alexis wright – Cannonball Read 17

“History, rolled, reshaped, undone and mauled”

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

October 20, 2021 by Merryn Leave a Comment

CBRBingo: Uncannon (And card full!) Carpentaria is a powerful novel by Waanyi woman, Alexis Wright, set in the fictional town of Desperance on Australia’s remote tropical Gulf of Carpentaria. It’s a challenging read, with densely beautiful passages of description and distant omniscient narrative that takes sudden dives down into the dirt of this troubled town and its messy inhabitants. It took me a while to find its rhythm, but then I was hooked. This is a story about a family. Norm Phantom, who “the Pricklebush […]

the argument is, we are excluded from the argument

Tracker by Alexis Wright

January 31, 2019 by RecurringExtra Leave a Comment

Tracker Tilmouth was a member of the Stolen Generation – his older, lighter-skinned siblings were taken away from their parents and sent to white families in the south, while he and two younger brothers were taken away to a mission more than a thousand kilometres further north. Tracker’s ties to both northern and central Aboriginal communities stayed with him his whole life, and were one of these reasons he became such an influential figure in the struggle for Aboriginal civil rights. Tracker’s life story would […]

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