Praise for Praiseworthy

A big picture of a big book. Seven hundred and twenty three pages. I bought it as soon as it came out – I loved Wright’s Carpentaria and enjoyed Tracker. But I knew it would take energy and commitment to read it, so it’s taken me this long to finally do so. Conscientiously avoiding all the rave reviews – I like to make my own mind up without being influenced by others – as it won prize after prize. Deservedly so I discovered. It’s a masterpiece. Straight away it reminded me of James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is the same profusion of words strung together in beautiful long sentences evoking visceral responses.

The whole novel overflows with ideas and emotions responding to past and future issues about Australia’s engagement with Aboriginal Australia. Here described in all its fulsomeness. The book is full of idiosyncratic characters whose streams of consciousness and dreams carry the story forward. Along the way we learn lots of factual information about the country, animals, insects, cultural references and much more.

It reads as though written in a white hot rage about the failure of White Australia to come to grips with anything about Indigenous Australians. A lack of knowledge of, and willingness and capacity to do anything about Indigenous disadvantage. The continuing failure and perversity of programs meant to address that disadvantage. And a complete lack of interest in, let alone understanding, of Aboriginal culture.

So alongside the deeply depressing litany of failed approaches in Aboriginal Affairs we get beautiful invocations of that culture: the importance of country, totems, ancestor spirits, ancestral creators still living throughout the continent, of old wisdom knowledge, of language, customs and tribal lore.

All of this is laid out in beautiful Joycean sentences that run on and on and in paragraphs sometimes pages long. While a page without punctuation looks daunting there are literary gems throughout. I wanted to underline phrase after phrase. Poetic language.

Joycean displays of erudition abound. As when I read Ulysses I had a dictionary on hand to look up words like: ‘aeviternity’, ‘confectum’, ‘apotropaic lacunose’, ‘vespertine’. And lots more. And the same lists and information about things that dominate Ulysses. I loved the way different styles of language were woven together – the vernacular, the pompous, the local Indigenous idioms and Indigenous language. Lots of classical allusions to music, opera and cultural references like these gods of the sea: the goddess Maz who protects sea travellers, sailors and fishermen, the Irish sea world of Lir, Zhu Rong dwelling in the dragon’s lair of the South China Sea, Long Wandg the Dragon King, in the Shinto Sea the sea god Watatsumi.

And Joycean repetition, often ironic as in this excerpt considering how Aboriginal Australians experience equality – in their experience of being broken. Poverty broken. Broken generators. Broken homes. Broken emotions. Broken ties. Broken culture. Broken land. Broken people. Broken love? Broken joy? Race broken. A broken state of affairs.

And while the themes are heavy and rage notwithstanding, it’s all executed in a light, sometimes even frivolous, way. Pop culture and classical references are in the mix and all sorts of language: formal English, local vernacular, Indigenous idioms. A lot of it is very funny.

Titles and names reflect a Joycean humour. Starting with the town itself; is the book a paean of praise to the town of Praiseworthy or is the name ironic? The townspeople are writ large with all their very human foibles and idiosyncrasies identified. Manipulated this way and that. Quite ready to adopt officially sanctioned causes; to believe rumours and conspiracy theories; to pursue individual agendas and rivalries. But thankfully, injecting a measure of hope by books end, resistant to the worst overtures, preferring age-old common sense to populist exhortations.

Much fun is had with the pernicious influence of evangelical churches vying for the souls of the inhabitants: The whole place had become giddy in its devotion to off-grid religions …These new-style, all-swinging rah-rah churches … were very fashionable for the times … the choice of multitude holy places enriching their fabric and even camouflaging the old laws. The quick smart became ultra-competitive while rattling their fusible pedagogues with the contemptuous cacology of devotional language.

There’s a lot of anger expressed towards so-called experts including: an anthropologist who seemed to have developed hate and spite in his heart from his years of building his reputation and career from studying Aboriginal people, which had made him more an expert on their lives than they knew themselves .. the rioting media lauded it, when he said, ‘that they were racially wired back to front and hell-bent on being a failure. All of which is contrary to the experience of the citizens of Praiseworthy.

The story opens with the town in crisis. A haze has descended upon them. Origin and cause unknown. Perhaps reflecting the depth of disadvantage suffered by the Aboriginal townspeople, perhaps all those failed government initiatives, perhaps a harbinger of the climate apocalypse to come. It’s a struggle to get government to do anything and when action is finally taken all attempts to disperse the haze fail. An analogy to be sure.

Apart from the haze which continues to feature in the story the townspeople are facing two distinct choices for moving forward. Our protagonist Cause Man Steel sees economic independence as the way to go. He’s seeking to establish an Aboriginal owned and operated business, with no reliance on government, aimed at addressing the inevitable climate crisis that is to come. His adopted name acknowledges the power wielded by steel manufacturers and shipping magnates. He’s also known as Planet because he’s always talking about planetary stuff like climate change and Widespread because of the breadth of his ideas. He sees himself engaged in a one-person political stealth campaign of saving morons by establishing a multi-dimensional donkey transport empire for when fossil fuels are no longer available.

