Carrie Tiffany’s new novel Exploded View is the first featured book in Guardian Australia’s new highlights series, The Unmissables. In this exclusive essay, Tiffany meditates on her childhood and the highways and dirt tracks she drove as an adult trying to reconcile her youth with the writer she had become
• Read more about The Unmissables and Exploded View here
My family migrated from the UK to Western Australia in 1972. I was seven when we arrived. A real estate agent collected us from Perth Airport in a white Valiant station wagon with fins. It was a huge car – a car from American television. The real estate agent flipped out a silver handle on the rear door and wound down the window so my brother and I could climb in the back. It was the cleverest and most modern invention I had ever seen. We drove off into the suburbs with the window open and great slabs of hot air pouring in. The Australian road was pale and quiet beneath the tyres. I remember how polite we were to each other inside the car, in front of the real estate agent. The large modern car, the fresh smooth roads, seemed to represent a second chance my family needed. I thought it was possible, back then, that we might do better in this new country.
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