No Road: Out of Print 01/1999

by Stephen Muecke

On a trip north Gloria Brennan, Aboriginal activist, meets a bloke who tries to entice her to visit his community. But she wants to know if the road out there is any good.
He's puzzled.
'Road? No road,' he says '... no road ... bitumen aaall the way.'
No Road is a seductive mix of storytelling and ideas, and a personal account of travels in outback Australia, Europe, Africa ... and suburban Newtown. Irony and humour invert the usual expectations of a travel book; nobody seems to be going anywhere.

251 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Stephen Muecke is Jury Chair of English language and literature in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a writer specialising in cross-generic work, cultural theory and Indigenous studies. His publications include The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). He has recently translated two books, Another Science is Possible (John Wiley) by Isabelle Stengers, and Doctors and Healers (Wiley) by Isabelle Stengers and Tobie Nathan, both published in 2018.

Reviews

[Teeya · Rating 3 out of 5]

great for my thesis, but I feel like the reader of this needs a lot of expected knowledge to understand every piece of theory in here (myself included!!!!!!!) which isn’t a bad thing, just something to consider

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

No Road is written as titled, without an easy linearity connecting destinations. It drifts past an impressive scenery of theory and encounter, searching for a way out of whiteness, toward a ‘real’ engagement with Aboriginality and a new conception of Australia. The text was very difficult at times, and loaded with theory that assumed a lot of prereqs. But the feeling underneath, of wanting to keep moving, barefoot and footloose, to explore without colonizing, was deeply felt and compelling.