When Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin Award — Australia’s equivalent of the Booker — in 2006 for her dazzling epic Carpentaria, she became the first aboriginal writer to do so.
Ironically, the announcement coincided with John Howard’s package of measures designed to exercise tighter controls of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Her win, in her own words, was a “ray of light” for many Aboriginal people. Since then, of course, there have been changes in Australian politics.
The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, on his first day in office, made a formal apology for the “stolen generation” of children forcibly taken from their parents and settled into white society. “His apology was very emotional for the whole nation and for the Aboriginal people,”
Wright says. “It was very strong and he did it well, but it didn’t come with any compensation for what has happened to many thousands of people, and in a sense, it’s business as usual in Australia.” Wright insists this is not enough; there needs to be a platform to redress past wrongs and pave the way for a future.
“We haven’t even begun that conversation yet.” For twenty years, Wright has worked as an activist and a writer. Her previous books include a novel, Plains of Promise, and Grog Wars — a non-fiction study on the effects of alcohol on the Waramungu people of Tannin Creek, who asked her to document their ten year struggle to decrease the amount of alcohol available in their town.
“They had to fight the government, the liquor industry, all sorts of people for ten years, just to bring in some restrictions. All this for a government that turns around and blames us for a problem that wasn’t ours in the first place!” Wright was then asked to chronicle the effect of the mining industry in the Gulf of Carpentaria, which she said she felt inadequate to tackle in a non-fiction form, for fear she would be sued.
So she embarked on what has become her most ambitious project to date — the majestic, operatic, sprawl of work called Carpentaria, which straddles the worlds of myth, modernity, parable, satire and manifesto. The book is set in Waanyi land, Northern Queensland, very close to where Wright grew up, and it has as its core these questions: How do you respond to a world with ancient beliefs? How do you live with integrity in today’s world? Carpentaria begins with an image of the ancestral serpent — “a creature larger than storm clouds,” that comes down from the stars a billion years ago “laden with its own creative enormity.”
This serpent crawls on its belly all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria, buries itself underground and attaches itself to the lives of the river people like skin. The story Wright tells is the story of the Pricklebush river people in a town called Desperance where white and blacks live separately. The hero of her tale is an ageing tribal man called Normal Phantom who talks to spirits and believes that the spirits will provide.
Wright weaves an intricate web with characters that are as much to be admired as they are to be reviled: Angel Day — Queen of the rubbish dump, Mozzie Fishman — religious zealot, Stan Bruiser — mayor and bigot. The book, at 522 pages, and with its utter irreverence for time, space, tense, character and plot, isn’t for the faint-hearted. It took six years to write and was rejected by every major Australian publisher for its style and content. “They found it too big, too difficult,” Wright says, “But that’s precisely what I was trying to do. The situation of the Aboriginal people in Australia isn’t easy, and it’s hugely complex.”
During those six years, Wright faced moments of real despair, so much so that on many occasions she was tempted to press the delete button and free herself from this mammoth project. She wondered if she was wasting her time, if she should have been doing other, more productive things. Luckily, she persisted and eventually found a publisher and a champion in Ivor Indyk at Garamond. In many ways, Carpentaria is a narrative of dispossession.
But it’s not just 200 years of white colonial history that Wright is tackling, because that would assume that the history of the Aboriginal people only began with the arrival of White European settlers 200 years ago. Wright goes further back to a time of original creation, using a language and form that belies any Western precedent. It has as its muse the rich tradition of Aboriginal oral-story telling. Wright’s brilliance lies not just in the way she mines the “elephantine memory” of her ancestors, but in the way she uses the English language to wash over the page like an enormous tidal wave, engulfing and drowning you until all you hear is the sound of “long sacred vowels across the land.”
The writing of this book is, in a sense, the highest act of reclamation for her people. This book is about so many things: racism, segregation, ownership, human relationships. But at the heart of it, it is about survival. “Stories must go on,” Wright urges. “The Aboriginal culture is the oldest culture on earth, and we’ve been able to survive countless millennia to be here now. There’s something really important about the beliefs and the stories and the lore of our culture, which needs to be celebrated along with cultures from other parts of the world.”
Wright believes undeniably in the power of art to help people understand each other, to help create a dialogue about humanity and its place in the future. In trying to find the right voice for her story she immersed herself with writers like Heaney, Marquez, Fuentes — writers who had a similar unbroken connection to the land. But it was the stories of her grandmother that she returned to, the ones she’d heard as a child.
“My grandmother was a magical woman,” Wright says. “She was very much connected with nature and the natural world…It’s just a cultural way of looking and seeing and knowing, and I think I carried it into adulthood. I think we have to really be able to embrace our own culture, and the ideas and beliefs, and hold our conscience strong… It’s the only way. You must own your future. No one else can own your future and tell you what to do.”
— Tishani is a poet, journalist and dancer.
E-mail: t_doshi@gmail.com