1In her seminal paper “The Upside-Down Hut,” published in 1961, Australian poet Judith Wright argued that settler-Australians were living in a hut that was “upside-down” considering that they could not connect with the natural environment. J. Wright insisted on the idea that settler-Australia was still enmeshed in the colonial past and had a colonial perception about landscape and the space of the nation:
Australia is still, for us, not a country but a state – or states – of minds. We do not yet speak from within her, but from the outside: from the state of mind that describes, rather than expresses, its surroundings, or from the state of mind that imposes itself upon, rather than lives through, landscape and event […]. We are caught in the old nineteenth-century split of consciousness, the stunned shock of those who cross the seas and find themselves, as the Australian ballad puts it, in a “hut that’s upside down.” (Wright 1961, 30)
Judith Wright’s claim, which illustrates her ecological commitment and desire to connect with Indigenous Australia – a connection which was even more significant through her relationship with Indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal – highlights how realities were forged through the colonial perceptions inherited from Europe and how issues of belonging stemmed from a distorted vision of Australia, more specifically its specific environment. In this article, I will take up Judith Wright’s claim and definition of Australia as a “hut that’s upside-down” to contend that Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, written forty-five years later, deconstructs the components of the nation and the upside-down hut. I will thus interrogate the ways in which the novel tends to reconfigure the upside-down hut in order to advocate a discourse that engages Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I will examine such a discourse to argue that the meaning that operates in the landscape – the traces of natural and historical processes actually manifested in the landscape – is inseparably linked to the spiritual and affective meaning of the landscape, the mindscape as it were.
2In the opening pages of the novel, the extradiegetic narrator refers to the colonial history of the town and to the ways in which its course was diverted by the river that “spurns human endeavour in one dramatic gesture, jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour” (Wright 2009, 3). The narrator’s statements attest to the vitality of the river and its precedence over human beings, underscoring the idea that human endeavour depends on the movements of water, something that a character like Norm Phantom, whose ancestors are spiritually attached to the sea, experiences. Natural elements – earth, sea, water – are significant elements of the Indigenous cosmogony and provide a discourse exposing the reality of twenty-first century Desperance, which as Wright suggested is “very much like Australia […], a desperate place that needs to grow better understanding between one another” (quoted in Joseph 2009, 75).
3The issue of place and locality, which several scholars have developed in critical articles on the novel and on Wright’s writing, unravels through the articulation of various spaces. Thus, the allegorical function of Desperance relies on the interplay between antinomian spaces, between the physical and the spiritual, the town and the natural environment, the local and the national, Indigenous country and settler-country. Desperance, beyond its association to the historical and colonial figure of Captain Matthew Flinders who mapped Australia (the reference to Flinders and place also surfaces in That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott, published in 2010), is animated by daily fights, battles, oppression, racism, and suffering. The topographic division of the town not only signifies cultural and social divides but also highlights the many ways in which the Indigenous characters are in place, how they position themselves in the Pricklebush and also vis-à-vis settler Australia. In fact, while Uptowners position their belonging to place in a timeless time (Wright 2009, 55), the Indigenous characters, whose history and belonging stem from “time immemorial” and from within Indigenous cosmogony, show a propensity at reconfiguring their sense of home in between the space of the Dreaming tracks and of Desperance.
4Angel Day’s determination to set up a home on the edge of the town, next to a rubbish dump, on “the top of the nest of a snake spirit” (Wright 2009, 13), reflects her desire to delineate her own space in a specific and fixed location. Contrary to Norm, who senses the spiritual presence beneath the land and keeps travelling back and forth between the space of the sea and of the Pricklebush, Angel Day is eager to enroot herself in a specific place under a tree and manages to construct “an igloo made of rubbish” (15) which Uptown eventually considers has grown into “an eyesore” (20). The signifying of home as an igloo and an eyesore is ironic and symbolic. It associates the home of an Indigenous Australian to the standard home of a Canadian Inuit while emphasizing the incongruous nature of such a home in an Australian environment; it stands as the signifier of Angel Day herself, as the space of her femininity and subjectivity, and from the perception of Uptowners as the space and people they do not wish to see since they disrupt the image and settler-character of Uptown. Angel Day espouses the notion of ecology in its broadest sense since it derives from the Greek word Oikos, understood as “home, household, place to live” (Collins Dictionary). The way in which the character designs her “spot” entails a cartographic transformation of the Pricklebush and by extension of Uptown. Her attitude embodies the discourse of mapping and a strategy to regain a territory (“‘This is mine’” [13]), and for (re)territorializing a space she deems is hers. The ways in which she recycles objects and occupies a specific location benefiting from the “rubbish dump palace” (17) takes place through “a transformative interpolating process” which illustrates “the ambivalent, fluid, chaotic relationship” (Ashcroft 2001, 50) within the “postcolonial reality” of Desperance – the term “postcolonial” referring here to the idea that Australia is solely conceived and viewed as an extension of Britain and Europe.
