Alexis Wright's "Carpentaria". A Poetics of Aboriginality?

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria: A Poetics of Aboriginality?

Silke Hesse

Monash University

I have just reread Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, a book originally hard to get in mainstream bookshops even though it was awarded the Miles Franklin Prize. I had rushed through it a few years ago not long after it first came out in 2006, and then found it would not leave me alone; there were obviously things that I had not taken time to explore sufficiently.

One of the memories that remained with me was of a unique voice, perhaps an authentic Aboriginal voice or better, a creative imagining of such a voice for this is not a work of realism. Admittedly, as a Southerner with little firsthand experience of Aboriginal people I cannot really claim to know what such a voice must sound like. The language of this book tends to be oral and colloquial. It can have untidy syntax, a careless use of words, and an exuberant and exploratory wielding of a vocabulary wider than that of normal spoken English. It can be wordy, exaggerated, dramatic, pseudo intellectual, farcical, playful, and sometimes rebelliously inappropriate without any sense of taboos or the social place of language. There is often a hit and miss quality about it and it seems deaf to linguistic levels established by history, class and regional origin. An example:

These matters were not helped by Angel Day, even though Normal had pushed her back into the house, for she kept slinging on about conspiracies, and letting her foul mouth go forth like a Cape Canaveral launch, full of the most slanderous truth or half-truth she could muster from every nook and crevice of her brain, and directed to and then from Bruiser downwards, as she bade them farewell. (42)

While the narrative mostly alludes to the perspective of individual characters or to groupings of Aboriginal people in the book, the author herself may join her characters and speak   along with them in this voice, to the consternation, presumably, of those who like their authors to be fully literate. There are of course other sections of the book in which Alexis Wright’s fine sense of language shows us that we have to assume that what she does is always intentional, that she is probably simply talking as one of her people. Nowadays many of these have, like Wright herself, received good schooling; and many are not only well educated but obviously highly intelligent. But with their less educated countrymen they seem to share a rebellious, randomly uninhibited, at times irony laden enjoyment of language and what it can do. The language of the chapter “Angel Day”, from which the above passage has been taken, sounds almost as though it had been scavenged and reused from a great rubbish dump of language; it describes Angel’s foraging, preening, irreverent and assimilationist character beautifully. It is this chapter in particular that came across to me as being linguistically unique and therefore in some way specifically “Aboriginal”. But as other sections of the book show, Angel Day’s is clearly only one of many existing versions of Aboriginality as Wright sees it.

It is obvious that Wright’s book has grown out of an oral, story-telling culture and this is reinforced by the constant mention throughout the text of stories being told. We hear, to give only one example, that half finished stories are used by the older people to make sure the young people don’t forget to come back and visit again. The flow of the narration is always being interrupted by the many stories that pop up in its course and divert the reader’s attention. They, rather than a focus on the eventual outcome, are ultimately what captures our attention and gives color and variety. In this day and age they are, however, not Dreamtime stories, nor even Norm’s father’s stories of frontier massacres which Norm will occasionally tell in his father’s words, nor stories we might expect of mustering and boundary-riding from not so long ago, but the ever new stories that come out of day to day living. We get the feeling that Aboriginal people think in and through stories, communicate by means of stories, most frequently high-spirited, farcical stories. There is the story of the big fight at the dump whose outcome little Will Phantom decides with a cigarette lighter; the story of the Madonna statue which Angel Day found there and painted black to give her the white man’s lucrative luck; the story of the house she put together from the dump; the story of the gurus who attempt in turn to exorcise the snake under this house; the story of Norm finding a decomposing corpse on the dump and being charged with murder when he reports it to the police; the story of Elias walking in from the sea over 25 kilometers of mud flats after being battered by a cyclone and of the absurdly fearful people of Uptown who can not work out whether he is friend or foe; the story of Finn, the self-appointed guardian of the coast, in his moth-eaten uniform; the story of Kevin, the one-time brainy boy, being pursued and bashed to a pulp in mistaken retaliation; the story, nowadays only alluded to, of “those up-to-no-good Mission-bred kids accidentally hang[ing] Cry-baby Sally”; the story of Truthful, the policeman, turning his jail into a hot-house for roses and ficus; the story of the three little petrol-sniffers arrested for a murder they knew nothing about hanging themselves in the prison and the story of Truthful, the policeman, taking plates of hot food to their disintegrating corpses; the story of Lloydie the barman in love with a mermaid hiding in the wood of his bar counter; the story of Truthful and his vehicle enveloped by flying spiders and their webs; the story of the camels of Abdul and Abdullah turning up with their rotting loads years after their masters had presumably perished and eventually being shot because no one was prepared to unload them; the story of Norm the fish taxidermist preparing and painting his fish; the story of Will depositing the body of Elias in his friend Norm’s workshop; the story of Norm dropping dead Elias down to the sacred ancestral gropers after having talked with him for many days at sea; the story of Norm after the cyclone being found on an island beach and fed by little Bala, who turns out to be his grandson; the story of Will learning to live on a raft of floating rubbish. There is no end to the stories.

