'In this brilliant debut novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page. Black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic's mission. With her political awareness raised by work with the city-based Aboriginal Coalition, Mary visits the old mission in the northern Gulf country, place of her mother's and grandmother's suffering. Mary's return reignites community anxieties, and the Council of Elders again turn to their spirit world.' (From the publisher's website.)
'Settler Australians always ask what First Nations Australians have done in Australia. This address turns the lens to my largely settler audience and asks how far you have come in your engagements with us in literary and textual spaces, and in Australian popular culture in the last three decades. In the minds of many settler Australians, the Country’s First Peoples live between a series of calendar events – 1788, 1967, 1992, 2008, and 2017. Between the lip service given to invasions/discoveries, referendums, national apologies, and royal commissions, the lives and lived histories of First Nations Australians are largely terra incognito to many settler Australians. Yet in between, beyond and underneath these events exists a language of constraint and civility symptomatic of the ongoing Australian (dis)ease – evasion. This address offers a First Nations perspective on the language and politics of evasion in some settler texts in post-Mabo Australia, and suggests pathways and protocols for future engagements with and interpretations of First Nations writing.' (Publication abstract)
'The Mabo decision in 1992 was a turning point for Australia. It finally overturned the dishonest doctrine of terra nullius and recognised Indigenous land rights. It was a moment of hope, accompanied by a productive tension.' (Introduction)
'Literature by Indigenous Australians - the voice from the heart - is the true core of the Australian canon, writes Geordie Williamson The ur-text of the Australian canon appeared just over two centuries ago, in 1819, when First Fruits of Australian Poetry by Barron Field, a Supreme Court judge of New South Wales with literary pretensions, was published in Sydney.' (Introduction)
'The Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright has developed a novelistic oeuvre that experiments with written forms of fiction, and paints an Aboriginal universe that does not need European epistemology to sustain itself. Rather, it questions western values, certainties, and convictions and problematizes the western way of seeing and doing in the island-continent. Her latest novel, The Swan Book, in manifesting its spiritual and mystical connections to the holistic universe known as the Dreamtime, foregrounds this epistemological turn, which is premised on the ontological relationship Aboriginal people have with “Country,” their traditional land. Alexis Wright’s fiction, which she herself has called an instance of “Aboriginal reality” or “Aboriginal realism,” as opposed to magic realism, is an epic tour de force that juxtaposes the Indigenous and European traditions in startling ways but also speaks across a cultural divide – the discursive gap between colonized and colonizer, belonging and non-belonging, assimilation and sovereignty – which this essay will address.' (Publication abstract)