Alexis Wright on activism, Indigenous land rights and breaking down literature stereotypes
34:01 Share

231. That's the average number of apps used by many companies. This leads to a lot of context and tab switching that drains employee focus and costs your company. Grammarly can help. Grammarly's AI works in over 500,000 apps and websites, making it easy for your team to write clearly and on brand without disrupting workflow.

I didn't want to be contained in what was expected of me to do, of what Australian literature is and how it should be written. And I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. And that's probably the story of my life.

My guest today has been lauded as arguably the most important Australian writer alive today. Her work is not only award-winning, but it's breaking new ground and challenging the publishing industry. Alexis Wright made history as the only writer to have won both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize. And this year she became the first person to win the Stella twice.

Her most recent book, an epic work of fiction called Praiseworthy, has been heralded by critics around the globe as genre-bending, an epic of classical proportions, and the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century. After recording this episode, Alexis won this year's Miles Franklin for Praiseworthy as well.

But despite more than four decades of writing, this proud Wanyi nation woman didn't grow up with books.

She says it was her inquiring mind and taking notes during community meetings in outback towns that led to work in research and advocacy and eventually writing. I certainly enjoyed learning more about Alexis' life, what has caused her to write, the way she thinks about her writing and her reflections on the novel Praiseworthy.

Alexis, in talking about Praiseworthy, does canvas themes associated with suicide and also the impact of the Northern Territory intervention by the Howard government, which was in response to allegations of child sexual abuse. I hope you enjoy listening to Alexis as much as I did.

Alexis, congratulations on the incredible success of your novel, Praiseworthy, for which you were awarded your second stellar prize. That's a remarkable achievement. I've got a copy of Praiseworthy here. I've just finished reading it and I'm really looking forward to discussing the book.

But before we get there, I want to start at the very beginning and talk about your childhood. You were just five years old when you lost your father and you and your sister were raised by your mother and grandmother. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood growing up? Thank you, Julia. It's a real pleasure to talk to you this evening.

So, yes, my father passed away when I was about five. And he was a cattleman. He came from a family of cattle people, graziers in northwest Queensland. My sister was a year and a half older than me. My sister's passed away now. That left us with our mum. She was bringing us up in Cloncurry.

And he spent a lot of his time on the cattle property and he would come in to town, but he was often away. That's my memory. We didn't see him all the time.

When I was about three, I used to run away from mum. I used to go, I deeply loved my grandmother. And my grandmother was a really kind and remarkable woman. And I think probably, you know, I was just a child who liked to argue and maybe try to get my own way. Or not necessarily get my own way, but just to...

I think I needed a lot of freedom and she was trying to keep us tightly reined in and

This is my memories of growing up with my mother. And she was very strict. And so I would just, as soon as she'd turn back, I would just be over the front fence and off down to my grandmother's place. Her place was, it was just a retreat. It was just an oasis in a way. You know, she was a really great gardener.

and she grew everything, and she'd be up at the crack of dawn, and there was not a weed in her garden, and she was always arranging pot plants and growing mango trees or pawpaw trees and things like that, but I was one that decided I was going to cling to my grandmother, and it was only just a corrugated iron plant,

uh, place. It, uh, part of it had, uh, dirt floors and she had no electricity, uh, just, um, you know, hurricane lamps, things like that. She walked to town every day, virtually because she had no electricity to buy food, you know, to, to cook. And, uh, but she, she'd cook what she needed every day. And, and she had all these vegetables in the garden. And, um,

a Chinese cabbage. She was always making cabbage stew and rice. But she was the head of our family. She wasn't a bossy woman or anything like that. I don't remember her as being bossy with the family, but the family had enormous respect for her. And I just loved being with her. So that was a great saving for me, I think, to have had a grandmother like that. I've seen in my life a number of children who haven't had that

you know, a grandmother close by. And I think that was the saving of me to have had that really loving and remarkable and wise, um,

grandmother and she taught me a lot about a different way, a cultural way of seeing the world because that's how she saw the world and how she spoke about it. So she was incredible. My mother I think was more affected by the assimilation era of that time. I think my grandma was just oblivious to a lot of people who might have given her trouble or