All the same, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria is not just a collection of stories. The more than 500 page long book does have a plot: a realistic, exciting plot that at various times gathers momentum, builds up to a climax and then slows down again. It would not be wrong to label the book a novel though it does not put itself in that category. The action takes place in a little town on the Gulf of Carpentaria that calls itself Desperance, a town from pioneer times. It is fringed on the east and west by native camps built into the Pricklebush. Those in the west are on traditional land, those in the east belong to dispossessed people from further away who have made up a new name and identity for themselves; the two tribes are enemies. The town is exposed to monsoonal storms and cyclones each year which can recreate the landscape. One year, a man walks in from the sea after a big storm; he has suffered memory loss. Someone gives him the name Elias Smith. Elias is an experienced fisherman and because he does not belong to any group, he gets on with all. He is eventually put in charge of the town’s neighborhood watch, the surreal Net which some religious crank has invented. Before that he becomes the mentor of Will, the son of his friend Norm. Like him, Norm is a fisherman; but he is also the most prominent of the west Pricklebush Aborigines. 

When Will is a young man, a multinational Mining Company starts up on his tribe’s sacred land with government support. It ignores land rights and inappropriately and cheaply pays off the east Pricklebush natives who are not the traditional owners. Will blows up the mine’s pipeline. His father, Norm, disowns him. The Company take clever revenge: they start several fires in town for which Will is blamed. The town accuses Elias of poor surveillance of The Net and he is told to leave. Will disappears with a group of traditionalist zealots led by Mozzie Fishman who cross the continent on two-year-long journeys to keep alive the ceremonies of a major dreaming trail.

When Will leaves, his wife Hope’s father, Midnight from the east Pricklebush camp, asks Elias to smuggle out Hope and her little son Bala to an off-shore island. The mining company spot the fugitives with their surveillance helicopters. They murder Elias and set up the corpse in his boat on an inland lagoon hoping to catch Will as he returns with the Fishman mob. Will brings the dead Elias back and deposits him, as said, in Norm’s workshop. After that he goes out to sea to find Hope and Bala. He reaches the island but is caught by the Mining Co. They have also captured Hope and make Will watch as she is thrown out of the helicopter. Beaten and shackled, Will is flown back to the company site where, by good fortune, the Fishman mob are just stealing petrol. They rescue Will and the mine goes up in flames.

 About the time Will was captured on the island, Norm too had gone off to sea. He has to bury Elias. Norm is caught in a cyclone and eventually washed onto an island. There he is found by Bala. The raging cyclone floods the island but grandfather and grandson survive.  When the cyclone is forecast, Desperance is evacuated; only Will and the barman stay in the pub. Will is eventually washed out to sea; he can save himself on a large floating platform of rubbish which is then caught in a circular current and from which he will most likely never escape. Norm and Bala make it back to Desperance which has been completely destroyed and is now uninhabited. The old man and the child start again in the Pricklebush. But the plot here outlined is not particularly obvious nor easy to reconstruct. Novels with their plots belong to white man’s literature and in this book only Will has seriously taken on the white man and his cowboy culture. What one might call the novel in this book concerns him.

Far more important, however, are the day to day lives of the Aboriginal people and their ways of existing in this transitional age between tradition and white culture, whether it be outback or southern. We get a good glimpse of the wider malaise of both groups. Tellingly, the central figure of the book is Norm, which stands here for Normal, not Norman. Norm is someone who tries to stay out of everything, certainly out of the “plot” and the action part of the book. He likes things to be as quietly “normal” as possible.

