There are months and moments which distil any debate. In Northern Australia, the month was June 2007; the moment was the announcement on the evening of 21 June that the widely-admired Indigenous Australian activist and novelist Alexis Wright had won the nation’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, for her novel Carpentaria. The news produced unbounded excitement in the literary world because of the way in which Wright had been able to totally recast the mould of narratives in—and about—Northern Australia.
Yet, in a bizarre stroke, within twenty-four hours of the Miles Franklin announcement, the Australian Federal Government had released its own ‘story of Northern Australia’: one of emergency intervention into the same region on the stated grounds of pervasive child abuse in Indigenous communities. The measures involved serious restrictions upon personal freedoms; direct military overlordship of numerous small communities; the abrogation of specific rights to self-determination and to movement; enforced schooling; strict controls upon the sale and use of alcohol; and generally-curtailed human rights.
The paper explores the significance of these two events—one allegedly literary and the other purportedly political. Both are situated spatially in Northern Australia and are, seemingly, worlds apart in origin and orientation. For example, while Wright moulds a new, free and burgeoning linguistic universe, the federal language of ‘emergency response’ seriously threatens the possibilities for productive resolution. Yet, between those two lies a fascinating story of activism, journalism, creativity and orality in which the ‘hard dreams’ of Australia’s Northern Territory are being addressed.