5Angel Day’s decision to claim a space she calls home and organize what Norm Phantom calls a “hornet’s nest” (Wright 2009, 13), along with her entrepreneurial management of the rubbish dump (22) places her in between the settler perception of belonging through material ownership – which the Bureaucratic people of the “Aborigines Department” (16) ironically see as the result of an assimilation process – and the Indigenous approach to land management. Through the central positioning of Angel Day’s marginal space, Desperance surfaces as a multi-layered structure, and the town’s spatial and geographic divisions – signified by Angel Day’s palace, the Pricklebush’s marginal places, Uptown (with its safety net) and the Gurffurritt mine – all tend to reflect both an ongoing colonial perception of place and the Other and at the same time seem to re-map location as the space of many territories and Indigenous culture. When some Pricklebush families start moving closer to the rubbish dump, Angel Day fights back against those she sees as intruders:
“Hey! What are you people doing here?” she hollered. “What’s wrong with you people? You people don’t belong here. Who said you got any normal rights to be hanging around here? On other people’s laaand for? Just taking what you want, hey? What about the traditional owner then?” (23–24)
Angel Day’s discourse is clearly ironic but can be interpreted as being double-edged considering that her claim may be part of an Indigenous war between clans – addressing an Indigenous audience – while at the same time addressing a non-Indigenous audience and speaking back to settler history. It is then befitting that such a claim is attributed to Angel Day who constantly shifts from one cultural space to another, from the traditional Indigenous Dreaming to the dream signified by the objects and fairy-tale books she incorporates in her own conception of the Dreaming (18) and home.
6In Carpentaria, the ways in which Angel Day negotiates between her Indigeneity and her world as the Queen of her palace or in which characters such as Norm Phantom or Elias Smith respectively embrace landscape and critically respond to the world of Desperance, rely on an articulation between the homely and unhomely in the Bhabhan sense (1992) and on the confrontation between Indigenous history (“From time immemorial”) and settler history, between the space of Indigenous spirituality and the space of Western/settler beliefs. Norm Phantom’s successive voyages to Country and the ocean, just like Elias Smith who “comes… and goes” (42), translate as the individual connection to country and the spiritual beings, and to home since home is conceived through journeys to many different places. Thus, Norm’s displacement is marked by the expression of a dynamic and spiritual environment, which encapsulates various voices and functions as a dialogical space:
It was a long journey Norm Phantom had set upon into a world that by day belonged to the luminescence of the ocean and above, to the open skies, and by night, to the spirits who had always haunted this world. They say that faraway place belonged to the untamed spirits of fishes, women and sea creatures. This was the realm of mischievous winds and other kinds of haughty souls from above. Who goes there? the quiet wind asked. The following wind answered. It said there came a man of pain and another, who looked disinterestedly at the world as though it did not exist. (229)
- 1 In the novel, the groper is part of the Dreaming paths of the sea and embodies guidance and protect (...)
7The combination of divergent spaces and natural elements is expressed through the concept of heteroglossia and distinct points of view on the world and reality. Norm Phantom, and to some extent Elias Smith, is eager to sustain ancestral ways; he wanders in the space of the Indigenous cosmogony and the ocean, and as part of his spiritual experience and totemic connection (through the recurring imagery of the groper)1 with the ocean, connects with Country. The ocean surfaces as a centre of reality and is conceived as a voice that produces a place for being, whereby the topography and physiography of Country and thought do play into each other. Its various movements and rich marine life are central to the spiritual progression of Norm Phantom and his access to the world of the spirits. This occurs through a process of deterritorialization at work within the space of Desperance that leads to the characters’ alienation, to the increasing power of the Gurfurritt mine and to environmental damage.
