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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
In these extracts from Provenance, Rafaela discovers she is pregnant while staying on Bob and Clarissa Carmichael's farm, and attempts violently to end the pregnancy. In the second extract, Chella and Rafaela have been separated by misunderstandings, and Rafi must wait for the Carmichael family's return to the farm before going on to Melbourne alone. These events are a turning point in the novel: Rafi's dream of leaving home to become an artist has, in a few short weeks, been horribly complicated.
Affiliation Notes
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Associated with the AustLit subset Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia' as the work contains an Indian character.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
Provenance
North Sydney
:
Vintage Australia
,
2007
Z1363980
2007
single work
novel
'Growing up in an Italian family in 1950s Queensland, Rafaela longs to move to Melbourne and start her own life. When she finally seizes her chance, floodwaters halt her train's progress south, and a beautiful young Sikh scientist named Chanchal captures her heart. While both their families search for their wayward children, Rafi and Chanchal forge ahead with their life together, living briefly in isolation and bliss on a farm, unaware that their story is travelling. Set against the stifling heat of the Queensland canefields, the lush farmland of northern New South Wales and the bustle of Melbourne in the early 1960s, Chanchal's and Rafi's stories unfold and intersect over the following years, as their chance encounter becomes a story of two countries on the cusp of modernity. Provenance is an accomplished and original novel that explores colour and cultural difference at a moment in India and Australia's post-Independence and post-war history when the West was keen, as one character puts it, to get on with the sexy part of the twentieth century.' (Publisher's blurb).
Last amended 14 Mar 2007 13:45:40