I didn't even know what racism was until I was much older. So that was my early years of having that very close relationship with my grandmother. And my mother was always trying to pull me in and she was trying to bring us up in a town. There was quite a divide there on racial lines and not just only on racial lines but on social lines as well, you know, on who had more, you know,

who were richer than other people or who had status. So that was difficult, you know, to have that sort of upbringing. But to have the grandmother who was, you know, loving and kind and saw the world in a different way, it was good. And I think that really did help me a lot in life and to this day.

And can I ask you, I'm really loving the image of the slightly disobedient young girl popping over the fence to go down and see her grandmother. That's a wonderful image. And your question

grandmother was of both Aboriginal and Chinese descent, wasn't she? So you've talked about her making the Chinese cabbage and rice. In this family setting, I mean, obviously racism and divisions around race were visible in your township.

What about a sense of being a girl? Was there a time when you first realised that girls got treated differently to boys? Was that when you went to school or at some other point? Yeah. What I could say about my family is it was very matriarchal. See, I had my grandmother. There was no grandfather. You know, he'd passed away before I was born. And it's a big family.

And they were mainly girls, you know, so I had a lot of aunties, you know. And they were all their own person. I actually grew up in that early stage of my life with women, you know, with men.

With my grandmother, my mother, you know, who's very strong in her own right. But there was this thing with my grandmother who was head of family. And with these aunties who, I don't know, there was a family of about 11 or 12.

and only two of those were boys. Looking back on that period growing up, where did your interest in the world of literature and books come from? I mean, from that background to become the writer that you have been across your life. Can you join that up for us? How did that happen? Well, it certainly didn't happen then. It's a...

In fact, I started Catholic school and had a very old, an elderly nun who taught first grade. And I'm naturally left-handed and...

She would, you know, rap me over the knuckles, you know, until I learned to write with my right hand. And so writing was not something I enjoyed. And when I went to high school, I had the English teacher who would often write

you know, disparaging notes on my essays and assignments. You know, I remember clearly one time he sprawled across the bottom, this writing is pathetic. Ouch. So I had no idea. And...

And my mother wasn't able to, you know, in all that schooling years, she had very little education and she wouldn't have been able to confront that.

people about things that might have been going wrong for us not easily and then after some years I turned my attention to my own traditional homeland, a one year homeland in the Gulf of Carpentaria because this was something about my grandmother as well

She had to leave our traditional country, and a lot of people did because the cattle properties were locked places. You couldn't just go on there. You could get shot going. So I turned my attentions back to things that were happening to our own people, and I got a lot of support from

you know, from older people in our world. And I was very, very lucky because they took me under their wing. I became involved in things that were happening, you know, in Aboriginal legal service in Mount Isa, you know, and living on Mornington Island for a while. And I ended up in Canberra.

I was working with the National Aboriginal Conference when it was still in existence years ago. I was head of research there. We were going for things like national land rights at that stage and that was defeated.

And I worked in the Northern Territory. I lived in Alice Springs for a long time and I worked there. And so I worked in Kama for a while and that was fun. And I worked for, you know, did projects for Central Land Council. I organised the Aboriginal Constitutional Conventions, one we had in Tennant Creek called Today We Talk About Tomorrow and another one in Kalgoorringi.

Talking about ideas, there's so many issues that we were fighting for over the years about land rights and you know all that struggle of the land rights cases, some lasting 20 years or more. And so I work with a number of elders from across Central Australia and

on issues of Aboriginal governance. It wasn't a fashionable thing that people wanted to talk about. So there's just been that deterioration and because of government policies and this sort of constant failure. ♪

231. That's the average number of apps used by many companies. This leads to a lot of context and tab switching that drains employee focus and costs your company. Grammarly can help. Grammarly's AI works in over 500,000 apps and websites, making it easy for your team to write clearly and on-brand without disrupting workflow.

