Caravan Story

Caravan Story is a brilliant satire on the role of the artistic community in our society and the changing response of the government to their role.


The first caravans arrive in a convoy. Wayne Macauley’s narrator, Wayne Macauley, is in one of them. He’s one of the artists removed from his home, given a new place to live and the chance to ‘give back to society’.


In his strange new community, housed on a footy oval in a faraway country town, he is given his task. To create and be useful. To be thankful for the opportunity. He decides he will not give in to his misgivings; he will write.


Then he finds out about the rejection slips already written for the work he has yet to submit…



‘A delicacy and wryness, a sort of tough reversal of expectations, that relaxes the mind and sends it skidding on the thinnest ice of elegance…If Macauley is black he’s satiny.' Peter Craven


‘In an era when many Australian novelists are playing it safe…Wayne Macauley is an ambitious talent worth watching.’ Wet Ink


‘Wayne Macauley’s first novel, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, showed that a real talent had arrived and his second confirms the promise.' Age


'Mixing elegy and whimsy, satire and black humour, language becomes pliant under Macauley’s command.' Australian Book Review


'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.' Monthly