ABSTRACT
‘Hunting Down Home’, the title of this chapter, is taken from a semi-autobiographical novel by a Scots-Canadian writer and sometime colleague, Jean McNeil. It is a novel about journeys – some imagined, some painfully real – in which the quest for one kind of home is often the flight from another. Its narrative crosses worlds: from Kodachrome coloured slides of southern Africa – in which occasionally appear glimpses of a mother never known and always dreamed of – to an inescapable cultural memory of an emigration that was also an exile, one which saw the forced eviction of McNeil’s ancestors from one homeland, and their founding of another: in this case a Nova Scotia, a new Scotland.