8The ocean gradually begins to function as the space of signification for Norm’s belonging and this is even more significantly asserted when the character encounters his grandson Bala and concludes his itinerant journey through the water and landscape by “walking Westside, to home” where he will rebuild his home and thus reterritorialize himself “among the spirits,” seeing the land as it is and walking back to the place of origin, the place of the Rainbow Serpent and of the ancestral stories (Wright 2009, 499). Through the movements of the “ancestral” and “creative” serpent, the ocean even extends its language through the river, the bearer of “the Aboriginal law handed down through the ages since time began” (2). The natural environment reflects the way in which stories are woven and in which divergent subjectivities are interrelated. In fact, the story shows how some Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters can interact and share their views on social, cultural, political, and environmental issues.
- 2 This may ironically echo with the Australian phrase “Sydney or the Bush,” which is a metaphor used (...)
9One may here combine such an idea with Marcia Langton’s arguments on intersubjective relations, especially through the way in which characters interact in a space which is beyond the colonial Black/White binary. In her comment on the concept of Aboriginality, Langton argued that it “[...] is a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation, and interpretation,” and that “[b]oth Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create Aboriginalities” (Langton 1993, 33–34). Langton even iterated this idea when she responded to Germaine Greer’s controversial essay “White Fella Jump Up! The Shortest Way to Nationhood,” published in Quarterly Essays in 2003, in which Greer was urging settler Australia to embrace Aboriginality as the only way to imagine itself as a nation. In the same journal and issue, Langton argued that depicting Indigenous people as perpetual victims denied them agency, that in fact some settler-Australians (for example authors such as Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan and Murray Bail) displayed a strong commitment to the land in such a way that they could interrelate with Indigenous Australians in terms of their “deepening attachment to place and locality as the core of identity” (Langton in Greer 2003, 81). Carpentaria encompasses such ideas, along with Langton’s insistence that colonialism should not be held entirely responsible for the predicament of Indigenous people, that some Indigenous people might display as much perversity and violence as some settler-Australians (Langton 2008, 31). Such a stance is indeed signified in the way members of the Indigenous community stand alongside the mining industry for sheer profit (Old Joseph Midnight for instance) and some are enmeshed in the colonial ideology of Desperance (Youths have no prospect other than suit in a car and dream of escape, some of them to the big city, Sydney,2 Brisbane or Melbourne). Yet, interrelatedness is clearly an issue that works most strikingly in the connection that both Elias Smith and Norm Phantom have in their deep commitment to the land.
10The sudden and almost uncanny appearance of Elias Smith from the sea encompasses the idea that such an enigmatic and marginal figure can bridge settler and Indigenous Australia. Uptowners first see him as the epitome of the early settlers and one of their own (Wright 2009, 48), a man of the sea who sailed through the waters and arrived on Australian shores almost by chance; the community associates the arrival of Elias to the manifestations of the weather and to the ancient stories since they “have been awake all night watching the sea, and even seen the whole catastrophe of clouds, waves and wind rolling away, off in another direction” (Wright 2009, 49); children think he is Santa falling off the sky (46). Elias Smith thus encapsulates Western and non-Western subjectivities, and the character, who has no memory, is depicted as if he were caught somewhere between daily reality and ancient immemorial cosmogony, “in an otherworldly abyss” (59). The narrator indicates that Elias’s arrival takes place right after time “stopped tick-tocking” and the clocks and watches stopped working (43), and at a moment when the natural elements become unleashed in an uncanny manner for Uptowners, setting the stage for the upcoming events and the alienated and peculiar nature of the character. Elias Smith’s connection with Norm Phantom takes place through a space which functions as a third space of enunciation, a transition space in the Bhabhan sense, considering that both interact and act through the sea and their connection with landscape. Such a connection does shift at times and as shown in one of the book’s chapters, “Number One house,” where Norm and Elias are depicted as both being in communion and yet diverging in their own interpretation and reading of landscape (91, 93). Elias’s positioning and prophetic claims against Desperanians (which eventually leads to him becoming an outcast and scapegoat) express his ability to connect with the sea, albeit in his own way as Norm asserts – “‘Elias always believed in his own stories’” (91) – and to be virtually part of landscape (he surfaces from the sea and goes back to the sea).
