For 30 years, the two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey has made his home in New York City. Don’t even think about calling him an American.
ByARIELA BARD 31 Oct 2026 on VI’s 36th birthday
Peter Carey can’t remember what year it was when he was bullied by a London cabbie while on his way to either win or not win the Booker Prize.
“I’m not sure whether it was when I was shortlisted for Illywhacker or when I won for Oscar and Lucinda, but I was in a taxi and the driver picked up my accent,” says Carey, who’s one of only a few authors – and the only Australian – to have won the Booker twice. We are supposed to be talking about his grandfather, aviator Robert Graham Carey, whose Blériot XImonoplane will be exhibited alongside personal curios and ephemera from his life in the sky when the beleaguered Powerhouse Parramatta museum opens next weekend. But instead we are in London in the 1980s (we think) in the back of a taxi.
“I was on the way to the awards when the taxi driver said, ‘So, you’ve come for the culture, have you?’ I explained to him that I was contributing to the culture. He laughed and asked if my contribution was Neighbours.”
When Carey got out of the taxi, the driver continued his spray. “Got the marks, have you?” he asked, pointing to Carey’s ankles.
“I’m not sure …” Carey replied, bemused.
“From the shackles,” the driver mic-dropped, before cackling and driving off.
“I never forgot it,” Carey says. “It was such a shock.”
Carey in 2001 after he won the Booker Prize for True History Of The Kelly Gang. Carey has dialled in from his New York home, where he lives with his wife, book editor and publisher turned literary agent Frances Coady. He’s in his study, with a wall full of books behind him. Some squinting (mine) reveals the titles are all his own. The cabbie anecdote has come up in response to my asking the now retired author of 14 novels, two volumes of short stories, a children’s book and two travelogues why he thinks Australians love a fugitive, an outlaw, a rogue. The kinds of characters that are whomping out of the wall behind him. The kind of man, history tells us, his high-flying grandfather was.
“I think that love of the character comes from our colonial past. I don’t know, I haven’t really examined it. I just love writing those characters … As kids at school, we loved those characters. We responded to the cheek of it, to the send-up of the posh English. That wily character who can outsmart the posh ones who think they’re smarter than you. It’s overcoming those in power, in a way.”
He recalls that during his time in England, “Australian literature wasn’t regarded highly. You could always get a laugh in the West End just using the word ‘Australia’.” I ask him if he ever felt denigrated for being an Aussie among his English contemporaries. Instead of telling me that Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were mean to him (they were not), he tells me the story of the rude taxi driver.
Carey first went to London in the late 1960s, after he and his then wife Leigh Weetman left Australia to travel through Europe. The young couple spent time in Florence, which was then recovering from the devastating flood of 1966 that left the city smelling “of mud and mould”; Carey rented a typewriter and spent his days at the Uffizi, and at the Galleria dell’Accademia gazing upon Michelangelo’s Prisoners, the unfinished figures still emerging from the rock in which they were carved. Arriving in London, he says, “felt like coming home”.
A mop-haired Peter Carey in the early 1970s. Carey with wife Frances Coady. Picture: Getty Images “You have to understand at that time in Australia, there was Vietnam and there was a considerable internal disagreement about that. It was also the time of Haight-Ashbury and the hippie movement. But if you went into a pub with long hair in Melbourne in those days, it was quite likely someone’s going to want to beat you up because you had long hair. London was very much more accepting. I didn’t look any different to anybody else on the street, except for my peculiar idiosyncratic appearance …”
Carey’s idiosyncratic long-haired hippie days are long behind him. At 83 his voice is husky and soft, his mood jolly. His eyes are bright behind black-rimmed glasses, with a twinkle that recalls the absurdist, larrikin spirit characteristic of the heroes and antiheroes that populate his books. I’ve been told he can be ornery in interviews. He is not. Instead, a small, conspiratorial smile tugs at the edges of his mouth. On several occasions he prefaces his recollections with “I’m embarrassed to say”, then says it anyway. He is embarrassed when he loses his train of thought from time to time, “a casualty of age”, he says. But it’s not hard to get him back on track – his memory is sharp, his wit and humour quintessentially Australian.
