Sara’s Walkabout (2020) by Inez van Loon is a Dutch-language historical fiction novel for young adults. It tells the story of Sara, a thirteen year old Dutch girl who emigrates from the Netherlands to Australia by sea with her parents and younger brother in 1959. Unlike her younger brother, who views the upcoming emigration with excitement, Sara doesn’t want to leave the Netherlands. She is happy at her school where she has good friends, and is head over heels in love with her first boyfriend. Moving to Australia means leaving behind her whole life as she knows it.
The story follows Sara as she tries to find a place for herself in late-1950s Australia. Life Down Under turns out not to be quite what the glossy emigration brochures promised and Sara’s parents struggle to keep the family’s heads above water. They have little time to worry about how Sara is fitting in – or not – at her new Australian school. Sara’s Dutch heritage marks her as Other in the classroom and prevents her from making friends; she also finds it hard to connect with the new Australian culture and language.
Eventually, Sara befriends her classmate Otis, whom the white Australian schoolchildren also consider different. Otis is of half-Aboriginal descent and he and his sister, from whom he has been separated, are part of the Stolen Generations. When Otis finds out where his sister has been taken, he decides to find her. Unhappy and fed up with her life in Australia, Sara joins him and together they go walkabout. Through Otis and this journey through outback Australia Sara learns that richness or wealth isn’t tied to material possessions, but to family and love.
About the author
The book was written by Inez van Loon, a Dutch author who has written several historical fiction novels and the Skatewise series. Her books have been longlisted for the Thea Beckmann Prize and translated into several languages. For Sara’s Walkabout Van Loon conducted extensive research into the experiences of Dutch people who emigrated to Australia in the mid-twentieth century. Her book is based on this research and portrays Sara’s world the way a thirteen-year-old girl would have viewed and experienced it in the 1950s-1960s.
Sara’s Walkabout deals with themes of migration, racism and coming of age as a child migrant in mid-twentieth century Australia. The novel provides a rich discussion of identity and family in the context of this Dutch migration to Australia, and brings to life the experiences of child migrants from this not-so-distant past.
