from the editor's desk
Noble Praise
Robert Wood
Alexis Wright won both this year’s Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Prize for her monumental novel Praiseworthy. On the Editor’s Desk, Robert Wood offers a timely reflection on the significance of Wright’s work within Australian publishing, and internationally. You can read a review of Wright’s novel, by Julia Garas, here.
It’s July 2014 and winter in the south. I’ve flown north to the warmth, up here to Gangalidda Garawa Country across a patchwork continent, past country after country, all the way from that Whadjuk town of Perth, stopping after five hours in Brisbane then two hours more to Mount Isa, and then hopping in a car for another five hours to Moungibi/Burketown. I have spent the whole day sitting down, must be sixteen hours in total, maybe more—what it takes for people from Melbourne to fly to LA, or perhaps San Francisco if you are booked all the way trough.
I am in Burketown with a teacher of mine. We have come to the Gulf for a ‘conference’ with Waanyi writer Alexis Wright. I say it is a ‘conference’, but really it is five or six people who work at universities that have travelled here, to understand the country that Wright writes through. It is a long way to come for three or four days, but the food is provided and they have a free tea station at the bed and breakfast where the conference takes place. I am just down the road at the local campground, in a tent I brought myself, with a pocket full of change that I use at the phone booth to call home, just to tell my mum that I have safely landed here, in a place familiar yet distant too.
We spend time talking and eating together, go out to where the old Chinese market garden used to be, come back and listen to Wright. On the second night, local leader Murandoo Yanner stops by and takes us out fishing; we stand in knee-deep water, silhouettes in the yellow light cast from the motoring troopy, failing to spear fish, talking and laughing too, gaining stories to return home with. At one point, in half shadow, Yanner’s shirt is off, wrapped round his head, and you can see a snake on his side moving towards his chest. It is the same snake on the cover of the first edition of Wright’s breakthrough novel Carpentaria, a character in a fictional book, here in the flesh, on ribs moving up and down with breath.
Yanner tells me about the time the police came by looking for crocodile meat in his freezer, and how he fought the case all the way to the High Court (Yanner v. Eaton 1999, HCA 53; 201 CLR 351). The Court found in his favour—that he had the right to hunt crocodiles under the Native Title Act of 1993 and that this was not extinguished by the Fauna Conservation Act. It was probably a precedent that protected in-laws and cousin brothers I knew in the Pilbara too, especially when we were there eating goannas or kangaroos. That mattered here in this Country a long way from home as well.
I thought of this moment almost a decade later—Yanner and Wright and Burketown in July 2014—when I was being driven past the High Court of Australia in Canberra. It felt like a full circle moment, but now my bones were cold as I came through the Parliamentary Triangle, flags flying up on the hill as I made my way to the diplomatic streets that radiated outwards, like spokes of a wheel. If I was in sandals and shorts up in Gangalidda Garawa Country, I was now in boots and a suit on Ngunawal and Ngambri land. I was on my way to a meeting with the Swedish Deputy Head of Mission, Per Linnér. For whatever reason, he agreed to see me.
When I arrive, I am buzzed through the gate and walk up the winding driveway to a house that could be on the outskirts of Stockholm itself. They let me in and scan my ID, then I wait with a woman who is applying for a spousal visa with hopes of joining her husband soon. Again, they buzz me through, first going past one set of heavy glass doors, then another, and I am led up a staircase. There is a steaming pot of tea waiting for me, and I am asked to take a seat on the couch—Mr. Linnér will be with me shortly. The room is minimal, airy, light, piney, something you recognise from the Scandinavian noir films on SBS late at night. When he arrives, the diplomat and I talk for a while. He has just come back from watching the FIFA Women’s World Cup, where Sweden played their group games in New Zealand. He is gracious and knowledgeable, and after a while I make a pitch.
‘I am here because I think Alexis Wright should win the Nobel Prize for Literature.’
It is a strange statement to make in person, or even to write down a year after. It is not the reason I am in Canberra, not even the reason I am in this meeting, which is about my work in social cohesion and multiculturalism. And yet, I make the statement nonetheless. I have not spoken to Wright about this, nor to anyone else really. But there it sits, taking up space between us, while I wait for advice and a reply. The diplomat explains the process of the Award to me, goes to great lengths to say it is up to the Swedish Academy, at arm’s length from public servants and politicians. I nod, understanding, and we part on friendly terms, a pot of tea and some bikkies gone, no awkwardness in literature or sport, not when your host is calm throughout.
Some weeks later, I email Wright’s publisher, Ivor Indyk, about this, and write an open letter on the journal I edit, Portside Review. There is a positive response, and I write letters to the Minister and public servants, to funding bodies and others; some offer half-hearted replies, some are not quite sure what to do, or why they have been spoken to like this at all. Literature is not used to lobbyists, let alone those of us who are based in Perth, mere amateurs, imposters, people who don’t take tea with Swedish Ambassadors, and this seems part of a future that might not come to pass.
***
My favourite book of Wright’s is not even one she wrote. It is Take Power: Like This Old Man Here, which she edited for the Central Land Council in 1998. I have read the other books and like them, and think fondly of their scale and language. I know too that Wright will ultimately be remembered as a novelist, as a fictional writer of epic proportion, a person whose ‘sovereignty of imagination’ was best expressed in literature as an art form (Wright, ‘The Inward Migration’ np). Those books, and that public understanding, sit on my shelf. Take Power sits on my desk, which is a different place, precisely because it is active and activist, a work that curates a set of perspectives and ideologies that make material interventions in the world; that effects people and politics, over and above the literary itself.