To do this he’s collecting a herd of donkeys that is increasingly causeing havoc in the town. A lot of the novel is devoted to describing him driving across country in search of a special platinum coloured donkey to lead his team. Wonderful descriptions of the landscape. He was following song paths through ancestral spirit charged saltbush marshes, dry gidgee country, mulga scrub, lightning and thunder worlds, oceans of pale-lemon spinifex plains and ironbark forests.

He’s described by the promoter of another way forward – that of assimilation – as a type that kills his own people, like children, with dreams that do not work, and never would. Ice Pick is the Mayor of Praiseworthy. He’s also called, increasingly ironically, Major Mayor, described as an albino, white as vanilla ice-cream even with white eye-balls. He’ sees his job as running the show and orchestrating everybody else’s business from the humane to the economical. With a direct line to the Federal Government’s Minister for Aboriginals and her advisors, he’s foisting on the townspeople a Forward Plan the purpose of which is to move the entire Aboriginal world of grief into white prosperity. He self describes himself as working my guts out to shape your acceptance by white Australia so we can at last all be one people under one Australian law. He hammers home his view – You know what? Assimilation will be good for you – in early morning broadcasts to which, wisely, few people listen and fewer are persuaded.

Cause Man Steel’s wife is Dance, also Moth-er – who’s part Chinese background (real or rumoured) gives rise to an exploration of who determines who is truly Aboriginal. She’s obsessed with butterflies and moths which become a central motif in the book, giving rise to many lyrical passages. Butterflies – all the glasswings, Carpentaria pearl-whites, yellow grass skippers, the cabbage whites and the strikingly marked black-and-white wings of the citrus swallowed butterflies – were dancing their ceremonies and forming aerial rivers above the leaf-broken, insect-chewed, cobweb-covered dry grass. Very Joycean.

Dance is the antithesis to her husband, down to earth, practical as against his dreaming man. While she has her own dreaming, she spends most of her time looking after hearth and home – feeding donkeys – while he’s on the road. The relationship between the two of them is beautifully realised – long-term, warts and all. They correspond telepathically.

The book’s cover portrays the flight of the tiny, yellow Eurema smilax butterfly. It was thought, these butterflies came back to the ancestors, and they were multiplying in tens of millions while reliving an eternal memory in a lemon- dancing haze becoming the ancestral serpent’s gigantic body, stretching over the land and passing through [Dance] crossing into faraway horizons. … a mesmerising yellow sea … drawing Dance into it’s enchantment hypnotising her in its story-making ceremonies of enrapturing country.

Dance and Cause Man Steel have claimed Native Title over land on which the Praiseworthy cemetery is located which is disputed by the rest of the town. Giving rise to the author’s sardonic comments about at the Native Title industry. Many sacred shibboleths are mocked in this magnum opus – activists, symbols, slogans.

The battle between the so-called dreamers and the assimilationists comes to the fore over the fate of the first born son of Cause Man Steel and Dance. He’s named, at his fathers behest – as advised by the ancestors who have come to him in a dream, Aboriginal Sovereignty, called AbSov for short. So named so he’d remember who he was, and this land under their feet was nobody else’s Native Title country. He’s a favoured son of Praiseworthy.

He could dance. The old mungkuji countrymen said that this Aboriginal Sovereignty had the ancestors dancing in him. Country mangayi right inside him, dancing through him. Him true jamba. While he has always practiced his country spirit dance like he was the law personified, the real business, when we meet him he does not dance so much anymore. He looked lost, as though he had forgotten where he had left his spirit. As expected late in the novel his name becomes shorthand for the whole concept of Aboriginal Sovereignty. But in the meantime Ab Sov is caught in the no-mans land between Aboriginal customary law and Australia’s white justice system. At 16 he’s slept with his 14 year old promised wife – an act she sought, worried another girl would snafffle him up. In the eyes of Praiseworthy they’re already married.

It’s his younger brother who’s reported him to the police. There’s no love lost by anyone on 8 year old Tommyhawk Steel, described as a bloody little fascist by his father. His descent into paranoia about paedophilia amongst Aboriginal men makes up a large part of the book. He heard the message coming directly to him in endless political diatribes describing his situation on the radio, TV, or on the internet, where all these people were actually talking about him in the singular, and drumming it into his thick head how much he was at risk living in an Aboriginal community. … Watch it kid because you are living where all the paedophiles roam… the white people were saying … he was living in a totally dysfunctional world crawling with paedophiles. It’s very upsetting reading.

It infects the whole of Praiseworthy. In the paedophilia era of belief running through the mind of national Australia, the story was that everywhere you looked in an Aboriginal community you would find a paedophile. … Police came into their homes looking for paedophiles and the whole town went through each other’s homes looking for paedophiles and could not find any, and being people who could see what was not there, found it very challenging that they could not find a black paedophile. The army came looking for abused children in every house.

Even the insects had grown accustomed to the sound of the chattering classes on repeat booming across the graves and down to the mangrove forests, speed-talking about all the paedophiles rampant in Aboriginal communities where those Aboriginal parents did not love their children, and all Aboriginal men were violent. And the chorus – wait for it – why should they have special rights.

