The Australian book you've finally got time for: Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick-a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between.
When you’re feeling as if you’re already living in a place called Desperance, you might as well go immerse yourself in that fictional – but oh so real – town featured in Alexis Wright’s tome, Carpentaria. First though, you’ll need a span of time to truly and deeply engage with this oral story turned epic novel. Don’t be intimidated by 519 pages, it really couldn’t have been trimmed – this is the whole truthful story of the Pricklebush mob set in Gulf of Carpentaria, on the author’s Waanyi country.
Related: The big book about small town Australia that travelled the world
The last time I read Carpentaria was 2007, just before I attended a literary lunch in Sydney. I can’t remember who threw it or the context, but I remember two distinct moments. The first was a slightly strange conversation I had with a woman who was somehow privy to that year’s yet-to-be announced Miles Franklin Award winner. Around dessert she confided that Carpentaria had won our country’s greatest literary award, slugged her wine and swore me to secrecy.
The second incident was not long afterward: running into aunty Alexis Wright in the elevator, just us two, and me immediately blurting out that she’d won. “Nooo,” I remember her saying, thinking I was kidding her, but I was so insistent in my conviction, that – perhaps as we were passing level four, descending to three – I held out my arm and knighted her as the Miles Franklin winner.
At ground level we spilled out the doors giggling. I don’t know if she believed me, but there you have it: my tablemate was right.
I’ve just read Carpentaria again, 13 years later, and perhaps I’m only realising now how much it had, over a decade ago, gotten into the marrow of my bones. This novel will change you, as long as you have the guts to read all the way through.
It does take a certain determination I think to trust the book pays off in a big way; there is so much that the characters need to tell you, and Mozzie Fishman, Angel Day, Norm Phantom, Will Phantom, Joseph Midnight, Girlie, Bala and the rest of the mob are scrambling to be heard.
To prepare: tear down your calendars, disable your phone’s clock, your complete understanding of before and now and after – because to give up those constraints of chronology will help you to float from Uptown, through the narrative, en route a stream that Wright had all intentions of setting you on, into the broken heart of the land to view the dispossession of ancestral country from the elements.
Dream and reality blend, and time bends, and everything occurred even if it never happened. The history she is in conversation with, and the people who litter the distances, are complicated, and messy and loving, and spiteful – but you stand in the brine up to your ankles, always with them, the whole journey.
Related: ‘I had to be manic’: Tara June Winch on her unmissable new novel – and surviving Andrew Bolt
The writing is the best in the country, some of the best in the world; we call to mind Alexis Wright when they talk about our country’s great literary voice. But I think few have really read, read her.
If you want to engage with our story for the first time, because you’re reading the room and it all feels too real, the reality you’ve been ignoring – then begin here. It’s as timely as it ever was.
When the policeman came, the Phantom kids cringed like dogs, with their backs flat against the walls, trying to attain a powerless invisibility. Immobilised by fear of being seen, they listened to their thumping hearts race when they watched their father being taken away.
• Tara June Winch will be joining Christos Tsiolkas for Guardian Australia’s book club on Zoom on Friday June 12 at 1pm AEST. The theme of this month’s event, hosted by Michael Williams and presented by Australia @ Home, is the Australian book you should read next; click here to register
• Tara June Winch’s The Yield was selected as one of Guardian Australia’s Unmissable books of 2019. The Unmissables series is supported by the Copyright Agency
