A Literary Feature by Frances Devlin-Glass
I recently took the plunge and taught for the first time a novel I’ve been reading and writing about since it first came out in 2006 (one of the earliest essays was for Táin, predecessor to Tinteán in 2006, the year of publication of Carpentaria). Since first writing on it, I’ve often found it necessary to refine my reading of this demanding novel. Carpentaria is an ambitious epic with a huge canvas, in a variety of styles and literary genres. It was a risk to teach it because I’m all too aware that I don’t fully grasp all Alexis Wright has to share with me: I have many questions, some of them resolved in iterative readings of this dense and rich text, but new ones are inevitably generated by these readings as well. That is what it is to be immersed in a culture not one’s own, and very much how I feel about Irish culture, which is closer to my Irish-Australian culture.
In preparing the course, I read (courtesy of a student) an Australian critic (Natasha Frost citing another, Jane Gleeson-White, author of Australian Classics), as singling out Alexis Wright as Australia’s most impressive contemporary writer, in The New York Times no less. It’s a big claim and one with which I agree. Furthermore, Marilyne Brun (Université de Lorraine) and Estelle Castro-Koshy (James Cook University, Townsville) report (see Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 44.2, 2022) how the French have made Carpentaria essential reading in a national Masters programme (the Agrégation competitive exam), which listed only one other Australian novel, Voss, by Patrick White more than 45 years ago. What they value is Carpentaria’s feisty affirmation of Indigenous cultures and epistemology, and its post-colonising politics. Her Awards list on AustLit (accessed 5 March 2024) with its Australian Literary Society gold medal, Stella and Miles Franklin wins and a Lifetime Achievement award from the Australia Council, as well as short and long-listings, is astonishing (46 currently). Could a Nobel laureateship be in sight? It’s possible she’s more enthusiastically read overseas than at home. She certainly fits the Nobel profile for a very promising candidate.
What so energises me about this novel? Alexis Wright invites her readers to enter a world which is sometimes foreign, but often simply magical. For instance, we enter into the enchantment of a traditional man re-discovering his totem, the Groper, when he rises to his responsibility to consign his murdered friend’s body to the depths of groper undersea palaces. It’s a sheerly joyful moment to return his sea-faring friend to the safe custody of his kin, and it sets him free to rescue and educate his grandson. The episode is a privileged glimpse into the affective life of a First Nations person’s (or rather, community’s, since individualism is at a discount in this world) ontology (ways of being Waanyi/Gangalidda/Garawa), epistemology (ways of knowing the world) and cosmology (understanding of how the physical environment — from under the sea, to its landscapes and skyscapes —comes to be intensely invested with meaning). I’ve read a lot of Dreaming narratives in plain prose, and been disappointed by their lack of affect. I’ve seen them animated in exciting ways which help me to understand the phenomenon of creatures in nature (e.g., a dingo or a massive groper) and how they can under certain conditions transform into Dreaming ancestors and more than themselves. See also a larger collection of digital animations. It’s a worldview that I’m more than willing to experience at an emotional level, by proxy, in reading this extraordinary novel. I understand too that my grasp as an urban white woman is of necessity partial.
Alexis Wright helps me appreciate how much more significant a Dreaming narrative would seem to someone whose heart-country it intimately animates. In writing about how she acquired her own culture’s cosmology as a town-living child, exiled and remote from Waanyi homeland in the small town of Cloncurry, from stories told to her by her grandmother of her beloved Country, Lawn Hill (Bujimala, named for the Rainbow Serpent), an idyllic paradisal locale on the Gregory River.
For readers of Tinteán, and certainly for me, it may be significant that Wright often articulates her debts to her Irish heritage. Her father, who died when she was 6, was Irish and, feeling an affinity with Irish writers, she ponders what she might owe to him. More significantly, she makes explicit her debt to the Irish tradition – using Heaney as the epigraph to her novel, and it’s a supremely fitting prologue to her own novel:
The first words got polluted
Flowing with the dirt
Of blurbs and the front pages.
My only drink is meaning from the deep brain,
What the birds and the grass and the stones drink.
Let everything flow
Up to the four elements,
Up to the water and earth and fire and air (Seamus Heaney, ‘The First Words’).
And it’s not just Heaney she invokes. In an intriguing essay, ‘On Writing Carpentaria’ written for Heat in 2007, she makes clear her indebtedness to James Joyce and to Brian Friel and the Field Day project in Northern Ireland, and to decolonising critics like Seamus Deane. She notes (footnote 9) the important work done by Field Day in requiring readers to ‘unlearn the Ireland that they know, and to receive new ways of thinking about it in analysing the present crisis of established opinions, myths and stereoyptes that had become both a symptom and cause of the current situation’ (p.95). The parallel between Ireland’s adherence to outdated mythologies and non-Indigenous Australia’s stubbornly fixed and demeaning views of First Nations people is implied. Her orientation is pluralist and reconciliatory in the deepest sense. She knows that the white refugee Elias can learn and internalise Norm’s culture, and that Mozzie’s mechanised Dreaming journeys in clapped-out bush-mechanic-serviced flotillas of ancient cars can meet ritual needs, including those of palliative care. She insists that modernity need not obliterate ancient knowledge. But I also speculate that her sense of the comic and in particular her use of hyperbole do indeed owe something to the Irish tradition.