When I mention that it’s been over 30 years since he left us, his fellow Australians, he interrupts me to say, “If you read my books you wouldn’t say that.” I politely tell him that the end of my sentence was: but you never really left us at all.
“I’m Australian,” he says. “I’m continually asking, every day: Why are they like that? Why are we like this? I am the product of my country, there’s no question about it. I didn’t come here, to New York, until I was 50. You can’t rearrange your mind, your character, your concerns. I write out of who I am and what my interests are.”
The story of Carey’s life is well documented. His childhood in Bacchus Marsh, a small town 50km northwest of Melbourne on the road to Ballarat, living above his family’s motor shop, PS Carey Motors. His parents were a team, he tells me; his mother ran the business from her seat at a high counter in the spare parts department.
Peter Carey in front of a Holden at his parents' car dealership in Bacchus Marsh. Picture: Trish Claringbold “In those days, spare parts came with huge books of indexes. When the mechanics came in from the workshop, they would tell her the number of the part. My mother would always be able to recite the correct number if they were wrong. She was not one to be dictated to by men.”
When Carey was 11 he was sent to Geelong Grammar, thecountry’s most prestigious boarding school. Rupert Murdoch was a contemporary of his brother; Kerry Packer was there at the same time, too. He tells me that the landed gentry were not among his friends and he was somewhat oblivious to the pedigree of his fellow students.
“It was a couple of years out of school that I suddenly realised that these people I’d been at school with would go on to run the f..king country,” he says. I point out that while he had no idea that his peers would go on to run the f..king country, they too had no idea that he would go on to become our greatest living novelist. “There are plenty of novelists to argue with you about that,” he says.
“Sure,” I reply. “But they’re not here now, are they?”
“When I first read Peter Carey, I found a writer who wasunmistakably Australian. Who seemed to have invented his own country,” says writer Steve Toltz. “His work is exuberant and nasty, very funny, deeply humane and darkly imaginative. His early novels had a pleasant dash of misanthropy that resonated. There is always something exhilarating to me about his insistence on the primacy of story, his unsentimental view of human nature, and his palpable joy of invention. Since I first started writing, he has sat at the very top of my pantheon of Australian writers.”
Toltz’s first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, had reviewers reaching for the Carey comparison, especially towards Illywhacker. Both are sprawling, picaresque tales, dense and chaotic, thrilling and propulsive.
“I was mad when I wrote that book. Literally mad,” Carey says of his second published novel. “I doubt I could reach that spot today.”
‘Australian literature wasn’t regarded highly. You could always get a laugh in the West End just using the word ‘Australia’. Picture: David Joshua Ford Reading Illywhacker for the first time in decades, it’s easy to agree. About the madness, not about his inability to write like that in his eighties; that’s for him to say. From the famous opening sentence, “My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity”, the reader is on unstable ground (Herbert is a big fat liar). And so it continues; Herbert’s verbal ejaculations span three generations and tell the story of modern Australia through the eyes of a rogue, a scoundrel, an illywhacker. The kind of character Australian audiences love, the kind of character who might, say, travel 600 miles to buy a wreck of a plane even though he doesn’t know how to fly.
“It’s very unfair, what I’ve done,” Carey says. “The character isn’t really my grandfather. A lot of my grandfather went not only into Illywhacker but also into A Long Way from Home … Whatever he was to my father, however unkind, no one ever said he was a liar, a confidence man. But the effect his life had on me produced this character who does things, who is a liar. So I’m not really writing about my grandfather. I’m writing about the effect my grandfather had on my writing life.”
He pauses before ending his thought with, “This won’t make any sense. It’s just bullshit.”
When Illywhacker was published in 1985, the launch party was held at the Powerhouse Museum in inner-city Ultimo, beneath the Blériot XI, one of the first civil aircraft flown in Australia, described by a newspaper in 1957 as “a cross between a wasp and a box kite”.
The plane arrived in Sydney in July 1914 after French pilot Maurice Guillaux flew it from Melbourne carrying the country’s first official airmail and air freight. It was a two-day trip, requiring multiple refuellings and nine and a half hours in the air. Both Guillaux and the Blériot XI arrived at their destination in bad shape; the pilot spent time in hospital before being rushed home to join the French air corps, abandoning the plane on a Sydney wharf, where it sat unclaimed, racking up storage fees.
