Kim Mahood Kim Mahood i(A66441 works by)
Born: Established: 1953 ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 3 y separately published work icon Wandering with Intent Kim Mahood , Carlton North : Scribe , 2022 24823830 2022 selected work essay

'To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

'In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia, where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention — art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.

'At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.' (Publication summary)

1 A Din of Competing Noise : Confronting History at Tennant Creek Kim Mahood , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 442 2022; (p. 16-17)

— Review of Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence Dean Ashenden , 2022 single work autobiography

'In Telling Tennant’s StoryDean Ashenden gives a lucid, succinct, eminently readable account of the reasons why Australia as a nation continues to struggle with how to acknowledge and move beyond its past. Travelling north to visit Tennant Creek for the first time since leaving it as a boy in 1955, Ashenden is provoked to question the absence of shared histories on the monuments and tourist information boards along the route. Mostly, the signs record pioneer history, from which the Indigenous people are absent. When the Indigenous story is invoked, it records traditional practices and does not mention white people. ‘How did they get from then to now?’ he muses. ‘Just don’t mention the war.’' (Introduction)

1 A Different Kind of Loneliness : The Story of Two Complex Australian Women Kim Mahood , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 430 2021; (p. 9-10)

— Review of Into the Loneliness : The Unholy Alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates Eleanor Hogan , 2021 single work biography

'Into the Loneliness is the story of two Australian women, opposites in temperament, who eschewed the conventional roles expected of women of their eras, lived unconventional lives, and produced books that influenced the culture and imagination of twentieth-century Australia. The book focuses on their complicated friendship, and on Ernestine Hill’s role in assisting Daisy Bates to produce the manuscript that was published in 1938 as The Passing of the Aborigines, which became a bestseller in Australia and Britain. Hill, a successful and popular journalist, organised the anthropological material and ghost-wrote much of the book, for which Bates privately expressed her gratitude, while not acknowledging it publicly.' (Introduction)

1 Tjanima’s Story : A Parable of Redemption through Family Kim Mahood , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , January–February no. 428 2021; (p. 20)

— Review of Tjanimaku Tjukurpa : How One Young Man Came Good Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunjtjatjara Women's Council , 2020 single work short story
1 Lost and Found in Translation : Who Can Talk to Country? Kim Mahood , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , January no. 63 2019; (p. 29-46)

'Unlike many city-dwelling Australians, the desert holds no terrors for me. Instead, like DH Lawrence, I find the cathedral forests of the coastal regions oppressive and disquieting. Lawrence brought to his descriptions of the Australian bush the same overwrought sensitivity that created the claustrophobic emotional landscape of 'Sons and Lovers', and the appalling, majestic insularity of the Italian mountain village in 'The Lost Girl'. He was the writer who made explicit the sense of some non-human presence in the Antipodean landscape, and while I have a different interpretation of the 'speechless, aimless solitariness' he attributes to the country, his instincts were good.'  (Publication abstract)

 

1 Reconciliation with Place and Self Kim Mahood , 2018 single work review
— Appears in: Arena Magazine , December / January no. 157 2018-2019; (p. 49-50)

'The blurb on the back of Christos Tsiolkas’ impassioned personal meditation on the work of Patrick White claims that White ‘…recognised, through his own alienation and his profound love for his partner, that we were a migrant, mongrel nation forging our own culture and our own language’.' (Introduction)

1 Honey Ant Country Kim Mahood , 2018 single work prose
— Appears in: The Monthly , October no. 149 2018; (p. 13-14)

'The route to Papunya from Alice Springs, via Glen Helen Gorge and the Western Macdonnell Ranges,, takes you through colour-saturated country fractured with geological upheavalsk sculpted by wind and water, scored and scoured by time. A crenellated horizontal strip of dark red dolomite, in places barely a metre thick, stalks along the foothills of the ranges like a horde of migrating stegosaurs. In the distance is the dark blue bulk of Mount Sonder: the Sleeping Woman likes prone and splayed, a vast fertility goddess with breasts and flanks cleft with indigo shadows.' (Introduction)

1 The Left-Handed Self i "See, when I hand the pen", Kim Mahood , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 May no. 86 2018;
1 'The Cryptic Residue of Former Worlds' : Tracing One of History's Great Narratives Kim Mahood , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 400 2018; (p. 38-39)

'In Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, Billy Griffiths describes the process of imagining the past through the traces and sediments of archaeology as ‘an act of wonder – a dilation of the commonplace – that challenges us to infer meaning from the cryptic residue of former worlds’. In his endeavour to infer meaning from this cryptic residue, Griffiths begins his wondering by sifting through the evidence, insights, enthusiasms, and mistakes of an articulate band of Cambridge-trained archaeologists who, from the 1960s, professionalised what had been the province of amateurs. Led by John Mulvaney, they halted the indiscriminate gathering of artefacts and human remains, brought rigorous techniques to the excavation of sites, and began to strip back the layers of time, aeon by aeon, to reveal the astonishing antiquity of human presence on the Australian continent.' (Introduction)

