How fighting for Indigenous rights shaped Alexis Wright as a storyteller
The Waanyi novelist and activist spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2009 about her award-winning novel Carpentaria
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired Apr. 12, 2009.
When Indigenous author Alexis Wright was growing up in Cloncurry, Queensland, her grandmother often talked about their traditional lands in the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was an area her family had been forced to leave before Wright was born, a place she vividly imagined through her grandmother's stories.
Wright drew on this oral tradition in her 2006 novel Carpentaria, which won almost every literary award in Australia and became the first work by an Indigenous writer to win the country's most illustrious fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Award.
A strikingly original epic, it centres on a powerful Indigenous family in a precariously settled coastal town as they battle with mobsters, white officials and a mining company. The book made Wright a literary sensation — both in Australia and internationally.
In addition to being a novelist, Wright is an activist for Indigenous rights and is the author of essays and three nonfiction works. But it's creative storytelling, she says, that allows her to imagine a better future.
Her new novel, Praiseworthy, will be published in Canada on Feb. 6, 2024.
Wright spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in Melbourne in 2009.
A vision of Carpentaria
"It was just magical in my imagination as a child, growing up in this very small, northern Australia town [of Cloncurry].
"My grandmother always talked about the Gulf country and always wanted to go back there. [She talked about] fishing there and the beautiful waters and the fig trees and palm trees, the native palm trees that grow there — not like coconut palms.
"It was planted in my imagination, this really wonderful, beautiful place. A place that I just thought was impossible to be real in a way. I mean, where I grew up didn't have any palm trees. It had dry riverbeds most of the time, unless it flooded during some rain that we might have got, if we were lucky.
"I had this vision of what [the Gulf of Carpentaria] was all like in my mind before I went there. And it is truly beautiful — far, far better than I could have ever imagined. It's a spring fed water system and the water is crystal clear and it's full of turtles and fish and water lilies.
"A really magnificent place."
Absorbing her mother's determination
"My mother, I think, suffered from the racism and prejudice she was living in. It mattered to her what people thought of her and thought of us. She was fearful of that and probably fearful that things could happen to us, about policies that [had to do with] taking [Indigenous] children away.
"She was struggling too to bring us up, to work, to have an income. She was cleaning the Airdrome buildings at the airport in Cloncurry. Then she was working in the kitchen at the hotel. My mother was working and living under quite harsh realities.
"At one stage, she was fighting to get off a cattle property where she was forced to go to work under [the Protection Act] legislation and was being treated quite brutally, when she protested. That was a very brave thing for her to do as a young Aboriginal woman, to take on these white police and white people who were the owners of this cattle station, probably very influential, prosperous people held in high esteem.
"I think she knew the harsher side of life and she wanted to try to protect my sister and I. And as a consequence of that, she was quite hard on my sister and I as well, because she wanted us to behave perfectly, beyond reproach.
"So I think that she instilled in me one thing and that's determination. So I've been pretty determined in my life with whatever I take on."
Finding belonging with Indigenous people
"When I was quite young, I didn't really know how to see myself [as a mixed Indigenous, Irish, Chinese person]. But as I grew older, I wanted to be like my grandmother who was very big in my mind and still is.
"I started learning more about our own history, about who we are, not just in my own family, but through our tribal area, the conditions of our people in Australia. I could then start putting labels onto things that happened in my life as a child that I didn't understand. I saw myself as Aboriginal because that's where most of my influences have come from. That's where my security has come from and my sense of being.
I found probably more love and generosity and care amongst my own people than anywhere else in that time when I was a young adult.- Alexis Wright
"I just grew up fighting and became involved in land rights activities and working in my own area. And I found probably more love and generosity and care amongst my own people than anywhere else in that time when I was a young adult.
"I still had a lot to learn when they took me under their wing."
How activism made her a writer
"Because I was young and I had a little bit of education, the people who were running those organizations and communities regarded me as, 'Oh, well, she knows how to read and write.'
"And so that became my job — to do all the reading and writing that needed to be done.
"I would take the minutes of the meetings and so it taught me to listen. It was actually a traditional concept of teaching a young person to listen and listen well. It taught me more than any school had ever taught me — an education that came from my own people.
"That's where the interest started and I thought I would become a writer — I would try to become a writer. I think a realization that was coming to me along the way is that a lot of the things that I believed in and a lot of what I'd worked for hadn't come to much.
"I was starting to realize that most of what we were doing was always chasing government to do something better for us and then having to deal with the policies — the stupid policies — they put up. We spend the next four years of each government term dealing with that and dealing with it again.
Is this the best that we can be? Is this the new Aboriginal culture? And I didn't want it to be that.- Alexis Wright
"I thought, 'Well, my life, our lives are being defined this way. Is this the best that we can be? Is this the new Aboriginal culture?' I didn't want it to be that. I didn't want to have to be loaded with that all the time — and all of us with no time to think about how we could be different and who we really are.
"I thought that through writing that gave an opening to start thinking about who we are and what sort of people we would like to be — or we really are.
"To show the world something else about our humanity."
Alexis Wright's comments have been edited for length and clarity.