Trauma in A Far-Flung Life shatters identity rather than merely altering it. Stedman follows people who must build new selves out of broken memories, changed abilities, and persistent grief. Matt MacBride’s brain injury, Pete Peachey’s war memories, and Lorna MacBride’s loss all show how survival depends on shaping a life from what remains rather than trying to return to what existed before.

Matt’s injury fractures his sense of self and forces him to reconstruct his identity. The crash wipes out his memory and leaves him volatile and cut off from his own past. He becomes a different person who sometimes lashes out and often feels disoriented. As he regains stability, he tells Miles Beaumont that he feels “as if I’m not really a person—I’m just a story, that someone else has to tell me” (114). The bright, ambitious boy he once was does not return. Instead, he builds a quieter, burdened identity shaped by the memories of others, as well as the responsibility and the secret he carries. From his brokenness, Matt learns to rebuild himself. After falling in love with Bonnie, he sits with her at Wallaby Ridge, “in this place, where Matt had howled and sobbed and cursed the world [...] he put a hand to the nape of her neck and leaned down to kiss her” (280). Through his anguish and grief, he has pieced himself back together enough to be able to experience love and happiness. Although he eventually calls off his engagement with Bonnie, his relationship with her helps him reconstruct his capacity for joy. When he eventually leaves Meredith Downs decades later, the move marks the final stage of this reconstruction, for he frees himself physically from the site of his trauma.

Pete Peachey, the roo shooter, shows another kind of rebuilding. His time as a prisoner of war leaves him with painful memories he cannot discuss. His ritual of cross-dressing becomes a private ceremony that gives him a measure of calm and comfort. In this feminine persona, he finds a space where he can step away from the violence that haunts him. He notes that “[h]e performs the ritual now by way of offering: to those who didn’t make it; to the self that survived, and the self that died in the camp” (326). Pete’s reflections indicate that his experience in the POW camp was traumatic and caused a part of his identity to perish. By dressing in soft, soothing clothes, he can acknowledge how he survived and also give himself the grace to be able to make a new life for himself. When a group of drunken men expose this hidden part of his life, they destroy the refuge he created and leave him unable to stay at Meredith Downs. His departure shows how tenuous such rebuilt identities can be.

Lorna MacBride’s trauma comes through emotional shock rather than physical injury, yet it breaks her sense of self just as completely. The sudden deaths of her husband and eldest son turn her from a confident station wife into someone her friends barely recognize. Her identity had rested on her role within her family, and she must build a different version of herself around the work of keeping the MacBride property running. Over the years, she becomes the station’s steady matriarch, defined by quiet resolve and the grief she carries. The narrator captures Lorna’s transformation at the end of the narrative: “Things change slowly. You get used to the shape your life has taken, even though you never meant it to” (407). Lorna becomes “used” to her role as Andy’s grandmother despite her initial resistance to the idea; additionally, she embraces a softer, more compassionate approach with Matt as he grows older, a persona she lacked with Rose when she was alive. Lorna, Matt, and Pete reveal how trauma destroys old identities and how the hard, ongoing work of reassembling a life shows its own kind of endurance.