My seventh reading of Carpentaria was even more exciting than my first, as it created new layers of understanding to add to old – in my experience, a test of great writing and one rarely afforded this addicted reader who loves to revisit complex novels (Ulysses and Such is Life set high bars, and Carpentaria meets that test of epic quality). Carpentaria was a long time in the composition, and it rewards the reader who will sit patiently with it. Almost twenty years later, I’m still a novice reader of this novel, one that like Ulysses teaches you how to read it. It yields its pleasures slowly.
What first impressed me about it was Carpentaria’s creation of a First Nations mythopoetics. It creates in fictional ways what it is to live inside Indigenous cosmology and fills in what for me was lacking in plain prose dreaming narratives. She recreates the vitality of multiple vernacular voices in different registers all debating the significance of natural events, and shows the three factions in town doing Indigeneity in different but complementary ways. I’ve worked in Borroloola with Yanyuwa and Garawa elders (from adjacent Countries) on the stories they shared with Alexis Wright’s Waanyi and Gangalidda peoples of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and this education in the first instance helped to make what she was doing as a writer more legible for me because I had a handle on some key Dreaming tropes and some exposure to passionate Yanyuwa elders who were anxious to have their culture understood and willing to teach it.
As well as its cosmological underpinnings, what fires up this novel is how she pushes back against colonial abuses of many kinds. These are unhappily all too familiar to whitefellas who care about Indigenous disadvantage: the relegation of Indigenous people to the Pricklebush margins and to poverty (not necessarily experienced as such by those who live and profit from the dump); the divide-and-conquer politics of the colonial invaders and the rise of factions within the Indigenous community; the abuse of river and environs by global conglomerates with no interest at all in protecting fragile and ecologically sensitive environments; deaths in custody; the imposition of religious and knowledge systems in full disregard for what they attempt to displace.
And yet this is not a novel that counsels despair. Far from it: because the point of view is almost always that of the resisting colonised, the tone is often deeply satirical of the aptly named Desperance and its Uptown denizens who don’t understand that a mighty river like the Gregory (or indeed any Gulf of Carpentaria river) can spurn western ambition and relocate a river a kilometre from its ‘port’ and obliterate a town in a single cyclonic event. Furthermore, Desperanians have no idea of the First Nations counter-insurgent ally, the Rainbow Serpent, who can manifest in many guises and in its discontent with the affairs of men will casually blow up a mine (the model is Century Zinc) proudly described to its shareholders as ‘among the largest of its kind in the world’. All of the attributes of the Rainbow Serpent, some of them contradictory in nature, have unique lexical handles in the languages of the Gulf. In the tropical savannah coasts of the Gulf, the Rainbow is associated not just with rivers and ponds, but more significantly with the variety of forms cyclonic activity in that territory takes. Major climate events can converge there from the north west and the east, wreaking unimaginable damage on the puny built environment.
The novel brilliantly and in a spirit of high comedy, enacts the drama of the cyclone season. It demonstrates the collaboration between the Rainbow and Indigenous guerrilla actors who are compelled to avenge the needless deaths in custody of three boys. Because they are familiar with the Rainbow in its many moods, its dry and drenching forms, its eye and its violent winds, one is dragged into this inclusive community by a vernacular narrator to celebrate the teamsmanship between a willi-willi (a dry avatar of the Rainbow) and its seemingly capricious (but in fact purposeful) ignition of a pizza box capable of exploding a massive mine infrastructure. It embraces its non-Indigenous and Indigenous readers in a desired wish-fulfilment outcome that answers a lot of contemporary fears of out-of-control ecological destruction of land and rivers and coastal systems by interests remote from the realities on the ground.
To re-read Carpentaria was to fall in love again with this novel’s demonstration of how a small, poverty-stricken community can, in extremis and despite all its schisms, pull together to save an ecosystem from being despoliated and destroyed by global capital. In its searing critique of Uptown (the township that has pushed the original holders of this land to its margins in the Pricklebush), Alexis Wright points to Indigenous knowledge as in fact a form of deeply knowledgeable science (she calls it ‘scientify’) which is ignored at the White establishment’s peril (the town in flattened in a single cyclone). It also enables some access to the Indigenous sense of humans not being separate or above the earth, but nested within it, interrelated with everything human, animal and more than human in it. Country is what shapes identity and cultural practices.
May I suggest that Wright is a writerly writer that Australia needs to be paying attention to and in whom Irish Australians can take huge pride. You will certainly find an affinity with her high comedy and her subversive critique of Western power. It’s time to broach her latest, Praiseworthy.
Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances is one of the team of Tinteán editors, and has taught Literary Studies at Deakin University and currently in other forums.
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