Creating an Aboriginal reality from history, myth and the spiritual realm

Long before Alexis Wright was a major figure in Australian letters, she was taking notes at community meetings in remote outback towns. Assigned by Aboriginal elders, her job was to write down every word by hand.

The work was difficult and it calmed her youthful longing for the change that seemed to come all too slowly.

“It was good training in a way,” she said in a recent interview at a public library close to the University of Melbourne, where she served until 2022 as Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature. “They taught you to listen, and they taught you patience.”

Wright, 73, is perhaps the most important Aboriginal Australian – or simply Australian – writer living today. She is the author of epic, polyphonic novels that reveal the patience, perseverance and careful observation she learned during those long hours of note-taking, books that stretch over hundreds of pages, in which voice after voice cries out to be heard in a dynamic swirl. of the fantastic and the gloomy.

“Praiseworthy,” her fourth and latest novel, will be released in the United States by New Directions on February 6, along with a reissue of “Carpentaria,” her most famous work.

“She stands above anyone else in Australian literature,” says Jane Gleeson-White, an Australian writer and critic. “What she does has yet to be fully understood.”

Set in Wright's ancestral homeland – she is a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the north coast of Australia – 'Praiseworthy' is her longest and most complex novel to date. Alternately a love story, a hero's quest and a loud cry for Aboriginal sovereignty, the story unfolds under a sinister haze in Australia's Northern Territory.

The novel tells the story of Cause Man Steel, an Aboriginal visionary who dreams of harnessing five million wild donkeys to create a transportation conglomerate for a post-fossil fuel world. It's a venture he hopes will both save the planet and make him the first Aboriginal billionaire.

Literary critics praised the novel's sense of urgency and its extensive network of literary inspirations. Some struggled with the challenging shifts in perspective or the use of excesses and repetitions to highlight the brutality of life without the right to self-determination. Others applauded the scale of his ambition.

“As in all of Wright's work,” says critic Declan Fry wrote in The Guardian“'Praiseworthy' features cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances: in short, a realist's view on colonization.”

Wright has been a long-time land rights activist and advocate for Aboriginal culture and sovereignty. The question of how her people, already marginalized by the effects of colonialism and ravaged by successive hostile governments, will weather climate change is on her mind, she said.

“I see people working very hard every day to make a difference,” she said. “And the difference doesn't come.”

Six months ago, Australia held a nationwide referendum on whether to establish a 'Voice' – a constitutionally enshrined body that would advise the Australian government on issues relating to Aboriginal affairs.

The referendum was intended as a first step towards correcting major historical mistakes. But the campaign became mired in misinformation and, in some cases, racism, with 60 percent of Australians voting against the proposal.

Wright was neither surprised by the outcome of the vote nor impressed by the initial proposal, which she said was limited in scope. “The bare minimum was asked for,” she said. “Minimal ideas about identifying Aboriginal people and a voice that was really, really – well, I'm sure it would have done its best.”

Wright began writing 'Praiseworthy' thinking about what the future might look like for Aboriginal people. “The government was continually making cuts and not really working towards Aboriginal self-determination in a strong or meaningful way,” she said. “And then came the Intervention. And that was just terrible.”

In 2007, following reports of sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Australian news media, the Australian government imposed the Northern Territory Emergency Response, a set of reformist policies that became known as the Intervention. The measures include banning or restricting the sale of alcohol or pornography, demanding land and social benefits, and taking back protections for customary law and cultural practices.

The law scared and bewildered many of those affected, and that is true there is broad agreement has flouted human rights and failed in its objectives. It was designed as a five-year contingency plan and continues to inform policy, says Michael R. Griffiths, professor of English at the University of Wollongong.

The intervention and its after-effects loom large in 'Praiseworthy'. In a devastating episode, Tommyhawk, the main character's 8-year-old son, is drawn into a world of news media reports that convince him that the adults around him are pedophiles planning to hunt him.

“I just thought, 'Aboriginal children need to hear this, their communities, their families, demonized,'” Wright said. “What effect can that have on a child?”

Reading “Praiseworthy” as an Aboriginal person, said Mykaela Saunders, a writer and academic from the Koori nation, was a relief. “These stories haven't really been told in the media or in literature,” she said. 'Here, in this book, you cannot look away. She says: this is what this does to our people. This is what it does to our psyche, and to our children.”

Wright's work is inspired by the oral tradition of her people, as well as global writers such as James Joyce, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes's approach to temporality—where “all times are important,” she said, and “no time is ever resolved”—is a special touchstone.

“She brings 60,000 years of narrative songs and stories into the 21st century, with the 21st century fully present and all time present in one place,” said Gleeson-White, the critic.

Wright's work is sometimes described as 'magical realism'. But she instead sees it as “hyperreal,” where the story intertwines with history, myth, and a spiritual, extra-temporal reality, to make the real “more real,” as she puts it.

“The Aboriginal world is a world that has existed since time immemorial,” she said. “It is a world that comes from an old world, and the old is here, in the here and now.”

Although the Waanyi nation is connected to the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Wright was born in 1950 about 350 kilometers south, in the scorching rural town of Cloncurry, Queensland. Her father was white and died when she was five. She was raised by her Aboriginal mother and grandmother.

From the age of three, Wright jumped the fence to find her grandmother, Dolly Ah Kup, an Aboriginal woman of Chinese descent, and listened to her stories of Carpentaria, the homeland she longed for and was forced to leave.

That place with date trees, water lilies and turtles swimming in crystal clear water dominated Wright's childhood imagination. She didn't visit until she was an adult, and she doesn't live there now, but her novels – she is also a writer of non-fiction works – are set only in this region. In Aboriginal tradition she calls it 'Land', and it plays as powerful a role as any human character, however inextricably linked to the people and their lives.

“It's a big part of my consciousness and my thinking,” she said of Carpentaria. “Maybe it's writing there because you can't be there. You live in that world in your mind.”

Living in Cloncurry, about 500 miles from the nearest major city, “had its difficulties,” she said. “It wasn't a town where Aboriginal people were treated terribly well – it was very much a 'them and us' kind of thing.”

She left the city at the age of 17 – 'I knew there was nothing for me' – and traveled through Australia and New Zealand, where she worked as an activist, presenter, consultant, editor, teacher and researcher. She spent many years in Alice Springs, central Australia, where she met her husband, before moving to Melbourne in 2005, where she still lives.

'Carpentaria', her second novel, was rejected by most major publishers and shunned by booksellers, who feared that such a long and literary Aboriginal novel would find little traction with Australian audiences. Still, it was a sleeper hit and won the 2007 Miles Franklin Award, Australia's highest literary prize.

'The Swan Book' followed in 2013. It was one of the first Australian novels about climate change, released at a time when the country's then Prime Minister Tony Abbott was calling a link between bushfires and climate change “complete nonsense”.

Ten years on, Australian readers are slightly more open to writing about Aboriginal experiences or climate change – although not necessarily outside urban centres, says Jeanine Leane, a writer, lecturer and academic from the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales. “In rural, rural Australia, no one has ever heard of Alexis Wright,” she said.

Australian readers may have been slow to embrace Wright's work. But she is winning fans and admirers elsewhere in the world, now that 'Carpentaria' is being published in five languages.

The long road the novel has to take to find its audience does not bother Wright.

“Some of these things take time,” she said. 'And I try to write, so that I can keep my books with me for a long time.'