Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is taken to work as a housemaid for the Howard family (doubtless an incidental choice of surname), where she is sexually abused by Mr Howard, falls pregnant and is forced to give up her child. Thus the cycle of lost children continues. In time, Garibooli meets and marries a German immigrant named Grigor Brecht, and together they have six children. The threads of these children’s lives – especially that of Candice’s father, Bob – are interwoven to complete the tapestry of Home.

Despite the various life paths that Garibooli’s children tread – two sons head off to World War II, while the younger progeny end up in institutions – all are scarred by being severed from their past and discriminated against for their skin colour, and all are searching in their different ways for home, whether that be a physical, familial or spiritual place. Behrendt portrays the psychological costs of being Aboriginal in racist Australia, especially when separated from one’s heritage, and demonstrates the subsequent erosion of self-esteem that ensues. However, Home also draws attention to the fact that, in addition to its indigenous peoples, Australia is a nation of immigrants, many of whom have also faced racism, including Garibooli’s German husband and the Chinese shopkeeper whose daughter Garibooli befriends. The book also highlights the intimate connections that often exist between blacks and whites, especially given interracial relationships and miscegenation.

The best sections of Home are the early ones, which deal with Garibooli’s life before marriage. These mix third-person narrative with Dreaming stories and Garibooli’s lyrical interior monologues about her longing for home and family. However, the novel is not without its flaws. Behrendt has cast her net too wide, both in terms of characters and content. The novel overflows with characters, and it is hard to care about or believe in them all. For example, of Elizabeth’s seven children, two end up with doctorates, one from Oxford University for a study of Attic vases. For all I know, these accounts may be rooted in reality, but they don’t all ring true. As Behrendt is well aware, truth can be stranger than fiction: in a recent interview, she described how, when her father traced one of his siblings, he discovered that Uncle Peter had undergone a sex change and was now Aunt Lydia. But fiction has its own aesthetic requirements, unrelated to actuality, and produces its own register of truth, which is the key to its power. On this basis, some parts of this novel fail as fiction.

In addition, Home suffers from informational overload. It contains details of Karl Marx’s life, the Communist Party in Australia, Charles Darwin’s theories, Irish folklore, Leonardo da Vinci’s work; and this is in addition to material on Aboriginal massacres, indigenous soldiers’ contribution to World War I, the work of historians Henry Reynolds and Peter Read, and Aboriginal leaders such as Fred Maynard and William Ferguson. When imparting information about real events and personages, the narrative can adopt a didactic tone, again undermining Home’s status as fiction.

Essentially, Home needed more editorial work – some trimming of characters and digressions – before publication. And its proofing leaves much to be desired. Despite these shortcomings, Home is an important and moving story, with some striking imagery and evocative language; it’s just not a great novel. No one can question the significance of its message about the ongoing legacies of the stolen generations. Moreover, in an election year when Aboriginal issues seem to have fallen off the radar and the key Aboriginal body, ATSIC, has been summarily dissolved, Behrendt’s reminder that many Aboriginal people still do not feel at home in contemporary Australia could not be more timely.