Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, written in response to the Magwitch episode in Great Expectations, has been lauded as a milestone of postcolonial novel rewriting. This paper explores the construction of Maggs’ s identity and its political implications within familial genealogies, specifically mother-son, father-son and husband-wife relationships. The novel strategically relocates the question of Australian national identity within the private domestic space and therefore renders the his-story of Maggs’ s root-seeking quest into a metaphor for Australia’s national History. Rewriting the canonical English work, Carey reconstructs the myth of Australia as a family-like nation. However, the exclusion of Aboriginal people and other social classes from this symbolic birth scene indicates the author’s failure to transcend his white ethnocentrism.