Review: Plains Of Promise by Alexis Wright

Somewhere in Australia’s Gulf Country in the middle of the 20th Century, a woman arrives at a mission for Aboriginal people with her seven-year-old daughter Ivy. The two are separated, Ivy to the dormitory for girls, her mother to the camps where adults are permitted to stay. A crow comes to settle in the Poinciana that grew from a seed brought by the first missionary, a “thirsty, greedy foreign tree intruding into the bowels of [the spiritual ancestors’] world”. The crow is an ill omen, and soon after Ivy’s mother kills herself, a sickness that soon spreads, with Ivy shunned by the other inmates as the source of this wickedness. Unprotected, although notionally under the Protection of the law, she is raped repeatedly by the chief missionary Errol Jipp. Such is the brutal opening of this extraordinary story.

An Alexis Wright novel is always a wild and feral thing, fascinatingly unpredictable in where it make take you and what it might do to you. In this, her first, it is as liable to nip you on the hand like a cheeky dog as strike you senseless like the lightning from the thunderous wet season storms, or maybe the birds returning to a reborn lake “a black shadow formed across the sky, blotting out the moon and stars and finally crashing into the water”. Like her other novels, Plains Of Promise oscillates around a temporal centre — or two, in this case — the mission era of the 1950s, and the fervid Aboriginal political movement of the 1990s, but it can never quite be contained to one time.

In this novel it means that Ivy’s harrowing treatment is undermined by the conspiracy of the Elders to investigate her origins, choosing a Traveller to journey to the giant ephemeral lake in the centre of the continent to find her people, where he’s haunted by ominous pigeons and bothered by packs of camp dogs. “It was a dangerous time to travel alone over the land: it was waking-up season,” Wright warns, “It was at this time that whatever powerful essences lay submerged all around rose from the earth”. In the tumult of this restless season (rather reminiscent of the haze that descends on the town of Praiseworthy in Wright’s most recent novel) he finds that:

no one was able to look after the land anymore, not all of the time, the way they used to in the olden days. Life was so different now that the white man had taken the lot. It was like a war, an undeclared war. A war with no name.

Later we learn about Ivy’s incendiary fate, and in the second half of the novel join Mary in the 1990s as she discovers her Aboriginal heritage and yearns to learn where she comes from. Wright binds these components into a rambling journey across the continent, filled with incident and character absurd and terrifying, wonders that can’t be pinned down with a blunt a tool as the word, and like her later works Plains Of Promise is busting at the seams at every level.

Just as Praiseworthy interrogates the narratives that brought about the Intervention, Plains Of Promise takes apart the project of Protection that governed Aboriginal life until after the 1967 Referendum, demonstrating the abject irony of its name. With absolute authority vested in figures like Jipp, God-given or otherwise, this was a project that did everything but protect: “Protection. Assimilation … different words that amounted to annihilation,” all in the name of furthering the colonial project of taking the land by dispossessing its owners. This is a power exercised most arbitrarily and most insidiously over Aboriginal peoples’ bodies; Jipp must approve any marriages, and his abuse of Ivy is not an aberration but merely a logical extension of this paternal petting.

So it is fascinating that Wright twists this narrative of assimilation to ask: who is really assimilating whom? Under the missions’ authority, the Elders continue to convene and govern. Indeed, at times they incorporate the mission to their own ends, with the older men lobbying for access to girls. “When the old men started behaving in an over-familiar manner to him, it was a warning sign that things had got out of hand,” Jipp ruminates. Meanwhile the ancestral spirits of country continue their irascible business as if colonisation is a blip on their radar. The missionaries are but pawns in a story bigger than time and place, this “wonderland of nonconformist reality”.

Wright’s unparalleled satire of bureaucracy is also at full force, whether it be the Aboriginal movement as it attempts to wrestle with assimilation and articulate a new vision, mission scandal and scuttlebutt (“the curious eyes would look Ivy up and down. Just keeping the mental picture up to date”) or, given the cursory attention it deserves, the settler government. No one is left unscathed: Wright reserves a particularly sharpened pen for the various boyfriends and baby daddies of her heroines, but also the dogs like poor old Pal who is seen off in an explosion in which “the white tip of his tail was all the police found the next day”. Plains Of Promise may be an ironic title but it also contains the vision of humanity and sovereignty that Wright continues to articulate with incomparable force.

Gay rating: not gay.