving the residents to fend for themselves. In Caravan Story,
Macauley’s second novella, the author renews his
preoccupation
with urban planning and hones his gift for allegory, spotlighting the
plight of artists forcibly relocated to the countryside.
Wayne, the narrator, is one of hundreds affected by this government
policy. Evicted from the inner-city home he shares with his partner,
Alice, they are moved to a football field cum caravan park in a
Victorian country town. Here they are trained to channel their creative
abilities (writing and acting, respectively) to utilitarian ends. The
aim of the project is to turn them into citizens ‘[w]ho might
make a worthwhile contribution to society’. This proves to be
a
futile exercise for Wayne and his fellow writers. Bureaucrats dispose
of their work unread, their rejection letters having been drafted even
before they began their menial writing tasks.
An attack on the strip-mining of the arts, Caravan Story’s
strength lies in the manner of Macauley’s
critique. Eschewing heavy-handed didacticism, he opts for
economical prose imbued with subtle imagery. Housing serves as the key
motif, a totemic symbol of the depletion of the community’s
artistic freedom. The stationary caravan is a cogent metaphor for the
precarious position of the handout-dependent artist,
‘[s]ucking
on the dug of dubious benevolence’.
Mixing elegy and whimsy, satire and black humour, language becomes
pliant under Macauley’s command. The narrative palls when the
author allows his characters to sermonise at length, but this is a
small blemish in an otherwise engaging read.
Back to top
Ebb and flow of everyday life
made new
Emily Maguire (author)
The Canberra Times,
8 December 2007
Reading a metafictional novel can be like working at a cryptic
crossword. The cheeky winks and word play are good fun but in the end
it’s all just so much diversion. At their best, however, such
novels work to expand our understanding. Happily, Wayne
Macauley’s use of
metafictional techniques in Caravan
Story is more revelatory than
masturbatory; the head games and narrative tricks are directed toward
getting the reader to think more deeply, not just more cleverly.
The narrator of Caravan
Story, also a writer named Wayne Macauley, is
confused rather than shocked when he is herded into a caravan and
driven to a country football ground. It seems Wayne and all the other
writers, actors and painters have been involuntarily recruited to an
artists’ colony in which they will be fed and watered so long
as
they beaver away at their set assignments.
The actors and painters disappear fairly quickly; their skills are in
high demand for corporate training videos, commercials and community
murals. The writers, though, are less useful. ‘The question
is,’ says the camp administrator at one point,
‘what good
are all these writers, what possible worthwhile contribution could
any of you possibly make, how could any of you ever possibly pay your
way?’
After wasting the days writing pages that end up in the overflowing
garbage cans behind the toilet block, the useless writers are sent -
literally - back to school. Here they are bluntly told the
‘facts’: ‘You can hold on to your
romantic dreams all
you like... but there is only one way to make a living out of telling
stories and that is having your stories told on celluloid within the
paradigm of a three-act structure.’
On one level this book is a painful (to this novelist, anyway) satire
on the endless round of grant, fellowship and residency applications
that writers undertake in an attempt to eke out a living or improve
their literary status. But it’s also an interrogation of the
place of art, specifically literature, in our society. Is literature
that is produced by demand or written to pre-defined parameters
literature at all? Is a work of art only worth something if someone
(anyone), somewhere (anywhere) is willing to pay for it?
What’s the point of it all, anyway?
Back to top
Macauley on the road again
Owen Richardson
The Age, 25
August 2007
Melbourne writer Wayne Macauley’s first novel,
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire
Canoe, showed that a real talent had arrived, and his
second confirms the promise.
Like Kafka or Ballard, his books are set in a dreamlike parallel world
that shines a light back onto ours. Allegory being hard to keep up at
length, both those writers are better in their short stories than in
their novels, and Macauley’s chosen form of the longish
novella -
about 150 pages -and his physical specificity show canniness and
discipline, as well as ability.
In
Caravan Story,
Wayne, a
writer, and his actor girlfriend are rounded up along with their
colleagues and made to live in caravans parked in a country town footy
ground, like so many refugees or Jonestown cultists, and put to work on
various projects.