11Norm’s thought is double-edged in that it does reflect Elias’s own perception of the world and the stories he sees through the environment, but it may also imply that as a non-Indigenous person, Elias conceives stories in the way Australia’s official history (beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788) was assessed without any incorporation of Indigenous histories. In the novel, some instances hark back to the non-incorporation of otherness in the nation’s history; the opening pages of chapter 1, “From time immemorial,” inscribe the presence of other non-Indigenous Others, such as the Afghans who arrived in Australia as early as the British settlers and whose traces are embedded in landscape (Wright 2009, 5–6). This short reference to other Others balances the idea of Australia’s settler-history with the anachronistic exclusion of the subaltern people (Chakrabarty 1988, 26) since they are perceived as primitives (barbarians in the case of the Afghans) and as standing outside of the “modern” world and time of colonial Australia. Yet, it also implicitly assumes “a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself. Making this disjuncture visible is what ‘subaltern pasts’ allow us to do” (12). In his exploration of minority histories Chakrabarty insists that there are various modes of being in the world, that the “supernatural can inhabit the world in these other modes” (12). Spirits thus are “not dependent on human beliefs for their own existence, what brings them to presence are our practices” (13). The various manifestations of the environment, stemming largely from the ocean and winds, show that there is “a relation of contemporaneity” between the Indigenous cosmogony and the settler world – “a shared ‘now’” (14). The sudden arrival of Elias Smith illustrates the way in which Uptowners see him, almost like a mythological creature from the sea while the Indigenous community is much more realistic about his sudden appearance (Wright 2009, 49), but it also marks the “relation of contemporaneity” since Elias is depicted as being part of both worlds and his characterization embodies the intersubjective relations between these two worlds. It is even more significant that the narrator notes that on the day of his arrival, “Time stopped tick-tocking because there was so much moisture in the air” (43), suggesting that chronological time (as a Western concept) is subjected to the spells of the environment. Later on in the novel, as Will Phantom is chased by men from the mine and finds refuge in a cave, the narrator highlights that “Time was a fleeting whisper for Will,” and this specific scene unravels by establishing a balance – a “shared now” – between Indigenous and non-Indigenous realms:
the lagoon […] had been carved by an eternity of rushing floodwaters inside the remains of a forest that lived a million years ago, and had, after a moment of shock when drowned by high seas, petrified into rock. Time accumulates thought and vice-versa […]. His best memory of Elias was the coastal man forever staring at the seas lost from his memory. Now Will, who had spent too long following the illusions of the Dreamtime, was thrown back into the real world, where men became clowns and clowns men, which was another string of illusions altogether. (157)
The use of features that verge on the uncanny, the Indigenous cosmogony, and elements of fantasy creates a space that combines spiritual stories with daily events.
- 3 Authors such as Peter Carey with his novel Illywacker (1985), Tim Winton with Cloudstreet (1991), R (...)
12Like other Australian authors, who have also experimented with the genres of magic realism or even fantasy,3 Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria experiments with elements of fantasy by incorporating them into the space of Indigeneity. The use of the phrase “Once upon a time” (Wright 2009, 42, 147, 386), usually found in fairy tales, subverts the “happily ever after” perspective to reverse the world of fantasy and the fairy-tale and expose the tragic consequences of the colonial past and of the settler present on Indigenous lives, such as the bashing and death of Indigenous youth in custody and the way in which Indigenous people are deprived of their basic human rights (Chapter 10). In so doing, the narration not only conveys a disturbing mood to a story that harks back to Indigenous ancestral stories but also creates an atmosphere of artificiality as far as the history of settler-Australia is concerned. This is even more significant as readers are reminded about the legitimate presence of the Rainbow Serpent and its meanderings through the whole narration: “This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything” (2).
- 4 Tim Winton, often hailed in Australia as the author of working-class, ordinary Australians, is know (...)
13The porosity of the ancestral serpent operates through an intertextual space that confronts the fictional reality of Desperance not only with Indigenous reality but also with other fictional works. A striking example occurs in the reference to Tim Winton, which cannot simply be understood as a reference to a major author but rather as a means to respond to the fiction of Winton4 and most probably to his celebrated novel Cloudstreet. Kevin, who received the best grade for his essay on Tim Winton (Wright 2009, 102), ends up being injured through working for the Gurfurritt mine and becomes disabled, just as the character of Fish Lamb in Winton’s novel does by drowning. Both characters are aware of the damage done to the environment and respectively make readers see what the other characters do not seem to really see. Both are close to their older brothers: Fish to Quick and Kevin to Will. Besides, Norm Phantom’s home is called “Number One house” and thus surfaces as a substitute to “N°1 Cloudstreet,” and in Norm’s “Number One house,” Pirate, the white cockatoo bird, is able to speak just as a pig speaks in tongues in the Lambs and Pickles’s “N°1 Cloudstreet.”
