AustLit

Hassall argues that 30 Days in Sydney is consistent both with Carey's 'career-long preoccupation with re-telling aspects of Australia's story' and 'with his practice of doing so via distortions which defamiliarize his subjects, thereby enabling his readers to see them free of those other distortions naturalized by habit and convention. What appears to begin as factual celebrity travel writing ... turns into a collection of stories, of fictions, of beuatiful lies which capture more searchingly than a merely factual travelogue the look, the feel, the history and the spirit of Sydney, that metonym for Australia' (331-332)