The novel forms part of a larger literary effort that employs the particularities of the Waanyi oral traditions to predict the destruction of the Australian continent by the impact of globalization, neo-capitalism, and climate change. 2 Craig San Roque locates Carpentaria as a key text to resituate the human beyond a European epistemology (2007, 4, 10–13), and The Swan Book is no different. Wright’s critical engagement with “new times” and “end times” as expressed in Carpentaria (San Roque 2007, 4) 1 also informs this novel, which was written during the renewed, assimilative oppression of remote Indigenous communities under the Northern Territory Emergency Response – also known as the Northern Territory Intervention or Invasion. The Swan Book is a further elaboration of Wright’s Indigenous literary universe that emanates from her connection to the traditional country of her people, the Waanyi, located in the Gulf of Carpentaria in remote Northern Australia. 2 A conservative government led by Prime Minister John Howard intervened in the Northern Territory wi (.)ġ The Swan Book, Alexis Wright’s latest novel, published in 2013, was well received by readers and critics and shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most important literary prize.
1 In his study of Carpentaria, the psychoanalyst Craig San Roque praises Wright’s novel for engaging (.).Alexis Wright’s fiction, which she herself has called an instance of “Aboriginal reality” or “Aboriginal realism,” as opposed to magic realism, is an epic tour de force that juxtaposes the Indigenous and European traditions in startling ways but also speaks across a cultural divide – the discursive gap between colonized and colonizer, belonging and non-belonging, assimilation and sovereignty – which this essay will address. Her latest novel, The Swan Book, in manifesting its spiritual and mystical connections to the holistic universe known as the Dreamtime, foregrounds this epistemological turn, which is premised on the ontological relationship Aboriginal people have with “Country,” their traditional land. Rather, it questions western values, certainties, and convictions and problematizes the western way of seeing and doing in the island-continent.
The Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright has developed a novelistic oeuvre that experiments with written forms of fiction, and paints an Aboriginal universe that does not need European epistemology to sustain itself.
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