One of the most frequent questions authors are asked is, “Who are you writing for?” The audience I had in my mind while writing Carpentaria was the ancestors of our traditional country. I concentrated on the way our people speak to country and each other. In that way, it always felt as though I was writing a story to the old people about the complexities and bravery of our world today but also, by linking the past and the present in this way, I was bringing the ancestral realm into a story of all times.



I wanted to describe the powerful nature of our traditional country, which we know about through the law stories that have been upheld over countless millennia, and protected by our people to this day. In creating the main characters of Norm Phantom, Will Phantom, Angel Day and Mozzie Fishman, I wanted to demonstrate how the powerful essence of country is in our people. We are also the country’s spirit. Country and its people are one. This was the story I wanted to construct, to achieve for the possibility of future readers, although I was the main reader who needed to be satisfied that this book was developing in the way that I wanted it to.

While I was writing it, I was not thinking about where this book would be in 10 years time. Although authors hope that their book will have a future, it is hard to visualise it. Like Sam Cooke sings in his song of hope A Change is Gonna Come, “I don’t know what’s up there, beyond the sky”.

The future was not what I was concentrating on. My focus was on how to give the story its spirit, to create its heart. This was always the challenge, even though it was familiar ground because the quest of what is in the spirit and heart is related to how storytelling is being shaped in our times as Aboriginal people.

Deeper in my mind, where the rational part of the brain weighs up what was really likely to happen to ambitious thoughts, I realised that this book might never be published because of the narrative storytelling style. This is the fear of taking risks and what you have to constantly fight against, to believe more than being fearful, that you are doing the right thing whatever the odds.

Any other thoughts about the book’s worth were more humble. You doubt that you will ever finish the book, until one day you finally admit that the book is finished – that you cannot take it any further, years after you started with a few ideas and images jotted down on a piece of paper. You now have a manuscript printed on about two reams of paper. It is not perfect, although in the mind of the author it is – more or less.

This strange blackfella book in the time of John Howard was rejected by publishers Alexis Wright

This is the point where the book, and its world, starts to grow away from your imagination, taking with it all of the thoughts you have devoted to its creation. This is the day that you say goodbye. The book divorces the author, or the author divorces the book. You let the book go.

It was initially a very sad day to lose the imaginary world of Carpentaria and, with it, the powerful characters whom I had liked working with, but the intensity of the work, and its risk-taking, had also taken its toll. It would take a year for my mind to heal from the intensity of this level of creativity, and to regain enough of my former physical energies to begin working on new creative ideas.

When I talk about risk-taking in literature, this has more to do with the low levels of risk-taking in Australian publishing than with what was considered normal in the Aboriginal domain, where we are quite familiar with the idea of asserting our own ideas. I was attaching to literature my own storytelling influences, cultural criteria and aesthetics. I came from a very specific oral storytelling tradition and its visual imagery holds a strong influence over my thinking. These influences initially came to me through my own family, especially my grandmother, and through years of working and living in our communities alongside our own song men and women, some of the most masterful practitioners of storytelling, story-keeping and story-making you could find anywhere in the world.

In my earlier book Take Power, a book of stories and essays celebrating the first 20 years of land rights in central Australia, there are many stories from or about important keepers of Aboriginal law stories. One story tells of an elder, a master geographer of his traditional domain, who carried more than three thousand site names in his head – each with a sacred song, a Dreaming and sacred history. While I was developing this book, I walked around at night from one fireplace to the next, where people were camping in cleared ground in the spinifex, to collect some of these stories from members of the Central Land Council after their meetings in remote areas of Central Australia. These men and women were the memory keepers of the ancient stories and song cycles for hundreds, if not thousands, of places all across their country where they had traditional responsibilities. How could I write like this?

A very senior Warlpiri man of great knowledge who I recorded told a story in his own language about country, about who belonged where. He told his story in exactly 40 minutes. He then pulled out from his bedding his own cassette and retold this same story for a second recording. He explained that he wanted to keep his own copy, rather than waiting for me to go back to Alice Springs hundreds of kilometres away, make him a copy and post it back to him.

He told me that he wanted to leave his cassette playing somewhere, so others could hear it as they walked around in his community, rather then having to directly tell particular people that they needed to go back to their own country. This recording was exactly the same length as the first recording. He was a memory man of important stories, a religious man of high degree in our culture. I have been very fortunate in life to have been able to work beside many of our men and women of great wisdom and strength who have been a major influence in my thinking. They knew how to bring people together through stories, through ideas that our people would understand.