14Such similarities (and there are others) are not part of a subversion of the ideal of Winton’s Cloudstreet, a novel that to some readers may seem to epitomize the settler and working-class nation, with its focus on two antinomian families, the Lambs and the Pickles, ordinary Anglo-Australians who are compelled to share the house situated on number one Cloud Street. Rather, it is a means to engage with a non-Indigenous mode of storytelling by an author, Winton, who is deeply committed to the environment and addresses the issue of place in his work. In Cloudstreet, an enigmatic Indigenous man surfaces to remind characters of the importance of place, in the same way that Elias Smith insists on the spirit of place and the need to protect the environment; ghostly figures of Indigenous girls appear to Fish Lamb as part of the Stolen Generations while in Carpentaria Norm Phantom senses the spiritual manifestation and negativity that lies underneath the house, a home built on sacred ground: “the house had been inadvertently built on the top of a nest of a snake spirit. He always blamed her [Angel Day] for that. From day one, he knew and always said, ‘this house makes my bones ache’” (13).
15The parallels that can be drawn between A. Wright’s and T. Winton’s respective novels, which may be interpreted as part of the construction of a palimpsest, create a transcultural literary space that challenges the binary opposition between the real and the supposedly unreal and thus creates a discourse that relies on forms of reconciliation. In Carpentaria, such forms take place through the Dreaming, which, as Bill Ashcroft suggests,
is perhaps the archetypal demonstration of the infusion of the present and future with the hope of a mythic past, a fusion of time and place, because the Dreaming is never simply a memory of the past, but the focusing energy of the present. The Dreaming is a supreme example of the circularity of time in postcolonial visions of a future that are embedded in a cultural past. The utopianism in Australian Aboriginal novels such as those by Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006), and Archie Weller, Land of the Golden Clouds (1998), owes very little to the western utopian tradition, for the Dreaming is a radical infusion of the present by a myth that encompasses both past and future. (2017, 24)
The combining of history, memory and imagination designs a fluid time that can be paralleled with the slow movements of the Rainbow serpent throughout the narrative, challenging the Western conception of chronology, history and reality: “A world without end, Amen…” (Wright 2009, 248). Thus, the reframing and subverting of settler-culture icons and stereotypes both call attention to Australia’s ongoing history of violence towards Indigenous people and the silencing of Indigenous stories. Norm Phantom’s perception, as soon as he has taken Elias Smith’s body out to sea to rest, shows that the character has reached a stage where he is partly entering the Dreaming and confronted to spiritual creatures. This occurs in a chapter titled “Norm’s responsibility,” which clearly shows that the character has reached a turning-point in his wish to re-connect with a past that had been erased from the history of the nation. Through Norm’s connection to country and experience with the spiritual landscape, symbolically marked by his encounter with Bala, his grandson, the novel delves into issues of belonging and cultural identity.
16In her essay “On Writing Carpentaria,” Alexis Wright suggests that the novel with its fragmented narratives underscores art’s potential to imagine histories that are alternatives to official interpretations:
I have a theory that Carpentaria was imagined from an Australian heritage that has created disconnected islands of individuals, families, races, regions, beliefs, just as the continent itself is an island disconnected from anywhere else. Just so! In such a scenario, and without settling for one explanation for the novel while others can be imagined, Carpentaria is the land of the untouched: an Indigenous sovereignty of the imagination. Just such a story as we might tell in our story place. Something to grow the land perhaps. Or, to visit the future. (Wright 2007, 16)
- 5 Relational poetics relies on environmental aesthetics. It is a discourse that reconfigures the imag (...)