In the same year, in the early stages of the First World War, Peter Carey’s grandfather RG Carey, then a Ballarat garage owner who had never flown a plane, travelled by train with his friend, a young English pilot named Edwin Prosser, to buy the Blériot XI.
RG Carey, pictured in the 1920s. RG Carey had been hustling since boyhood. Born in Warrnambool in 1874, he was hauling coal and wood by wheelbarrow and selling newspapers in Port Melbourne at age 10. By 20 he was the sole proprietor of a carrying firm in Heath Street. In 1900, he registered the Port Melbourne Livery Stables and filled it with fine horses and carriages for hire. From horses he expanded to taxis and motor cars for hire, and he soon became an early member of the RACV, whose club magazine applauded his prowess behind the wheel. He took part in long-distance car rallies, joined the Australian Natives’ Association and the Ancient Order of Druids, and was later made a life governor of the Royal Freemasons Homes of Victoria for his services to its Citizens’ Lodge. In 1899 he married Edith Gilchrist, and in 1912 the couple and their six children moved to Ballarat, where he built a successful motoring business. Carey recalls that his grandfather once sold a Ford to a Chinese herbalist and threw in his own teenage son (Peter’s father) as chauffeur. (In Illywhacker, Herbert Badgery sells a snake to Chinese herbalist Mr Chin).
It was in Ballarat that RG Carey’s friend Prosser suggested they buy the abandoned plane and Prosser made good on his promise to teach his friend to fly.
According to A Message from the Clouds, a 2004 biography of RG Carey: “In November 1917 the 42-year-old Robert Graham Carey flew his Bleriot monoplane to Point Cook via Bacchus Marsh to undergo his flying test. His two Central Flying School examiners had the power invested in them by the Royal Aero Club of Great Britain to pass student pilots for the Australian Flying Corps and also for civilian operations. The result was a foregone conclusion. RGC flew home the proud possessor of the Australian Aero Club Aviator’s Certificate No. 34 as granted to him on that date, signed by Lieutenant Eric Harrison. This was the first pilot’s certificate issued to a civilian in Australia; furthermore, Carey was the first Australian born pilot to obtain an official commercial flying permit.
“As a legally qualified pilot there was no holding Carey back, he continued to fly all around his base at Ballarat to give country people their first introduction to an aeroplane. He also opened the Ballarat Flying School with Edwin Prosser as its Chief Instructor, a position he took over himself at a later date. The flying school must rate as probably the first of its kind in Victoria. Besides the training of pilots, activities included barnstorming, advertising ventures, aerial photography and the transport of mail, freight and passengers.”
Peter Carey’s Illywhacker. In 2023 Peter Carey wrote to the Powerhouse Museum to see if they had something belonging to his grandfather. “[He] took people up in his plane for joyrides and I’d seen somewhere, and I thought it was at the museum, a little book that he had, where he told them that they agreed to go on an airplane at risk of their life, and he took three pound or three shillings, I can’t remember what it was. So I wrote to the museum … The weird thing is, it turned out I had what I was asking them for. And in the end I gave it to them.”
The little book of waivers is but one artefact from the life of RG Carey on display in Task Eternal, inspired by Ted Chiang’s short story Tower of Babylon and designed by Beijing’s OPEN Architecture. The aerospace exhibition includes more than 850 objects, more than 320 of them provided by Australian and international lenders, and includes a historic Qantas Avro 504K, Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines, the largest Moon rock brought home from the Apollo missions, and a new immersive light work by James Turrell.
It strikes me that there is a thread there, in this covenant, between RG Carey and the thousands – 70,000, according to sources – of people who came on his joyrides, and all the journeys that his grandson would come to take his readers on. It’s also telling that Peter Carey has two great fears, heights and horses – two things that bookended his grandfather’s life.
“I’ll leave that to you,” he says with a smile. “You can make the poetry there. The thing I took from my grandfather was determination and will. It’s simple. He couldn’t fly. I couldn’t write.
Carey with a sketch of the Bleriot XI monoplane. Picture: David Joshua Ford We were both determined that we were going to do that, and so there’s a similarity there.