How do you learn an oral storytelling discipline to keep the story straight, a story that might take days or months to tell, yet tell it properly, so that it can be passed down correctly through the generations, so that it will always be remembered in the correct way?

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright Carpentaria is set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance. It centres on the powerful Phantom family, the infighting between local communities and the challenge that befalls the region when a multinational mining corporation sets up on sacred land. Wright’s surreal and experimental storytelling "fiercely resists the neat simplicities of linear chronology" according to the Guardian review, and is "exhilaratingly disruptive"."[It's] defiantly individual literary style can prove challenging at times, but the persistent reader will be amply rewarded".

After I finished the manuscript for Carpentaria– this strange blackfella book in the time of John Howard – it was rejected by publishers and had very little chance of being published. Luckily, the independent publisher Ivor Indyk of Giramondo Publishing thought about what I was trying to do as a writer, and also seriously challenged me about what I was doing. Then he was prepared to publish my book about our heroes.



I now find it very humbling to think about what has happened since Carpentaria was first published in 2006, and then in 2007, when it unbelievably won the Miles Franklin and other major literary awards. The novel took on a life of its own with the growing momentum of interest in the book and I have been overwhelmed by the way that it has reached into the hearts and minds of readers.

The interest in Carpentaria spread further afield than anything I could ever have realised, after it won these prestigious awards, and through the work of reviewers as far as afield as the New York Times. This interest would extend even more seriously for my next novel, The Swan Book.

At that time I was reunited with the book. I had to think about it again. I went all over the country and to many different countries to speak about it. I carried this heavy book across India where I heard some of their best academics give brilliant analyses about the work to students, and I would speak to schoolchildren in classrooms throughout the country.

I went to China, to the UK, to Europe and to some of the most prestigious writers’ events in the world. I spoke to young schoolchildren in Coober Pedy who were full of enthusiasm and asked how many pages, words, then letters there were in Carpentaria. I worked with publishers and translators across the world and helped them to promote the book in their countries. There were too many invitations to travel overseas to help promote the work. These were all good opportunities, because I was given the time to talk about Indigenous issues, and to promote our literature and learn from other countries. The tattered book I carried around now sits in my bookcase.

The copy of Carpentaria that Alexis Wright travelled around the world with. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

I travelled with Carpentaria for about three or four years until I decided the book could do its own work. I could not keep up with this book and go to all parts of the world where it was going, to talk about it, to help it on its journey. This book no longer needed me tagging along. I had tried to make the most of the opportunities as they were presented to me but, in the end, I felt that I would never write again. I did not want to keep up with an endless gruelling program of traveling from one country to the next, and with the major distraction these trips were having on the creation of The Swan Book.



I never thought Carpentaria would go into the hands of readers across the world and that people would respond so positively towards it. This book has travelled to far-distant places to be studied, for example, in Inner Mongolia, and in universities in India, and other places that sometimes I learn about. I have been humbled by the way Carpentaria has been thought about in the minds of people who have given the book their respect and trust, have passed it on to others to read, have talked aboutit in their book clubs, and have thanked me for writing it. Carpentaria’s long life has been created through the thoughts of people who keep it alive in this way and by many people who have written about it, translated it and teach it.

I have seen numerous streams of thought and study of this book and I have admired the intellect and skilful understandings of scholars who bring new ideas into the world through this book. This is all part of how literature helps to create better knowledge about our world. I have helped academics who were writing papers on the book, and students who had very kindly chosen to study it for their doctoral and post-doctoral studies in Australia, China, India, United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Japan and many other countries. I have been deeply moved by such attention and thought given to our world through this book, and by all the young students around the world I have met who have felt it was important to them.

I am particularly proud of the way that Carpentaria has been welcomed in China through the work of the literary translator Dr Li Yao in Beijing. China’s Nobel laureate, Mo Yan, launched the Chinese translation in Beijing, and it became a major feature in the Chinese literary journal World Literature. The translation of literature is an incredible thing because it helps to break down the barriers of language and distance, and creates communication, instead of silence.

The Chinese edition of Carpentaria. Photograph: The Guardian

I saw this when I was introduced to writers from Inner Mongolia when I went to China in 2008. They were able to read the Chinese translation of the first chapters of the book and began making comparisons with the similarities and values of their own people, and with the geographical features and the grasslands of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

And I will never forget the young Lebanese woman who gave me her copy of her work on Carpentaria, which had been translated for a small publication distributed in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Some of the most important acknowledgements of this book came to me though my own people, such as our strong Gulf of Carpentaria country leader Murrandoo Yanner who told me how he instructed white people in how to read Carpentaria: “Keep reading”, he told them, “it will start to sink in.” Or being told by one of our own Waanyi leaders: “I hope you are proud of your people, because your people are proud of you.” It is the greatest honour when my own people tell me how much they have care for this book. This has meant the world to me.

