Carpentaria was launched by Jaqui Katona and Murrandoo Yanner at the Brisbane Writers' Festival on 15 September, with Katona saying that she found it ‘fiction that redefines the political landscape' as well as being ‘a legacy for a younger generation for the struggle before them', and ‘a story that I hope will sustain my kids.' She also referred to the ‘political debt to the Gulf with the campaigns against mining,' in which Yanner has of course been prominent. Wright talked of one of her central concerns in writing the novel as being the question of: ‘How do you mend the broken line – the effect of colonisation?'

 

Wright's earlier novel, Plains of Promise, focussed upon three generations of women and their emergence from reserves and missions. The quest of Eliot, who travels off to seek for, but not find, the answer to the curse that seems to be on the mission becomes in Carpentaria several wanderings and quests, engaged in almost exclusively by male characters. Generally the female characters in this text are quite peripheral to the action, and one in particular one might have liked more of is Angel Day - in the view of her husband, Normal Phantom, ‘a hornet's nest waiting to be disturbed' (13). They live on the edge of the town rubbish dump - in even more straitened circumstances than the poor whites in Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry in that Angel has created her home entirely out of it. They belong to one of the four groups in the town of Desperance, the Westside mob. Joseph Midnght controls the Eastside mob; they claim to be the original traditional owners and have invented the name of Wangabiyas for themselves. There is also an Uptown crew of whites represented by the Mayor Stan Bruiser who considers ‘If you can't use it, eat it, or fuck it, it's no use to you…. Everyone in town knew how he bragged about how he had chased every Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground and raped them' (35). The fourth group is the old people of the Pricklebush, who watch and sing but are largely disregarded by the others.

 

Apart from epic heroic quests and struggles there is also a burlesque humour. The local cop, Truthful, like Bruiser is depicted with a carnivalesque excess similar to Vivienne Cleven's in Bitin' Back (given rein to even more in the the play than the novel). There is also a dry ironic humour at many points, in almost throwaway lines. such as the passage about Joseph Midnight's being responsible for the plague of cane toads because he brought them in so they could get the fifty cent bounty for catching them. Midnight agreed to the establishment of the mine for money and ‘This was what he got for his native title rights. Money to shoot all the pigs.' Far from this curbing the feral pig problem, ‘He let his useless relatives take all the little baby piglets home for pets and they bred up ten piglets each' (53).

 

Desperance (desperate hope, that the novel attributes to Matthew Flinders in inventing it as his middle name) is renamed Masterton by the state government, but every time the ‘disinterested proletarians of the Main Roads Department' arrive in the town to erect signs designating it as Masterton, the locals pull them down. This means, of course, that ‘strangers only had a snowflake's chance in hell of finding their way around these parts' (60).

The novel works at many levels, through from this humour and irony to a lyrical and poetic evocation of the age-old presence of the rainbow serpent. The shifts in register produce a heteroglossia that is beautifully unified through a narration that has great confidence and authority.

 

In the early part of the novel, the arrival of bemused and unseeing white Europeans is allegorically re-enacted by the emergence of the figure of Elias from the sea. Another periodic arrival in town is Mozzie Fishman, with his cavalcade, or ‘crusade' of people in old, dust-covered cars, ‘totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony from thousands of creation stories for the guardians of Gondwanaland' (124). Norm Phantom is a friend of his, although ‘a follower of spirits out in the sea' (129), and although his wife Angel leaves Desperance with him.

 

Norm's son Will is involved in the fight for land rights and against the Gurfurrit mine, but ‘talking like Che Guevara made the huffy people's hair on the top of their heads stand straight up on end. A chill ran right down their backs. So! Without saying a word, because the meek do not speak, they went heave-ho, in favour of chucking out wildness' (392). Nonetheless, eventually the mine buildings all go up in flames, with some help from Fishman and a whirly wind.

 

Towards the end of the novel the whole town of Desperance is destroyed by a cyclone. Will is left by it on a floating island of debris and rubbish, that is eventually to turn into an actual island. Norm is at sea for 40 days with Hope and Bala, Will's son; when they land again Hope disappears to search for Will, and Norm and his grandson return alone to the wrecked town inhabited only by a few dogs, with Norm planning to ‘rebuild on the same piece of land where his old house had been, among the spirits in the remains of the ghost town, where the snake slept underneath' with ‘song wafting off the watery land, singing the country afresh' (519).

 

It is impossible in a review to do justice to the brilliance of this extraordinary novel and I can only urge you to buy it and read it. Giramondo Press are to be congratulated for publishing it, in times when publishers are hostile to big works. This is a very big novel both in its size and in its qualities and it should win lots of prizes.

 

Carole Ferrier teaches in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland. She is editor of Hecate and editor or author of many books and articles on Australian authors and literature.