1 Evelyn Clancy and Kim Mahood Kim Mahood (interviewer), 2016 single work prose
— Appears in: Desert Writing : Stories from Country 2016; (p. 57-61)
1 Monica and Kim Mahood Kim Mahood (interviewer), 2016 single work interview
— Appears in: Desert Writing : Stories from Country 2016; (p. 39-41)
1 Introduction - Writing from the Desert - Paruku Kim Mahood , 2016 single work essay
— Appears in: Desert Writing : Stories from Country 2016; (p. 27-32)
'The Australian desert is a more complicated place than it used to be. There was a time when it functioned in the white Australian imagination more as a metaphor than a real place, a negative space into which explorers, white children and the occasional eccentric wanderer disappeared, leaving a frisson of existential anxiety and a satisfying conviction that the heart of the continent remained an impenetrable mystery. Its nomadic occupants, for the most part invisible, were stone age remnants - innocent, bloodthirsty, fabulous and doomed.' (Introduction, 27)
1 12 y separately published work icon Position Doubtful : Mapping Landscapes and Memories Kim Mahood , Brunswick : Scribe , 2016 9189112 2016 single work autobiography

'Imagine the document you have before you is not a book, but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears, and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter.

'For the past twenty years, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to roam the harsh and beautiful desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional landowners; the mining companies have arrived; and Indigenous art has flourished.

'By immersing herself in the life of a small community and its art centre, and in her ground-breaking mapping projects, Mahood has been seeking to understand her own place in the country she loves, and to find a bridge across the fault line between the profoundly disparate cultures that inhabit it.

'Position Doubtful is a meditation on that experience. Containing astonishing writing about art and landscape, it is a beautiful and intense exploration of memory and homecoming. Written with great energy, insight, and humour, Position Doubtful is a unique portrait of black-and-white relations in contemporary Australia.' (Publication summary)

1 White Stigma Kim Mahood , 2015 single work column
— Appears in: The Monthly , August no. 114 2015; (p. 50-51)
1 Into the Void Kim Mahood , 2013- single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , April 2013;

— Review of Belomor Nicolas Rothwell , 2013 single work prose
1 2 y separately published work icon Desert Lake : Art, Science and Stories from Paruku Kim Mahood (editor), Mandy Martin (editor), John Carty (editor), Steve Morton (editor), Collingwood : CSIRO Publishing , 2013 6889219 2013 anthology non-fiction

'Desert Lake is a book combining artistic, scientific and Indigenous views of a striking region of north-western Australia. Paruku is the place that white people call Lake Gregory. It is Walmajarri land, and its people live on their Country in the communities of Mulan and Billiluna.This is a story of water. When Sturt Creek flows from the north, it creates a massive inland Lake among the sandy deserts. Not only is Paruku of national significance for waterbirds, but it is has also helped uncover the past climatic and human history of Australia.The Walmajarri people of Paruku understand themselves in relation to Country, a coherent whole linking the environment, the people and the Law that governs their lives. These understandings are encompassed by the Waljirri or Dreaming and expressed through the songs, imagery and narratives of enduring traditions. "Desert Lake" is embedded in this broader vision of Country and provides a rich visual and cross-cultural portrait of an extraordinary part of Australia.' (Source: TROVE)

1 The Accident Kim Mahood , 2013 single work short story
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 355 2013;
1 The River Kim Mahood , 2013 extract autobiography (Position Doubtful : Mapping Landscapes and Memories)
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2013; Meanjin , Winter vol. 72 no. 2 2013; (p. 170-181)
1 [Essay] : The Tall Man Kim Mahood , 2013 single work essay
— Appears in: Reading Australia 2013-;

'On the morning of November 19th, 2004, an Aboriginal man named Cameron Doomadgee died in a prison cell on Palm Island, off the coast of North Queensland. He had been arrested less than an hour earlier by Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, for being drunk and causing a public nuisance. A post mortem revealed that he died as a result of a burst portal vein and a split liver; injuries of the sort that normally occur only in high impact accidents. Throughout the inquest and trial that followed, Chris Hurley maintained that he had not assaulted Cameron Doomadgee. Through a controversial series of legal processes he was found to have a case to answer and charged with assault and manslaughter — the first time in Australia that a police officer had been charged over an Aboriginal death in custody. He stood trial and was acquitted by a Townsville jury in June of 2007.' (Introduction)

1 Blow-Ins on the Cold Desert Wind Kim Mahood , 2012 extract essay (Blow-Ins on the Cold Desert Wind)
— Appears in: The Invisible Thread : One Hundred Years of Words 2012; (p. 204-213)
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