I feel that Carpentaria is doing its work if it can do its small part in being a shield for us. I have admired the work of the legal scholar Dr Kathleen Birrell in her book Indigeneity: Before and Beyond The Law in the way that she analyses the legal implications of the book’s story. That in the eyes of Aboriginal people, our law is more powerful than Australian law.

Carpentaria has opened the way to new directions in my life since I started it. Those were the days when it took two years to understand how to write the novel and then a further six years of writing it. Every day I balanced the risks I knew I was taking to write a book to honour my ancestral homelands. I knew it would be very different to the style of Australian fiction by writing it in a narrative style of Aboriginal voices, in particular, in the way that I have heard older Aboriginal men and women speaking all of my life but whose voices were ignored by non-Indigenous Australia.

I have had opportunities that few Australian authors have to create fearlessly, to experiment wildly and to work with new ideas with space, dignity and integrity, and the serious intent that ought to be given to produce works of art.

The writer Alexis Wright. Photograph: Meredith O'Shea/The Guardian

The experience of writing Carpentaria has helped me to become a more thoughtful writer. I have worked with the Western Sydney University’s writing and society research centre since it was established in 2008 with a small core group of writers and literary thinkers. At the centre, I completed The Swan Book and my new novel, Praiseworthy, and have worked with some of the best writers and literary thinkers in the country. I have now begun research on another fictional work that will be an epical journey across the waters of my ancestry, and deeper into our own heartlands. I have been able to undertake a literary research program from the writings I have been interested in across the world, and to develop greater knowledge in my own culture’s storytelling traditions. I also feel very honoured that I was able to work with my good friend, the late Aboriginal visionary leader Tracker Tilmouth, to produce Tracker, a new non-fiction book about him. Tracker is a monument of his thinking about many of the important stories of our times and will be published by Giramondo in November 2017.

Recently I was asked to talk about what had inspired me to write Carpentaria after not speaking about the book for a long time. Reflecting on what I had said earlier about its inspiration, I thought I had such a clear vision for this book. I knew what I wanted to achieve. This reflection was quite troubling because I started to wonder about what had happened to the person I once was. The one who had written this book. She seemed long gone.

I do not feel like I am the same person anymore. Where was the idealistic person I used to be? The one who knew exactly what to do, who had been so determined to write this book. Who believed anything could be achieved – all it took was the will to do it. This was just like the belief I once had in the creation of Aboriginal self-government in the Northern Territory. Now wouldn’t that have made a better difference than the spite and waste of millions of dollars of the failed and on-going NT Intervention, which is killing the spirit of so many of our people?

Writing to country: further reading My Place, by Sally Morgan Home, by Larissa Behrendt Talking to My Country, by Stan Grant Benang, by Kim Scott Ghost River, by Tony Birch Swallow the Air, by Tara June Winch Mullumbimby, by Melissa Lucashenko Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, by Doris Pilkington

The difficulty of writing Carpentaria never really caused me to doubt my belief in myself. How great the challenge would become was never an issue or, more likely, I had no idea about the scale of the challenge in the first place. I just went ahead. The clear vision I had for Carpentaria was that it would celebrate our heroes in the Gulf country, because I have always admired the strengths of our people. This is what I wanted the world to know, about who we were. That we were people of high culture. That we were so much more than how we were demonised as anti-mining and un-Australian because of our opposition to the destruction of sacred sites, and our desire for a fairer economic share from the resources that would be extracted from our land in the development of the Century mine.

I felt that I was living in parallel worlds when I was writing this book but possible worlds nevertheless, where anything could be achieved. The real world of the difficult and heartbreaking work of vision and hope to hold our world together, and the imaginary world of the book and its heroes moving with the same purposeful intent across the landscape of our traditional domain.

Now the world of reality seems more impenetrable than fiction, and is moving further and faster in the opposite direction to many of the things that I once thought were possible. I now find that I have to make the same energies go much further to achieve greater challenges, to hold a work together in the language of art.

Alexis Wright is appearing at the Brisbane writers festival 9-10 September. Find out more about her sessions here. Carpentara has inspired the artist Gordon Hookey to create an immersive artwork experience at the festival, Angel’s Palace. Watch a timelapse video of the creation of Angel’s Palace: