By Sam Sacks
In 2011, geneticists announced that findings from a hair sample indicated that the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians migrated from Africa up to 75,000 years ago, crossing a prehistoric land bridge into Australia, where they remain to this day. Scientists hypothesize that they may be the oldest continuous culture on earth — a distinction proudly claimed by Alexis Wright in her sprawling novel “Praiseworthy,” in which the persecution of Australia’s indigenous people converges with the global crisis of climate collapse. We live in an age of catastrophe, the book suggests, and who better to teach us the art of endurance than the people she calls “the world’s greatest human survivors”?
Ms. Wright, a member of the Waanyi people, is an outspoken advocate for Aboriginal community and culture. She was born in 1950 and grew up in Cloncurry, an inland town in northwest Queensland , and has worked as an activist, educator and public servant. Ms. Wright began publishing in the 1990s, but her breakthrough was her 2006 novel, “Carpentaria,” which has been reissued in a uniform edition alongside “Praiseworthy.”
“Carpentaria” — the title alludes to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north of the continent — is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink novel, a teeming chronicle of Australian village life as well as a golden treasury of Aboriginal legends. Its central conflict is the arrival of a mining interest in the fictional town of Desperance, but around that Ms. Wright embroiders colorful portraits from the impoverished native population, which lives consigned to the fringes of the village. The narrative flows seamlessly between actuality and dreams, most notably in a bravura chapter in which a fisherman named Norm Phantom, on a solo boating voyage to bury a friend at sea, enters the Waanyi spirit world, “where the congregations of the great gropers journeying from the sky to the sea were gathered.”
The book’s events, veering between the comic and the heartbreaking, are told in a warm, colloquial style that Ms. Wright has said taps into the oral tradition of Aboriginal storytelling. So “Carpentaria” is both an exultant celebration of that tradition and a continuation of it. “Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads,” she writes. “Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories. They called it decorum.”
“Carpentaria” was critically lauded and published around the world. But in June 2007, on the day it received Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, Prime Minister John Howard announced a set of measures that became known as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, banning alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal lands. At times the military was even called in to enforce the prohibitions. Ms. Wright became a high-profile critic of the laws, which she thought demonized Aboriginal people while dismissing their own attempts at self-determination. Her new book, “Praiseworthy,” is best understood as an angry reaction to the intervention — even longer than “Carpentaria,” this novel is narrower in scope, and its outlook much more dystopian.
The story takes place in the Aboriginal town of Praiseworthy, where global warming has caused a “monument of haze” to settle, polluting the air and portending bad times. Ms. Wright illustrates societal fracture through the misfortunes of the Steel family, particularly its two sons. The older sibling, who is burdened with the name Aboriginal Sovereignty, has been accused by police of statutory rape because his teenage sweetheart is a few years younger than he is. (Ms. Wright links the systematic accusations of child sexual abuse by the government to justifications for its heavy-handed actions.) Like many indigenous men, Aboriginal Sovereignty is suddenly tarred as a rapist and pedophile, and in misery he wades into the sea to drown himself.
In this, he’s cruelly egged on by his younger brother, Tommyhawk, who has repudiated his family and who, the author portrays as having been brainwashed by negative media depictions of his community. Tommyhawk dreams of being adopted by his guardian angel, the minister for Aboriginal affairs, and living with her “like a prince in Parliament House” — an assimilationist paradise. But as Tommyhawk petitions the government in Canberra, Aboriginal Sovereignty’s disappearance becomes a big news story — a lightning-rod for debate about the region’s skyrocketing suicide rates. A task force is sent to find his body, thickening the airborne haze with a cloud of scandal.
To this Ms. Wright adds the dramas of the boys’ parents, the most entertaining of which concerns their father, Cause Steel, and his attempt to buy all the continent’s donkeys — he thinks they will be a priceless business asset in the upcoming days of environmental collapse. A strain of macabre satire is present throughout “Praiseworthy,” especially during the carnivalesque scenes in which the “corpse hunters” looking for Aboriginal Sovereignty are attacked by Cause Steel’s horde of asses.
But much more of this lengthy novel reads like a broadside. The oddest thing about it is the narrative voice, which sounds less like town-square storytelling and more like aggrieved social-media posting. Hot-button terms like “fascist” and “the Anthropocene” turn up regularly, as do excruciating attempts to parrot Millennial slang. (“Don’t you know Ab. Sov. is gone really, like really forever? He’s finished! Cancelled! Dissed the man right off!”) Far too many passages have the dialed-up tone and garbled syntax of outraged tweets: “So even though the nation that had stolen seven and a half million square kilometers of the Aboriginal landmass, the total continent, it claimed to be sick of young Aboriginal kids suiciding to get out of reality, by going home to the ancestors.”
“What was freedom, but to have the mind adrift?” Ms. Wright writes elsewhere, a lovely line. But there isn’t much space to drift in a novel crowded with messages. In “Carpentaria” Aboriginal resilience took the form of an embattled but vibrant cultural flourishing. It may be a sign of the times that, in “Praiseworthy,” survival is a much more desperate business, and more openly tied to political resistance.
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