The writers fare the worst; the actors look as if they are going to
spend their lives doing corporate training videos or public service
ads, while the painters, well, they have all those community murals to
do. The writers are sent back to school, literally - shades of
Ferdydurke
- in the hope they may have a future in TV and film and made
to watch Chinatown over and over again and schooled in the jargon of
story paradigms (set-up, confrontation, resolution), the rhetoric of
the commercial arts.
It’s a book written by someone who has had to fill out one
grant
application too many, or had to read the dreadful pap funding bodies
put on their websites, until he’s started to bleed from the
ears.
Back to top
Caravan Story
Martin Shaw
Readings Monthly,
July 2007
(An edited version of this review appeared in
The Monthly, July
2007)
In 2004 Macauley published
Blueprints
for a Barbed-Wire Canoe
to great acclaim, with one critic even going so far as to say that
‘if more
Australian literature was of this calibre, we’d be
laughing’. On the strength of this, his
second, book, I must say I entirely agree
! But as much as
the art
of this book - its surreal, dreamlike atmosphere, its memorable cast of
slightly sinister characters (à la Kafka) - seduces the
reader,
what really excites is Macauley’s provocative cultural
intervention. The central premise is a
not-so-far-away-as-you-might-think radical
utilitarianization of the arts in Australian culture. A young couple,
one a writer named Wayne Macauley, the other an actor, are removed from
their inner-urban lodgings and taken by caravan to the local football
oval at a small town in the Victorian countryside. There they
find
themselves in a new ‘community’ of like-minded
cultural
workers. Somewhat confused, Wayne begins work on his writing
– until it becomes
apparent that the community’s material is simply
ending up in the garbage bin. The select few get the opportunity to
render themselves
‘possibly’ useful by generating scripts for film or
TV; the
others simply vanish. His girlfriend, on the other hand, finds that her
profession at least is deemed to have its uses – she finds
herself on the road seven days a week in a traveling troupe, providing
entertainment for demoralized country towns suffering from the drought,
or making TV commercials. But in the camp even
more artists are arriving on buses, it’s full to overflowing
(in
need of a final solution, in fact). A lament but also a call to arms,
Caravan Story
is a thrilling piece of satire, a compulsively readable, extremely
well-wrought Orwellian fable that I believe announces the arrival
of Macauley as a major Australian writer, one who definitely
has something to say.
Back to top
Citation
as a Book of the Year (2007)
My
discovery of the year was Brunswick author Wayne Macauley. For anyone
who thrills to a hypnotic prose style and incisive social satire, I
would urge you to discover his work! His most recent novella is Caravan
Story.
Martin Shaw, Readings Monthly,
December 2007-January 2008
Back
to top
The Launch Of Caravan Story By
The ‘Minister Assisting’ For Arts And Economic
Development
...I no longer know
where irony ceases and heaven begins...
Heinrich Heine,
The
Harz Journey (epigraph to the novel)
On the evening of Monday the 12th of November at the North Fitzroy Star
Hotel a ‘mystery special guest’ launched Wayne
Macauley’s new novel,
Caravan
Story. The ‘special guest’ was in fact
an actor and her speech was a hoax. Here’s how it went...
THE HON. PENNY MONTGOMERY, MP (MINISTER ASSISTING THE MINISTER FOR ARTS
AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT) IS INTRODUCED. SHE TAKES THE MICROPHONE...
THE HON. PENNY MONTGOMERY: Thank you Kevin and good evening. First of
all let me say what a great pleasure it is to be here tonight, in the
future
City of
Literature,
launching a new novel by one of our most exciting young writing
talents. Arts activity, as we know, accounts for a significant
proportion of our economic activity, both state and federally, and it
is our aim to do all we can to give this economic activity the
opportunity to flourish.
There is, as we know, an undeniable and long-established link between
the arts and tourism - and, as all available data shows, in a time of
massive movement across global boundaries tourism has become one of our
key profit-makers. With our own national economy running a current
trade deficit of just over $500 billion it is clear the role the arts
and its companion tourist industries can play in both increasing export
earnings and drawing down valuable tourist dollars. I am sure you
understand, therefore, the importance we place at all levels of
government on supporting young and emerging artists such as Wayne
McCaulliff and small independent publishers like
Black Pepper in
growing this important sector and renewing it with fresh
entrepreneurial vigour.
The Arts play a vital role in the life of any nation - from the writer
in his or her garret to the community arts worker helping the local
schoolchildren with their mosaics. Without Art and the artists who make
it, we are impoverished as a people. Many, many members of our
communities, both young and old, people who perhaps twenty years ago
would not have had the opportunity to engage with the Arts, are now
artists themselves of one kind or another. This is a very exciting
time. The Arts have begun to find their way into almost every aspect of
our lives; here in Melbourne, as you know, we see this artistic
seachange manifesting itself in the architecture, the streetscapes, the
bohemian café life, the plethora of festivals, the number of
galleries, poetry readings, performances and recitals.
However, unfortunately, it is one thing to speak of the riches of a
city’s cultural life and another to speak of the
countryside’s impoverishment. People on the land are doing it
hard: natural disasters, tough international markets, soil degradation,
the impact of unemployment and a new generation of disaffected,
alienated youth - and yet, again, where we see community and cultural
fragmentation we again see the role the Arts can play in recovering
self-esteem, regaining confidence, rebuilding community, restoring
employment and reinvigorating economic activity. It is my and my
Government’s belief that such a role is the role the Arts can
and
should play.
It is with great pride, then, and privilege, that I am here tonight to
launch this wonderful new work by an emerging writer whom I have been
told deals in a very challenging way with precisely some of these
complex cultural issues. It is true that, in our rush to invest in arts
activities of all kinds, we have also inadvertently created a surfeit
of people who now call themselves artists, in numbers that the present
industry simply cannot sustain over the medium to long term. A natural
correction is needed. Now, as I understand it, it is precisely this
problem that Wayne has tackled in such a creative way in his book. He
advocates, so I am told, a plan by which a surplus of city-based
artists might be relocated to the countryside in order to lessen the
pressure on the limited resources available.
He imagines an artists’ camp, set up on the abandoned
football
oval of a small and struggling country town, and these artists engaging
with and reinvigorating the economic activity of the local community.
Now, far from being far-fetched, Wayne, this is a most interesting and
challenging idea - as is the proposal, alluded to in the book, of
reducing the unsustainable number of unproductive artists who are still
burdening the system by poisoning them with pesticide and burying them
in a mass grave on the outskirts of the town.
This surfeit of artists and what to do with them has certainly taxed
some of the better minds in our own department. But here again is an
example of what we can do when we
think
creatively.
Wayne’s on the surface radical but in fact imminently
sensible
idea has much to recommend it and has, let me say, already found favour
with many of my colleagues. Not all artists, as we know, can be
productive in the way our society would want or expect them to be - to
eliminate these people quietly and at relatively low cost to the
taxpayer seems to me to be an idea that could and should find favour
within all State and Federal government bureaucracies...
SOMEONE INTERJECTS...
HECKLER ONE: Excuse me. I’m sorry. I have a question. Given
that
you are spending an estimated $9.2 million on the so-called
Centre for Books and Ideas - and the accompanying City of
Literature bid - and that in your publicity for this Centre you say it
will be, quote “providing writers with the resources they
require”, how do you then justify the fact that total
expenditure
on direct grants to writers of adult literary fiction to create new
work in a recent funding round came to a total of $27,000...?
THE HON. PENNY MONTGOMERY: Arts is inextricably linked to tourism, as I
have said. This is an established fact - there have already been many
costly reports and enquiries that have decisively proven this link. The
City of Literature branding - regardless of the quantity or quality of
literature produced (this, can I say, is quite frankly irrelevant) -
will not only create an enormous number of job opportunities for arts
bureaucrats, failed writers, ex-librarians but also add valuable
tourist dollars to the local economy. It will increase our
international profile and with it our international trade...
HECKLER TWO: Excuse me. Yes. I have a sculptor friend who was recently
found hanged in her studio. She had just finished filling out her sixth
grant application in as many months. Her suicide note said:
“I
don’t understand the criteria.” Do you have any
comment on
that...?