Drawing on the typical small-town obsession with nicknames, Wright gives her figures names that obviously, though by no means unambiguously, suggest characterizations; she drives home the point by wondering how Mozzie came to be called Mozzie.  It  is not hard to see why the brutal mayor Bruiser got his name; the policeman Truthful, Sergeant d’Estrange, once a tough cop in Brisbane’s Valley now wants to be a gentle, flower growing man which makes him weak and ineffective, too slow to act most of the time, an outsider to the local culture and by no means always truthful or gentle; the town clerk Libbi Valance, is a liberal-minded man who ensconces himself in his office as behind a valance but also aims at valid values. The book’s main character Norm has the somewhat mysterious surname Phantom; who knows, perhaps because he has contact with the spirits of ancestors? His disowned son, the activist Will, is driven by will rather than intuition. Will’s beloved wife is Hope, who wears a blue dress (blue for hope), her favorite color.  She is the daughter of Norm’s old enemy Joseph Midnight from the eastern Pricklebush, a people who have lost their land and largely also their culture and now tend to talk too much and do things without thinking. Midnight also suggests dark and occult forces: what is left of culture. The man from the sea who lost his memory is, as mentioned earlier, given the name Elias Smith, designating him a mix between an ordinary white man and a wise prophet. Norm’s youngest daughter, separated from her husband who has taken the children, and desired by Truthful the policeman, is always talking about her TAFE courses; she is called Girlie. His more nondescript girls are “always pregnant” Janice and always flogged Patsy. Norm’s sons Inso (insolent) and Donny are lazy thugs who work for the mine and think only of money. Kevin, the youngest with his obviously white name, used to be a highly intelligent, studious but clumsy child, who didn’t belong to either the practical or the spiritual Aboriginal world and might have done well down south. But he was rendered an imbecile in a mine accident that happened on his very first day at work; there was just no suitable work for him around Desperance. The Phantom children’s mother Angel Day (it would take ingenuity to explain that name), is a proud, belligerent, intelligent and much desired woman, queen of the rubbish dump, happy to salvage the leftovers of white culture and assimilate. With the help of all sorts of gurus she tries to rid herself of the snake (the ancestral serpent) under her house. She eventually leaves Norm for Fishman and other suitors, moves to Uptown, and neglects her two little petrol-sniffing boys. She seems to end up in foreign slavery, sleeping on rags and catching snakes in the waters of a cold sea, lost to her own people and culture. The traditionalist zealot Mozzie Fishman, who is always explaining that he has nothing to do with fish and the sea, is as irritating as a mosquito but a leader of his people like Moses, and when we consider his disciples, his care of the sick, and his forgiving nature perhaps even a “fish-man” like the followers of Jesus. He is an intelligent and wise man, someone steeped in traditional knowledge and in touch with the spirits. His large overland convoy along a major dreaming track keeps young men out of mischief and calls on the unity of Aboriginal people across the continent. But since he is always on the road he cannot look after his own little boys, though he does eventually give them a beautiful traditional burial. In the end the Fishman zealots disperse and go underground. Fishman is a man of the eternal and unchanging country of the ancestors whereas his friend and erstwhile companion Norm is a man of the sea which is ever changing and constantly recreating the lands of the coast. For Norm change is normal. In this way Wright encourages us to look for defining names though we will find that some are of more help than others. At the end of the book we are left with Bala, the son of Hope and Will. Bala is an Aboriginal name that reveals nothing of the boy’s nature or future to us white readers.

None of Wright’s characters are particularly useful as models to live by; they all have only too obvious flaws. With Norm and Will Phantom it is their unforgiving enmities. With Mozzie it is his single-minded focus on the past.  The best guideline to the future to be found here is probably in what the characters we most admire have in common. This is in the first place contact with the spirit world and receptiveness to the messages it sends and then a profound and competent knowledge of their natural ancestral surroundings. Such knowledge and abilities are both inherited and individually learned and honed. If it be permissible to translate these qualities into white man’s language we might say: we have to be observant and alert to the world around us, to be practical and well trained in life skills, but more importantly, we have to be in touch with our intuitions and our unconscious resources.

Modern readers, however, are usually excessively skeptical and suspicious of all things irrational. How does one bring up such topics without losing their good will? Wright’s trick is to give readers the freedom to react to things spiritual and mystical according to their own lights: they can take them seriously, laugh them to scorn, or enjoy them for fantasy, as they see fit. She employs a variety of mechanisms. Exaggeration is one which infuses the entire book; in it the obvious admixture of untruth in every statement invites readers to discount as much of it as suits them or, alternatively, simply enjoy the heightened coloration. The surreal is another device, used more sparingly by Wright but to powerful effect. The surreal forces us to confront questions regarding the nature of reality. When Norm rebuilds his broken boat after the cyclone and later rows home with Bala, the child’s mother Hope, whom we, the readers, know to be dead (both Will and Bala witnessed her murder) helps him and is then a constant and apparently real presence on the trip, only leaving secretively with the boat once the three of them have arrived back at Desperance. We have to work out for ourselves on what level of reality all this occurs. A third device is the symbolical. At what point does Hope become a symbol? Is the floating platform of rubbish going round and round in circular currents on which Will is eventually stranded an actual phenomenon or simply a symbol of his world of trash, the destruction he has created and his irrevocable isolation from his people and the land of real life? Is it both, is it neither? Another device is fantasy. Is Gardajala, the devil woman singing out from the bush and seducing Norm to sexual ecstasy, a fantasy or a real spiritual presence? We are abandoned in a limbo from which we, as non-Aboriginals, have to make our own way back to the life we know; we will reach our own conclusions. We might note that Norm cannot comprehend how the white man, Elias, could name his boat “Choice”. Aboriginal people know what is real; for them the right way to live is not a matter of choice.