“Somebody announces they’re going to be a writer and is serious about it, and really hasn’t read an enormous amount,” he says, reflecting on his early years as a fledgling novelist. “Has just read a couple of things that astonished him, that they didn’t think were possible. Like a William Faulkner, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, and then they think, ‘Well, I’m going to do that.’ It’s like you’re walking out into this field that’s been occupied by Virginia Woolf. It’s not being fearless. It’s stupidity, I think, is really what it requires.”
Maybe a bit of hubris as well, I venture.
“They’re tied together,” he says.
I suggest that what he calls his stupidity when he first began writing is no longer at the same level. He agrees.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s increased.”
The self-deprecation and humour is, of course, charming. Carey has never been one to use writing as a way to better understand himself. “Myself?” he almost spits the word. “I’m not interested in myself. My books almost always start with an idea. Here’s a contented bourgeois character who has a heart attack and recovers and wakes up and thinks he’s in hell, and he was sort of right.
“My books don’t start with me. They don’t start with my life. They start with something else, and then I try to imagine those people. I wanted to make something beautiful that had never existed in the world before. I’ve said it probably 50 times in my life. But it remains true.”
He has, in the past, said that the unexamined life is the one worth living; however, he is also willing to reflect and is not immune to sincerity, at all. It has been just over a year since Carey announced that A Long Way from Home, published nine years ago, would be his last novel. A memoir is on the way, but no more fiction.
“When I finished A Long Way from Home, I think around 2017-18, I didn’t think I was finished at all. I had ideas, and I said as much. But what I found happening over the ensuing years, maybe the next four years, was that I’d have an idea, I’d write a hundred pages, and I’d realise that I knew how to do it, but it wasn’t something I felt. Just knowing how to do it isn’t enough. That happened three times. Each time I’d get past a hundred pages and realise I was just making a book. And I didn’t want to do that. It was depressing.”
How does he feel, then, now that he’s not writing fiction? He has always been, by his own admission, an intensely political writer. What is it like living in New York, watching the current political climate unfold?
‘(Writing) was really, literally, a reason for my life. That’s what I felt.’ Picture: David Joshua Ford “The current climate is terrifying,” he says, the look in his eye suddenly grave. “Do you remember the old story? I think it was [zoologist and animal behaviour expert] Konrad Lorenz, who, after all, was a populariser. We dismiss people who are called popularisers, and maybe he was not correct about this, but he quoted a scientist’s work talking about minnows and how they swarm and how they proceed by group indecision. But if you remove the part of a minnow’s forebrain that is associated with fear, that minnow becomes the dictator of the group, and everyone follows it. That minnow has no hesitation about going straight ahead.”
He pauses.
“We are in the age of the minnow.”
A lobotomised minnow, I say.
It’s at this point in our second Zoom interview that Carey lets me know that while we’ve been speaking for over an hour, he had only granted me 30 minutes. I apologise, and tell him, truthfully, that I hadn’t been told about the time limit. He leans in close to the screen.
“I don’t believe you,” he says.
Before I let him go, I ask him to reflect, from where he is now, no longer writing fiction, on what drives a writer to write. An artist to make. We all carry an audience in our heads. For Carey, it has always been us, the Australian people he never left 36 years ago. What drove him, I ask, to write all those words for us?
“It will sound slightly ridiculous, and a little embarrassing,” he says.
Good, I say.
“Well, I won’t say it then,” he says with a coy smile, and we both giggle.
He rearranges his face and looks down at his desk, suddenly serious, almost boyish in his confession.
“For me, it was as big as a reason for living. It was really that. Really, really that. I’d grown up within the Christian church. I prayed to God. When I was a teenager I had a notebook, and I kept notes on whether my prayers had been answered or not answered. I was checking up on Him, so to speak. But when that went away, I think I was probably looking for a sort of moral underpinning to my life, a reason to be. It was really, literally, a reason for my life. That’s what I felt.
“There you go. It sounds pretentious. Maybe not pretentious. Just sounds desperate, and a bit sad, really.”
No, I tell him. It doesn’t, at all.
Powerhouse Parramatta opens to the public on November 7
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