Wright’s politics ground her novels, but they do not explain them nor necessarily make sense to the readers who have now begun to champion Carpentaria or The Swan Book, or maybe Plains of Promise if you are really keen. It is a politics that cannot simply be assimilated to the ‘national conversation’, not a thing for hollow promises at Garma, or in the morning after failed referendums, nor even judges’ comments for literary prizes. It is the politics of ordinary people, of Aboriginal people governing their communities, of self-determination at the grassroots level. If anything, these politics are the reason I made my statement at the Swedish Embassy in winter 2023, a full decade after visiting Burketown itself.
Weeks after I leave that meeting, I am home in Perth, sitting at my desk, when I see an article online about Number Two, who now has the mantle of being Australia’s oldest Aboriginal man, could be 102 or more. I’ve sat with him in Yandeyarra, heard him sing tjabi, reflected on the 1946 Pilbara Strike with him and eaten bush turkey thanks to the good grace of the Native Title Act of 1993 rather than the Fauna Conservation Act—or, should I say, thanks to his nephews and their eyesight. I read the article and think of Wright once more, think of how to ‘take power like that old man there’.
***
Soon after, Praiseworthy wins both of Australia’s premier literary prizes, the Stella and the Miles Franklin, the first book to do so in the same year, the first author to win both awards twice. The Booker Shortlist is released the same week, but Wright is not on it. Something in the middle class British literary imagination cannot quite make sense of the text, cannot understand what’s been done to the English language to see Wright’s sovereign qualities (or its threat). That might even go for how it is blind to ‘Australian literature’ as a whole, let alone ‘Aboriginal texts’.
Wright is quoted in The Guardian about Praiseworthy shortly after the latest accolade:
‘We [Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians] don’t seem to have that understanding of each other—and over 200 years, we’re no closer to understanding each other,’ says Wright. ‘I wanted to show how complicated it’s becoming, and what happens to people when time and again wrong policy decisions are made … and how much harder it becomes to try to figure out a way forward.’ (qtd. in Jefferson np)
It is a bracing statement, one that seems to both outline why she writes and the limits of literature. That these novels help improve understanding seems obvious enough. That they seek to create an intimacy that is otherwise absent surely helps account for the glowing compliments Praiseworthy has received from white critics in the wintry south. (This would seem to imply that there is growing closeness, even if it has not reached policy level.) And this is where we return to Wright’s politics, to the space under, over, around the novels themselves. It is, perhaps, to be found in a more optimistic quote taken from her Stella acceptance speech earlier in the year, when she said:
I am eternally grateful that my writing career has been guided by my publisher, Giramondo Publishing, for almost two decades. I am indebted to the literary vision of Ivor Indyk. He is a genius and literary hero whose knowledge of literature, readership and publishing is unparalleled. Ivor is recognised and highly respected across the world for his achievements as a publisher. In fact, I believe Ivor is the best publisher in the world. His total dedication, care, and valuing of Praiseworthy right through the publishing process was extraordinary and exemplary. (np)
This has been a twenty-year relationship, a deep collaboration between an [Indigenous] writer and a [non-Indigenous] publisher, an example of what Reconciliation looks like, where it has been a success. If we take politics down from policy, from legislation and referendums, if we look within personal relationships, even within families, if we make it legible as an intimacy we all share, then we will recognise that our closeness is ongoing. A work in progress, a collaboration that matters.
That is the space that novels, and their publication, reception and circulation, open up for us. This is about writing and reading as dedicated acts that make good things happen, and it reveals collaborative processes in service to an understanding born of desire and art, even necessity. By Wright and Indyk’s very example, we might begin to see a proof of concept, not art to be instrumentalised by politicians, not novels used as tools in culture wars, but as places of complex thought that can teach us lessons about where ideology can go and where activism can too, when we get the language as right as we know. Wright’s great contribution then has been to start mapping this with beauty and fury in equal measure. For that alone, she not only deserves a place in our collective heart, but surely eleven million Swedish krona and a certificate that can be put on the fridge at home.
Works Cited
Jefferson, Dee. ‘Praiseworthy: why Alexis Wright’s “staggering” epic is sweeping prizes—and challenging readers’. The Guardian. Sourced at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/03/praiseworthy-alexis-wright-novel-stella-prize-miles-franklin-awards
High Court of Australia. Yanner v. Eaton. 1999, HCA 53; 201 CLR 351, October 7 (1999). Sourced at: https://aiatsis.gov.au/ntpd-resource/781.
Wright, Alexis. ‘Stella Acceptance Speech’. Stella.org. May 2 (2024). Sourced at: https://stella.org.au/alexis-wrights-2024-acceptance-speech/.
—. ‘The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times’ in Emmanuel von Lee (host), Emergence Magazine Podcast. February 9 (2021). Sourced at: https://lithub.com/alexis-wright-on-the-inward-migration-of-apocalyptic-times/.
—. (ed, for the Central Land Council). Take Power: like this old man here. Jukurrpa Books, 1998.
Robert Wood is the Director of Writing and Publishing at the Centre for Stories. An arts non-profit that uses storytelling for social cohesion, they offer mentoring, festivals, and publication opportunities. In 2024, Robert is the Sir Edward Weary Dunlop Fellow at Asialink and Melbourne University. He lives in West Perth. Read more about him here.
