Part mystical, part practical, an absorbing and eventually enthralling view of Australia and Aboriginals from the inside out - that is what Alexis Wright has achieved with her second novel, Carpentaria. Any depiction of the indigenous people of Australia would be sadly lacking if it did not point out the injustices of dispossession and prejudice visited on one of the oldest cultures in the world. Wright is aptly armed to tell their tales, as she is a social activist for their cause and a member of the Waanyi, who inhabit the real Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Queensland.
It is perhaps this inside looking out position that causes Wright’s descriptions to differ so much from other literary glimpses of Aboriginals: Sad but sympathetic mentions in Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, the romanticism of Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under, an avoidance of the issue of marginalizing Aboriginals in The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, and the somewhat more realistic views of their lives in Bryce Courtenay’s Jessica.
Wright’s rambling, lengthy, sometimes stream-of-consciousness sentences fit her dreamy characters for whom time is as slippery as the ancestral snake that permeates and created their world, while they struggle to change a future that seems predestined. The style of writing is appropriate for someone who reveres a culture of that uses oral traditions (songs, chants, storytelling) to transmit information. Obviously, her writing style influences others, but I digress.
In the fictional town of Desperance, a name that connotes the inhabitants’ despair and desperation, the natural world both at sea and inland is as much a part of the Aboriginals’ lives as their own bodies: the wind, their breaths, the tidal flux of waters flowing like the blood in their veins, the land, their bones and bread. The spirits of the Ancients imbue every element of nature, and people think the spirits of the dead rise and inhabit places, influencing the lives of the living.
At opposite ends of the town live feuding mobs of native peoples, the Westsiders represented by Norm Phantom, a man of the waters. Norm’s nemeses on the Eastside are Joseph Midnight and his family, continuing a land dispute so old that no one can quite recall the gist of it.
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