Review: Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

This vast novel begins with a man, “a culture dreamer”, dreaming of how to take his people through the end times of climate change. A terrible dust haze, “a ghostly windstorm”, has settled over the town of Praiseworthy, somewhere on the Gulf of Carpentaria on Waanyi Country in northern Australia, a symbol of the country’s discontent with the Anthropocene. The man is Cause Man Steel, also known as Widespread or Planet or Omnicide or Global Warming for his apocalyptic preachings, and his plan is to build a transport system released from dependence on fossil fuels. The solution he’s landed upon is donkeys, the five million or so feral asses roaming the continent. The donkeys will create a door “big enough to free all his people from wherever they wanted to be freed from a haze … the door of traditional economies that had remained open since the beginning of time”. In the age of climate change, maybe the answer is to go a little feral.

His dreams are under siege from all sides, not least the townsfolk led by albino Aboriginal mayor Ice Pick, who would rather take the easy route to economic prosperity through assimilation, by doing and behaving exactly as the Australian government says Aboriginal people should behave. There’s also trouble in Cause’s home in the town cemetery, where his wife Dance has become entranced by moths and butterflies, and his two sons Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk find themselves in crisis. In the second of ten parts we meet 17-year-old Aboriginal Sovereignty walking into sea to drown himself, egged on by his eight-year-old “fascist” brother, who has become so brainwashed by media and government that he believes every man in Praiseworthy including his brother is a paedophile. Tommyhawk dreams of being rescued by the golden-haired Minister for Aboriginal people and whisked away to the white palace of Parliament House in Canberra.

Wright sketches out these narrative elements and then runs over them again and again over the course of Praiseworthy’s 700-odd pages, like running a sewing machine over a stitch, each time adding another layer, each time slightly altering the angle of the needle. It’s the same technique Wright has been honing over her previous two novels, Carpentaria and the Swan Book, the former set in the early 2000s, the latter in the distant future. Praiseworthy finds its temporal centre around 2008, around the time of the devastating Northern Territory Intervention, the Australian government’s response to reports of child abuse in Aboriginal communities. Praiseworthy richly satirises and parodies the tangled and racist bureaucracy of the Intervention (there’s an amusing scene in which signs banning alcohol and pornography are burnt to a crisp by lightning), but the overwhelming impression is a two-and-a-half-century howl of pain. The injustice of painting Aboriginal fathers and men all as violent and abusive vibrates on the page, one thread of the dehumanising story the nation-state of Australia has been weaving about Aboriginal people since colonisation. The parents in Praiseworthy:

they knew you had to run faster than hell with fear written across your face when you were Aboriginal parents, just to prove you loved your children more than white people saying you did not love your children, like they loved their children.

As Cause puts it bluntly, “the government wanting to bring Aboriginal men down … to justify taking our land rights. Same story … but we will never leave”.

All of Wright’s novels have been a bit like operas — or perhaps better is her term “open-wound theatre” — larger-than-life characters singing at the top of their lungs, pushing and shoving for their solo under the spotlight, and here the cast can barely be contained even in a story this size. Like opera, Wright’s writing operates in many modes, not just satirical, but comedic, lyrical, absurd, a lament, a screed, a manifesto, and often within paragraphs or even sentences that wind on like the lines of migrating butterflies that flit through the novel. Her wordplay is unparalleled (“sleep-depraved”; “adhocracy”) as are her reads (“let’s not act classless like a cultureless throng down on the open beach. This was not Surfer’s Paradise”; the townsfolk lie in bed “like a semi-comatose cane toad that had been run over”). Her parody of the white bureaucrat saviours who descend on Praiseworthy like vultures is excoriating:

the decrepit old professionals … now returned to the village square like flowing lava, to rant to their favourite black people compelled to sit through hours, excruciating hours, of long-winded analysis about themselves

But even here, as Wright does everywhere, she finds an opportunity for pathos:

the gravy train, more lucrative than pots of gold, looked broken. It was a circus. These people were a total mess. All of them, irredeemably broken. They carried mountainous internal gripes. Gaping wounds more open and salted than the Dead Sea.

It is demanding writing. It is always perpetually on the verge of too much but the too-muchness is the point. It is one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I can imagine. It is also often exceptionally beautiful, particularly when Wright turns to country of the “all times”, the infinite temporality of the ancestral spiritual. Take for instance Cause on his journey into the heart of the continent on his hunt for the right-coloured donkey, “air-force grey, naval-ship grey and so on … the colour of industry, the colour of conglomerates”, and hearing Dance on the wind:

Even thousands of miles away from Praisewothy, [Cause] still heard her voice whistling in, questioning and trembling like a tempest, everywhere ethereal, wrapped in the sky — all possible in the unexpected power of country, and there in a single tiny flower miraculously growing in the sparseness of an inferno-cleared ground, and there soaring — a single bird flying overhead, and there, her presence mist, moisture, wind, as expected as the morning stars that hung over his shoulder.

In Cause’s demand for economic independence I’m reminded of the writings of the late Yolŋu leader Dr Yunupingu:

What Aboriginal people ask is that the modern world now makes the sacrifices necessary to give us a real future. To relax its grip on us. To let us breathe, to let us be free of the determined control exerted on us to make us like you. And you should take that a step further and recognise us for who we are, and not who you want us to be. Let us be who we are — Aboriginal people in a modern world — and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past had thrown at us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people – our full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.

Wright has written of the “sovereignty of mind” and “sovereignty of imagination” and her novels and her biography of Aboriginal leader Tracker are book length demonstrations of this, the thing that can’t be taken away, even if it is constantly under siege. Praiseworthy issues a call to “keep it real, keep to the vision … act, and not just act, but be full of guts, to stay full of compassion, and be courageous in the thick of hell times”.

Gay rating: not gay.