Law vs lore

I failed the first time I read Praiseworthy. About 200 pages into this 700-page epic I was forced to confront the embarrassing realization that I had failed Alexis Wright’s first challenge: to put aside my western-centric preference for a linear narrative and embrace a different mode of thinking. Mortified – and fully aware that Wright intends this to happen to many of her readers – I began again.

Wright, of the Waanyi nation, sets Praiseworthy near her own Country (a proper noun in its Aboriginal context), in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Praiseworthy itself is a fictional town, besieged by an “Anthropocene haze”, a physical manifestation of climate catastrophe and a metaphorical representation of all that has gone wrong. Residents attempt to disperse the haze, trying everything from selling it as a tourist attraction to waiting cynically for the government to attempt to blow it up. Wright is unflinching in her depiction of the failed, decades-long attempt of successive Australian governments to “close the gap”, ending the inequality experienced by First Nations people. But she goes back further, making it clear that the people of Praiseworthy live “in all the cataclysmic times generated by the mangy dogs who had stolen their traditional land”.

Praiseworthy is a satire of Australian politics and bureaucracy, which for Wright is “white supremacy work experience in an Aboriginal community”. It is also a testament to the continuing violence of colonization. Praiseworthy was first published in Australia earlier this year, and Wright could not have foreseen the rejection in October of the referendum to establish the Voice to Parliament – a change to the constitution that would have given Indigenous communities a direct means to inform policy and laws. The ramifications of the failed referendum will reverberate for generations, and Wright’s Praiseworthy will be seen as the text to have captured this moment.

But Praiseworthy is not only a satire. It is also an allegory and a tragedy, ambitious in scope and execution, a dirge for all things and beings – people, animals, the past and the future – that have been, and will be, lost. It revels in the traditional components of epic: grand themes, the invocation of oracles, an impossible quest and intervention by non-human forces. And instead of being set in the mythological past it recognizes a different cosmology. Praiseworthy rejects the western concept of the novel and articulates Indigenous realism; it is set in every time. Wright recently reflected on this in one of her infrequent interviews (for ABC) when she remarked: “I had to look at writers who had a long, unbroken attachment to their own Country … I learnt from people like Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican writer, when he said, ‘all times in Mexico are important and no time has been resolved’”.

Wright’s epic revolves around the Steel family. There is Cause Man Steel and his wife, Dance, as well as their sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk. They contend with climate catastrophe, incompetent white elites, fake news, youth suicide, family breakdown and, driving it all, colonial oppression.

Cause abrogates his familial responsibilities and embarks on a quixotic quest to solve the climate crisis and secure economic independence for First Nations peoples. Driven by a “blue-sky vision” he rounds up as many feral donkeys (an invasive species) as he can to establish an Aboriginal-owned carbon-neutral transport empire to guarantee independence from government and transportation at the end of times. Dance also withdraws from the family, becoming “a haven for butterflies or moths” and the “moth-er Mother”, all the while plotting her escape from Praiseworthy to China (via a people smuggler or the Chinese government itself, whatever comes first). Wright’s own great-grandfather was a Chinese migrant, and this strand might be read as a comment on the racist debates demanding the DNA “percentage” of a person identifying as Indigenous.

Tommyhawk, the younger son, is a “government-indoctrinated robotic type of kid fascist”. Obsessed with politicians, he spends most of the novel trying to contact the “blonde-haired White God Government Mother” from Canberra so she can adopt and save him. Indoctrinated by the mainstream media, he is convinced that Aboriginal communities are full of paedophiles.

His elder brother, Aboriginal Sovereignty, is the pride of the town until he is accused – by Tommyhawk – of raping his girlfriend, according to western law, in an act the reader knows to have been consensual. Aboriginal Sovereignty is simultaneously detained in a police station, “dead to the world. Eye sockets bloodied, pushed into the back of his head”, and in international waters, “dragged … out of the broil” by a people smuggler, all the while “unalive to the world around him”. Meanwhile, “older and wiser people said differently, that Aboriginal Sovereignty was everywhere, he had not left, he was hidden in his own spirit. They believed he had gone away for the time being to somewhere in the future, but he would be coming back”.

Throughout the author explores questions of sovereignty and colonization, and articulates the differences between Australian law – driven by capital and apparently intent on destroying the planet – and Aboriginal lore, grounded in Country and respect for land and people. The experience of reading Praiseworthy brings to mind that of picking up Ulysses for the first time. Alexis Wright challenges and stretches us, forcing us to reconsider the act of reading itself. It is a mind-altering experience: Praiseworthy retaught me how to read.

Astrid Edwards is a critic based in Melbourne and the host of the Garret podcast

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