Wright’s explanation as to her art of writing extends to French-Caribbean poet and critic Édouard Glissant, especially in regard to Glissant’s theory of relational poetics.5 Wright’s approach to space and landscape through a simultaneity between connections and disconnections thus conveys the idea that twenty-first century Australian culture and identity result from a complex and multiple set of local and historical consequences. The way in which characters (Norm Phantom, Elias Smith, Will Phantom, Bala and Hope) tend to move throughout landscape brings up issues of exile and errancy in such a way that these issues, taken from the perspective of Glissant’s relational poetics, are not only relational and dialectic but are also and above all concerned with a dynamic that seeks to restore a voice long forgotten. As he is travelling through country, Norm Phantom experiences the spiritual nature of landscape and his own alienation from the spiritual realm:
Yet, in reality, the landscape gave the impression of being a dead country. Something that belonged to no countrymen. He [Norm Phantom] felt incapable of deciphering between authentic vision and what he had falsely created for his own benefit.
He sensed that only the sea claimed this land. Inside the bush, whatever powers – dangerous, malevolent – were crowding on the other side of the sand dune, he believed had originated from the sea. Terrible truths tumbled from his mind. The night sounds of souls divesting themselves, were possessed, without shame, with a yearning for the roar of the ocean. Underneath him he felt the sand was full of the sea’s malevolent powers. A poisonous country sapping his strength. More and more he dreaded its hinterland. Things had to be different. This was not his destiny. (282)
In this passage, Norm Phantom appears to be caught between the reality of Country and the spiritual world he has imagined as part of the mission he has set himself, which is to sustain the ancient law and culture of the ancestors. The character seems to be both at one and at odds with the natural and spiritual environment.
17Throughout the novel, the geographic space functions as a discourse but one which relies on an assemblage of cultural enunciations, defined by its relations to other territories, to other material (the various areas of the town of Desperance) and spiritual assemblages (the multifarious manifestations of the Indigenous cosmogony). The movement of characters, such as Norm Phantom, Bala or Elias Smith, from the physical to the metaphysical realm naturally stems from images of the ocean, dreamt and perceived, so that such images form a self-regulating complex system, an interpolative process between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences. The land and the ocean surface as subversive elements challenging the space of settler-Australia while sustaining at the same time the multiple forms of otherness that construct the world of Carpentaria. As Norm Phantom journeys across different territories, he is confronted to the topos, the narrative place of reality, and to his own mindscape too: “Dream and reality blurred” (Wright 2009, 192). Thus, his experience within the space of Indigenous Country, the place of the ancestral stories and reality, is expressed in a narrative space that encapsulates the manifestations of various realms in everyday life. While Norm Phantom’s main concern is to sustain Indigenous culture and stories, other characters tend to travel through territories of their own making as a means to survive, even exist. Angel Day’s decision to recreate a home on the margin through Number One house is part of her willingness to be integrated into the white dream of goods and capital. On the other hand, Kevin, who is a gifted student, is compelled to get a job at the mine and navigates between two cultures. Being broken by the mine (109) and then brutally assaulted by members of a white gang from Uptown, Kevin is left hanging in a mental space of his own, just as Elias Smith is. Such characters appear to be transitioning between two cultures without being socially recognized by either.
18At that level of narration, Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of “fields” and “habitus” illustrate the double moment, subjective and objective, of the culture and of the notion of social constraint in modern and capitalist societies, which results from the inscription of culture in history (Bourdieu 1980). The Bourdieusian interpretation of the field and habitus is useful to the interpretation of the novel, especially since it articulates physical, social, and spiritual space. The field is understood as a space in which the dominant and the dominated confront each other but which allows individuals to also belong to several fields at the same time while the notion of habitus integrates the elements acquired by socialization and refers to the behaviour of an individual. Bourdieu’s approach is applicable to Alexis Wright’s story and characters especially when exploring the mechanics of power and social change. In her desire to reconstruct the landscape, spirituality, and stories of her native region and to integrate them into Australia’s postcolonial reality, Wright conceives power as being culturally and symbolically created through an interplay of agency and structure.
19In his article on Carpentaria, Geoff Rodorera argues that the
construction of this narrative framework allows Wright to position a uniquely Indigenous oral narrative voice at the centre of her story, freed from both the written text of nationhood and the constrictions of literary address that Indigenous authors often remain captive to. (2016, 2)
- 6 The Latin expression terra nullius, meaning “land that belongs to no one,” expressed the common bel (...)
