Alexis Wright took out the 2007 Miles Franklin Award for her sprawling epic novel, Carpentaria. Wright’s other work has included a non-fiction exposé of the effects of alcohol on central Australian Aboriginal communities and a novel, The Plains of Promise. Both novels deal with the various ways in which indigenous liberations might be effected when they are complicated by histories of trauma, migration and hybridisation, by the clash between ‘bush’ and urban Blacks, old people and the young, male and female.
Wright’s fiction is topical in this moment of pre-election dramatics, when a Prime Minister who has preached self-improvement and national values as though we all share the same middle-class white desires suddenly sends troops into remote Aboriginal communities to save battered women and abused children, invoking crisis to put Aboriginal lands back into Government control. Wright’s work deals with seventies and eighties radical activism, traumatic memories of ‘the Stolen Generation’, witnessing to the imperfections of Black life while protesting the abuses that have produced them, the clash between communities and mining companies, millenarian nomadry and the dreaming power of the land. Her work is informed by global ideas (writers such as Salman Rushdie, Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant), but situates itself in specific settings in northern Australia.
The paper will consider Wright’s particular ‘take’ on the ethics and aesthetics of liberation activism, negotiating secret and open histories, dreaming and political action, ‘magic realism’ and ‘realism’ as means of advancing indigenous claims to respect and freedom.