THE HON. PENNY MONTGOMERY: Yes, well, what I can say is that we are
currently undertaking a review which will look into how we might
streamline the application process with the plan ultimately of
establishing a committee that will then report back to the relevant
authorities. Their preliminary investigations suggest, anecdotally,
that, over time, we may be able to marginally reduce the paperwork
involved… . All right? Everyone happy...? Good. And so, it
is
with great pleasure that I now officially launch
Caravan Story, by
Wayne - I’m sorry, Wayne
Macauley
- whom I will now ask to step up and say a few words...
THE AUTHOR STEPS UP TO THE MICROPHONE...
WAYNE MACAULEY: (reading from pg. 139) ‘...From the
moment
we stepped up into the caravan, from the moment the red-lipsticked
Polly ticked us off her list, we have sold it all away. What is a
product anyway, what is production, productivity? Who in
God’s
name first put the words ‘arts’ and
‘industry’
together? Who let all these bureaucrats and critics and ill-qualified
pedagogues loose on the world, who gave them the right to pardon or
punish? Who said we should listen? Who said we should learn, grow
up?’
Caravan Story
is a satire.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, an 18th century aphorist and one of my
favourite writers, said: ‘The finest satire is that in which
ridicule is combined with so little malice and so much conviction that
it even rouses laughter in those who are hit.’ I hope, in
this
instance, that this is the case.
The principal object of the satire in
Caravan Story is
the so-called arts industry.
I personally think art has got nothing,
absolutely nothing,
to do with ‘industry’. The
‘arts’, in my
opinion, is everything ‘industry’ is not. I never
thought,
and still don’t, that I am making any economic contribution
to
this country. That’s not what I do. If I do give something
back
- and even this is uncertain - then whatever it is it
certainly
can’t be measured in terms of dollars, profit, business,
industry. It will in fact be something as completely unlike money as it
is possible for anything to be...
Over the past couple of decades there has been the most appalling
appropriation of the arts, of the arts being hijacked for commercial
ends. How did this happen? Who is responsible? You and me, probably.
People who believed the arts was important, who caught the bug early
and as they got older and occupied positions of power began to
evangelically spread their belief in the arts into every corner of
society. But where originally we saw art as having an intrinsic,
autonomous value, we now found ourselves having to justify it to people
who simply could not understand such things. ‘But it will
help
your businessmen think laterally,’ we said. ‘It
will
revitalise your urban environments. Lower your youth crime rate. Sell
your messages. Give you the creative edge. Promote your city. Boost
tourism. Increase export earnings.’ Soon our art was
everywhere.
You couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over a
piece
of sculpture, go out your front door without running into a festival,
find a café corner without a would-be writer sitting in it.
So what is it with all this art? How - this is the question I ask
myself - how do we actually get outside it now, escape its clutches,
stand somewhere else, a place, unsanctioned, from where we can see and
speak clearly, away from all the hyperbole? How do you critique a
society that already owns your critique...?
I believe it is absolutely essential that we learn to bite the hand
that feeds us and that our patrons learn that this is a natural part of
the exchange. To bite the hand that feeds is the artist’s
social
and civic responsibility. Great civilisations all knew this - all great
civilisations had their satirists, their clowns. All great
civilisations knew the value of this tense, dangerous, ironic exchange.
One of the biggest problems with the way arts patronage is set up in
this country is that no-one has - or can afford to have - a sense of
irony. Art-making has become so regulated, its justifications so
complicated, the competition for its resources so intense, that it is
only the very serious and ‘worthy’ who will be able
to jump
through all the hoops and land safely on the other side.
In short, it has been an incredibly difficult period to live through
for the pig-headed independent artist with a warped sense of humour.
Not because there’s no ‘support for the
arts’ -
that’s everywhere, as Ms Montgomery was so keen to point out
-
but because the whole point has got lost. It’s other people,
mostly bureaucrats, who now tell us what art is, what we do, why. It is
very hard just to
be.
So how do you just
be?
How do you justify what you do and continue to do it independently of
that great all-consuming bureaucratic machine?
By having people around you who let you be. Who don’t demand
a cost-benefit analysis.
It is these people I am here to thank.
Back to top
Macauley
biography