Peter Carey (novelist) educated at Monash University
Early life and career: 1943–1970
Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, in 1943. His parents ran a General Motors dealership, Carey Motors. He attended Bacchus Marsh State School from 1948 to 1953, then boarded at Geelong Grammar School between 1954 and 1960. In 1961, Carey enrolled in a science degree at the new Monash University in Melbourne, majoring in chemistry and zoology, but cut his studies short because of a car accident and a lack of interest. It was at university that he met his first wife, Leigh Weetman, who was studying German and philosophy, and who also dropped out.In 1962, he began to work in advertising. He was employed by various Melbourne agencies between 1962 and 1967, including on campaigns for Volkswagen and Lindeman's Wine. His advertising work brought him into contact with older writers who introduced him to recent European and American fiction: "I didn't really start getting an education until I worked in advertising with people like Barry Oakley and Morris Lurie—and Bruce Petty had an office next door."During this time, he read widely, particularly the works of Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel García Márquez, and began writing on his own, receiving his first rejection slip in 1964, the same year he married Weetman. Over the next few years he wrote five novels—Contacts (1964–1965), Starts Here, Ends Here (1965–1967), The Futility Machine (1966–1967), Wog (1969), and Adventures on Board the Marie [sic] Celeste (1971). None of them were published. Sun Books accepted The Futility Machine but did not proceed with publication, and Adventures on Board the Marie Celeste was accepted by Outback Press before being withdrawn by Carey himself. These and other unpublished manuscripts from the period—including twenty-one short stories—are now held by the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland.Carey's only publications during the 1960s were "Contacts" (a short extract from the unpublished novel of the same name, in Under Twenty-Five: An Anthology, 1966) and "She Wakes" (a short story, in Australian Letters, 1967). Towards the end of the decade, Carey and Weetman abandoned Australia with "a certain degree of self-hatred", travelling through Europe and Iran before settling in London in 1968, where Carey continued to write highly regarded advertising copy and unpublished fiction.
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