Carpentaria’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on
the powerful Phantom family, whose members are the leaders of the Pricklebush people,
and their battles with old Joseph Midnight’s tearaway Eastend mob on the one hand, and
the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.
Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and
farce. The novel is populated by extraordinary characters – Elias Smith the outcast saviour,
the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, leader of the holy Aboriginal pilgrimage, the
murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the ever-vigilant Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and
prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, Angel Day the queen of the rubbish-dump, and
her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time – figures that
stand like giants in this storm-swept world.
‘My new novel Carpentaria portrays the world of indigenous Australia as being in constant
movement between different spaces of time, the resilience of ancient beliefs overlaying the
inherited colonial experience, while the almost ‘fugitive’ future is being forged as
imagination in what might be called the last frontier – the province of the mind…When
faced with too much bad reality, the mind will try to survive by creating alternative
narratives and places to visit, or live in, or believe in. Carpentaria imagines this cultural
mind as sovereign and in control, freely navigating through the known country of
colonialism to explore the possibilities of other worlds. It does so through the diction and
the vernacular of the region, and a spinning multi-stranded helix of stories. This form of
indigenous storytelling is the consequence of our racial diaspora in Australia. The helix of
divided strands is forever moving, entwining stories together, just like a lyre bird which is
capable of singing several tunes at once.’ Alexis Wright
Giramondo Publishing Company
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website: http://www.giramondopublishing.com