Wright is from Waanji country in the highlands of the Gulf, and though she has close personal ties with the region and community she portrays, she firmly identifies Carpentaria as fiction. But even more than this ‘plot’, the novel is about masculinity as played out in the characters of, and relationships between, Norm Phantom, an old Aboriginal mystic and local leader his son, Will and their family friend, Mozzie Fishman. Set in the fictional coastal town of Desperance, on the Gulf of Carpentaria in north-west Queensland, the novel centres on the infighting between local Aboriginal communities, and the greater challenge that befalls the region when a multinational mining corporation sets up on sacred land. In Carpentaria, Wright’s second novel, I found a prime example of such testimony: a fierce epic that both honours Indigenous sovereignty and culture and attests to the ravages wrought by colonisation. I was exploring the ways in which literature testifies to transmissions of psychic trauma, which, in Unclaimed Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Cathy Caruth defines as the impact of an unassimilated event or experience that makes its presence known belatedly and often illogically. I first read the fiction of Alexis Wright when I was writing a thesis on transgenerational trauma for my doctorate at Western Sydney University.

Watch a short video on this text from the Books That Made Us series, available via ABC Education! Essay by Meera Atkinson

Carpentaria book review