The language in the book becomes fiercer as we near the conclusion. The black father killer, the John Howard image imprinted on the brain of the Australian citizenry. Ice Pick himself takes up the mantra in daily broadcasts to the citizens of Praiseworthy.

Having been told he no longer dances, we now we see Aboriginal Sovereignty attempting suicide by walking into the sea. Tommyhawk is on hand to watch, willing the deed to be done. There are long descriptive passages following the boy in the sea and hearing his brother’s increasingly unhinged monologue seeking to be saved from this hostile environment by the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. He’s sending increasingly frenzied texts to the Minister’s mobile phone which eventually give rise to political manoeuvring in Canberra.

When AbSov has finally disappeared from view everything is changed. The act has awakened the spirit country: Every resting ancestor that had ever existed on this place was awoken from eternal sleep, rising up from their resting places in country, and assembling their powers in a deep trough forming an atmospheric weather phenomenon in the enormity of its build -up…. Once these spirit storms created out of this freak weather were on the hunt, it was not easy to put them back into their resting places. Their stories were countless, too epical to be recalled right there and then by an inconsequential human mind. The charge in the air was too powerful, and as the almighty creature of electrical storms moved through country a weather system was developing with it, gigantic dark clouds spinning with lightning and thunder like a colossal war taking place through the sky.

We are then taken back to why Aboriginal Sovereignty has done this. He’s been interrogated by police and his experience in the police’s hands is hard reading. Ending with this passage – so powerful I quote it in full: Afterwards, When Aboriginal Sovereignty had been accused countless times in the police station of being a hostile dirty old paedophile savage, he ceased to exist, he was no longer the sun, for he was being reimagined, his body parts cast into nothingness. He was dead to this world. Eyes sockets bloodied, pushed into the back of his head. Don’t worry. He would not see you looking at him. And you do not really see a skinny kid crumpled on the floor for the blood, so much blood from skin and bones. What was left? Nothing except all this bloodiness? No. He was being personified by the imagination the nation-state, the dull dirty lens of Australian folk law. Yep! He was the ethnological story. He fed the hunger. Fattened the mudslinger’s narrative of racial vilification. He was the paedophile savage. You know what happens then you throw enough mud? Hallelujah! Well! Song at last. Some dirty old black paedophile had been captured. Oh! Rest in peace. Success and vindication at last. The national narrative strengthened at the total cost of billions of dollars to hold back the tide of black justice through a simple illusion of fear, the dreaded uprising of the soul, the spirit of black savages attacking Australian domesticity.

The impact of the death of AbSov on the whole community takes up the remainder of the novel. His body is not found and in its absence rumours swirl, searchers – both volunteers and finally registered, official ones – arrive. The whole episode becomes a national event involving the Government, who want it closed down. Ice Pick does their bidding. The descriptions of his parents’ reactions are heart breaking.

Dance’s mind was somewhere else entirely … speeding away through the swarming mosquitoes and the old fraying wing feathers of migrating swallows diving through the air above the graves and even murmuring her thoughts were gone, departed, far off and could only be seen as a magnificent storm aura spreading through the atmosphere in its twisting and bending speed, puncturing the air with enough force that its vibrations reach back to the cemetery, trips mosquitoes, disorients the swallows’ flight over the graves and sends them crashing to the ground.

Towards the end of the book we find ourselves back in the sea near where AbSov committed suicide. It’s hard to explain without spoilers but makes sense in the context of the novel. I’m including it here because the writing is so beautiful. The whole section is called The Cargo Shifter, and we start on an ageing fishing boat slung low in the sea … the kind of vessel that hid by day, camouflaging itself behind the swells …This was the world of another kind of master cargo shifter, a ghost man of the ocean on board this ailing junk boat that was not his, he was the type of man who hauled human cargo around by asking no questions, and giving no answers. … The cargo shifter knew there were already millions of faces like his in the sea, people who had long ago abandoned the homeland face, the father’s face, the face of country, race, honour, love or history. His was just another face of the worldliness coming hard on the heels of the era, a disposable humanity claimed only by oceans and the sun above. The old sea slug crept through the crepuscular gloominess of the advancing night, while the ailing motor’s chugging barely kept up the task of carrying its crowded human cargo, packed on the deck like sardines. … He may have been out of touch with modern reality of giving up what weighs too much, of travelling light without responsibilities for anyone else, for the era was too unprecedented, and unable to weigh up what it was that was expendable, or question what was worth saving … there were too many people to save, and you know what? There were not many people left doing the saving.

In the last sections of the book we see the townspeople reject the worst of Ice Pick’s attempts at assimilation. We learn what’s happened to all of the characters and whether Cause Man Steel’s transport conglomeration has eventuated. I’m not sure I understood the ending. It’s not really the point. The journey to the conclusion is so rich in language and ideas. Read it and understand.

I was delighted to read this extract from the literary magazine HEAT where Alexis Wright talks about how she wrote the book. Unlike what I imagined – a quick outpouring of rage and knowledge – the novel took years to write. Another example of her wonderful way with language.

I have struggled to capture the experience of reading this wonderful book. This review from The Guardian does a better job.