Rodorera’s focus on narratorial structures highlights the importance of voice when discussing the politics of representing Indigeneity in Australia. It interestingly shows how Wright’s writing attempts to deconstruct the common discourse that tends to entangle Indigenous identity and culture in the social imaginary of the multicultural nation as well as in a more global structure. In a country “where legends and ghosts lived side by side” (Wright 2009, 91), landscape stands as the main and true voice of reality. Country is not just the background for the actions of the Indigenous characters or a terra nullius6 and an economic and mining resource for those wishing to make a profit as it is in fact depicted as an active, vibrant and living space with complete agency. In her novel, Alexis Wright writes the land into fiction since landscape is a dynamic narrative space to be read and the space for a new discourse about the reality of Australia. The novel’s conclusion, with Norm and Bala listening to the sounds emanating from the land and its natural species (499) and Hope going back to find Will with the help of the gropers (498), asserts the central role of country as the main voice. Such a voice (or voices since the land is the space of the multifarious) conveys a message which no longer relies on the territorializing/deterritorializing process, but which rather expresses the space of the radicant (Bourriaud 2009). Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of the radicant, an organism which contrary to the rhizome does not depend on a single root but rather advances in all directions, “on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks as ivy does” (51), is perceptible in the whole story not only through the way in which characters can move to alternative spaces (physically but also psychologically and spiritually) but also through the way in which the natural environment manifests itself. Indeed, one striking example of radicancy lies in the character of Angel Day, who manages to move between various spaces and to create alter spaces according to her own needs; but other characters such as Norm Phantom, Hope Midnight-Phantom, Elias Smith and Will Phantom also evolve by developing “their roots as they advance, unlike the radicals, whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil” (51). Bourriaud’s approach implies that individuals do not simply remain enclosed in one specific place (colonial Desperance), even when they remain rooted in their place of origin, but rather move and extend / their belonging to other spaces through (re)connections and reconfigurations (Country). These characters’ perception of the spiritual environment allows them to re-position themselves beyond the strict confines of Desperance and move forward, “singing the country afresh” (Wright 2009, 499).
20The natural environment clearly expands through the successive creation of alter spaces where performativity is reconceived – the land is then approached as the space of translation and renegotiation, where a dialogue with history, both confronting and soothing, is made possible:
It was at this point he [Will Phantom] realised how history could be obliterated when the Gods move the country. He saw history rolled, reshaped, undone and mauled as the great creators of the natural world engineered the bounty of everything man had ever done into something more of their own making. […] The bulwark of the spirits rose from the waters, and he saw nothing monstrous or hideous in this new creation taking shape, moving, rolling, changing appearance, and beauty in its strident crashing back into the water. (Wright 2009, 473)
The movements of the cyclone hitting the entire town of Desperance are marked by the appearance of the spirits and their capacity to subvert existing elements and create new stories. Will Phantom, an ecological warrior fighting against the ongoing colonization of Indigenous lands by the Gurfurritt mine and the damage done to the environment, is able to enter the discourse of the spiritual country and to envision other perspectives. Carpentaria naturally designs an alter-modern fictional space, “an archipelago of local insurrections against the official representations of the world” (Bourriaud 2009, 185–86), and in so doing writes back to Australia’s settler-history (past and present), re-inscribes the language of the land at the centre – all characters and their stories only surface from the land, since as Wright argues:
The story to be told, it does not only come from colonisation or assimilation, or having learnt to read and write English, or arguing whether people with an oral history should write books, but is sung just as strongly from those of our ancestors who wrote our stories on the walls of caves and on the surface of weathered rock. (Wright 2007, 13)
Wright’s examination of human relations and their social context from the perspective of Indigenous country provides an alter discourse and thus shows, as Mick Dodson argues in his foreword to the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, that “literature can be and is used as a powerful political tool by Aboriginal people in a political system which renders us [Aboriginal people] mostly voiceless. It can give us confidence and pride to raise our voices through the silence” (2008, xiii). In her work, Alexis Wright creates a voice and that breaks the silence hovering above postcolonial and multicultural Australia. The voice of Carpentaria not only echoes with W.E.H. Stanner’s “great Australian silence” or shakes the foundations of Judith Wright’s “upside-down hut” but also, and above all, provides a discourse that takes its roots in the Indigenous ancestral stories and extends to the postcolonial reality of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in an alter space and an alter-modern time.
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