To return to the names: The title of Wright’s book, Carpentaria, seems to allude to Xavier Herbert’s epic of the North, Capricornia. And as in his Poor Fellow My Country hope eventually rests on the shoulders of a young boy: in Herbert’s case it is a half-caste, in Wright’s a child that combines the heritage of two hostile tribes. Wright mentions the Tropic of Capricorn when she sets the scene of her novel; this suggests she wants her readers to take note of such similarities and differences.  The town Desperance (supposedly named after Captain Matthew Desperance Flinders who of course did not carry this middle name in real life) which the government wants to rename Masterton against the wishes and the resistance of the townspeople, suggests a town of desperados, or of desperate people. Diagonally at the opposite end of Australia, by the Great Australian Bight, lies the town of Esperance, hope. Maybe that was where the Fishman convoy headed on its journeys. Lastly: the name of the mine with its ruthlessly money-minded approach is simply satirical, even farcical: Gurrfurrit (go-for-it).

Farce is of course a significant ingredient in Carpentaria. What are the advantages of farce? It turns almost invisible things into stories, gives heavy emphasis to whatever it selects, stirs up laughter but does not prescribe whether this be lighthearted or satiric, and has a certain primitiveness even brutality about it, a lower-class feel appropriate here. It exploits clichés, undermines accustomed sentiments and viewpoints, and makes us question what is real and unreal. It is at home in drama, more generally, in oral communication. It is what makes the stories told throughout this book both seductive and unsettling. 

At the opposite end of the literary scale there is also a lot of poetry in Wright’s book. The first chapter “From time immemorial” which describes the sea and its impact on the coastline of the Gulf is pure poetry and the chapter in which Norm battles the sea, “Norm’s responsibility”, is also like a long poem.

The mist lifted rapidly, as though the grand curtain had been swiped apart by a magician who in his unexpected performance, banished the broken pieces of small ethereal clouds off into the sea. With the horror and shock of her unexpected arrival, Norm flinched at the wind driving him in his shoulder blades with the inhuman heaviness of two very strong hands. First she pushed and kneaded, willing him to stand up, shaking the boat. Her invisible touch she replaced with a bolt of static electricity which dipped his every movement into her stinging body. A crackling feminine wail ran around him, coaxing compliance to her desires. (261)

Poetry is Norm’s genre whereas farce is at home with Angel, her daughters and above all the Uptown people of Desperance whom these women both ridicule and try to emulate. The Uptowners are the sort of people we know from Herbert’s novels, without real roots or values, arrogant and fearful, many of them brutal, racist and alcohol addicted. Those among them who try to be decent tend to be comically ineffective. Wright’s mix of genres, encompassing the most bumptious and the most spiritual, is not only an indication of the range of Aboriginal disposition and ability but also of the possibilities that lie within periods of destruction and renewal. Like the landscape of the Gulf which is recreated with the storms of every wet season, so a time of turbulent transition between traditional culture and modernity can also be the site of surprising change that may require very considerable readjustment. Carpentaria leaves us with a situation in which both human and natural forces have wreaked great havoc; but in this chaos there is also the potential for transformation and renewal. At the end of the novel Norm asks Bala:

“One day [...] your Mum and Dad are going to come and get you after the grass grows green, and when the clouds of grasshoppers have come and eaten the grass down and died in the wintertime, and when you have caught one big fat barramundi in the lagoon. Can you wait until then?”

The boy thought of all these eventualities [...] His face lit up into a smile as he looked up at the big man surveying the flood plains. All dreams come true somehow, Norm murmured, sizing up the flattened landscape, already planning the home he would rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been, among the spirits in the remnants of the ghost town, where the snake slept underneath.

Of course it is to be assumed that the evacuees from Desperance, white and black, also survived the cyclone. Presumably they have set up camp somewhere in the safer hinterland and will continue to be in the vicinity. But Wright’s book has discarded them; it is not with them that a future for Aboriginal Australia will be found. White readers may well be shocked at how much needs to be destroyed before a new and genuine Aboriginality, as Alexis Wright sees it, might be recovered. But can an isolated old man and his little grandson bring about such re-growth, her readers may well want to ask?  

It is, I think, perhaps less the outcome or message of this book that we should take note of – this is tied to a certain phase of Aboriginal politics – but rather the author’s achievement in creating a complex genre and style of writing that does not seem to lean on white models: a narrative poetics that is suited to conveying the otherness of Aboriginal experience in today’s transitional era in a convincingly different way.