'One morning, without warning, our narrator wakes into a nightmare. He and his female companion are placed 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 of cultural workers.
'They are put into groups, set their tasks. Their meals are served to them on trestle tables in the middle of the ground. Entangled in a contract of mutual obligation, they are passive in their herding and their handouts.
'Then the narrator 'escapes', to an abandoned school in a big country town. It is here, unexpectedly, that a sparkling, if muted, transfiguration takes place.
'Caravan Story is both satire and lyric. Exploring between the lines the bigger questions of our culture it takes us on a strange and provocative journey. And with Macauley's inexorable narrative logic, we simply cannot put it down.'
(Publication summary)
Source: Black Pepper Publishing website, http://members.dodo.com.au/~ghannah/ (Sighted 11/07/2007)
