Carpentaria: a novel, by Alexis Wright

I purchased this for my holiday reading, even though I already have dozens of unread books, because it won the Miles Franklin this year and it seemed to fit the Lake Mungo theme. Ms Wright is a Waanyi person originating from the Gulf of Carpentaria region and the story is that of the family of Normal Phantom, an elder of the Western Pricklebush, living in a town camp on the edge of the brilliantly named town of Desperance. It has just about everything: family feuds, racial politics, tribal politics, Dreaming (lots of it), tragedy, farce, love, friendship, religion. The language is fantastic and poetic, lifting you off the ground and then bringing you down suddenly with a slap of vernacular or a load of plastic bags emanating from Uptown. At first the story seems like a series of sketches - Normal, his wife Mrs Angel Day, Mozzie Fishman the charismatic preacher, Elias Smith who walked out of the sea, Will Phantom the estranged son. I was happy to read a chapter at a time and wonder if it was going anywhere at all. Then about half way through all the threads start coming together and I couldn't put it down. I sat up reading until 4 this morning getting through the last 300 pages.

Even though it is a work of fiction, I learned a few things. For the first time I have got a hook on the meaning of Dreaming. Europeans tend to treat it as an analogue of Genesis - a mythical explanation of how the world came about. But Aborigines argue that there is no distinct Dreamtime; all of life is a continuous Dreaming, although it stops when you lose contact with your Country. Dreaming is simply an understanding of how the world works and how you live within it, before and, possibly, after death. New ideas (e.g. Christianity, or parts thereof) and objects can be absorbed into it without altering its fundamentals. In this story it works brilliantly (and absorbingly) in the aid of survival - only those who become separated from it are lost. Whether any of this particular Dreaming is real or not, Wright is firmly in the Aboriginal tradition of passing on the knowledge through storytelling. She just does it in a way that brings that knowledge into conflict with the whitefella's "scientify" way of knowing. The dénouement is more wishful than seems to be justified by the history of this conflict so far.