Join 70,000 teams who save an average of $5,000 per employee per year using Grammarly. Go to grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. So you're a young activist. You're doing incredible work on behalf of your community, Aboriginal Australia generally. But there does seem still a big gap between that and sitting down and writing fiction. So can you tell me about that? Mm-hmm.

What happened right from the start when I was working with organisations, you know, way back in Man Eyes, Mornington Island, places like that, people...

were having a lot of meetings all the time and they wanted to bring their young people in like myself and we generally had a little bit more schooling than they had. So they wanted us to do the reading and the writing. So one of my main jobs was to do things like the minutes of meetings and the meetings would go on for hours. And in those days, they would want to have you write down

that was said in the meeting, not just the decisions that were made, not like today, because some of those meetings could be quite heated and

And there's reasons for that and about ways of, shall we do things this way or that way and trying to reach a consensus and all that. But they wanted a record, you know, of what was said. And nobody thought, well, go out and buy a tape recorder. And maybe we couldn't afford a tape recorder. But anyway, you could afford, you know, a voluntary young person with a bit of education to write down every word. So that's because...

became a standard job for me and I could do that and particularly in Queensland where we talk a little bit slower the further north you go and it was quite easy to write everything down.

Later in life, I thought about that. And what they were really doing is teaching a young person like me, who was a bit of a hothead in those days. They were teaching you to listen and to understand. And it was a very good lesson, I think. So from someone who couldn't care less, originally about reading or writing, became quite successful.

something that I became very interested in and in doing that research of searching constitutional issues or what were other Indigenous people doing across the world, etc. And I worked really hard on some of the projects and issues that we were fighting. And I thought,

one day that, you know, maybe I would write. And eventually the day came, I think, you know, that I thought,

It came gradually that I would try and do some writing. And I became a great reader of literature across the world, trying to figure out how I would write. How could I try to attempt to write the sort of stories that I thought were necessary to write for this country if you're going to write at all? And that's where it started and has built up over...

Over the years, from very early books like Plains Promise and then Grog War, the issues about excessive amount of alcohol that was sold in places like Tennant Creek and what the people at Warramunga people did there to try and prevent and lessen the amount of alcohol sold in that town.

And I just couldn't believe it myself. And they wanted me to write Grug War for them. And they were just remarkable people. You know, when I went up there to Tenant and to do some of the work there, and it just...

us treated so well and taken all around the country shown the country what a beautiful place and then came um take power and um for the central land council to commemorate 20 20 years of land rights struggle in in central australia and then on to um uh carpentaria swan book tracker and um

and praiseworthy but you know it doesn't seem like many books there's you know I probably missed out I did miss out a few but some of those books are big books and they take a long time it takes me a long time to write the type of writing that I'm doing yes

And talking about a book, for example, your award-winning novel Carpentaria, it won the Miles Franklin, and yet it was rejected by most major book publishers who thought that the public wouldn't be interested in a long and literary First Nations novel. But it was published and found this remarkable success in

Can you tell us about your original intersections with the publishing industry? I mean, having determined that you were going to write and you were going to write fiction, how hard was it to get a book through and get it to an audience? Well, I decided really early on, Julia, that...

I think after my first book, Planes of Promise. And Planes of Promise is still, you know, it's still published. But I decided that I didn't want to be contained in what was expected of me to do, of what, you know, Australian literature is and how it should be written. And I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. And that's probably, that's...

Story of my life. I don't like to be contained in someone else's box or in the publishing industry's box or what they expect, you know, what literature is going to be in this country and what the standard is. I wanted to explore, you know, things a little bit more deeply. With Carpenteria, you know, I spent a long time trying to figure out how to write that book.

And it troubled me. It really troubled me. Because I had a manuscript there, but I didn't feel it was doing the right thing. Then it struck me that I should be writing this book in the voices of others.

elders, you know, or older people, you know, the senior people. And these are the voices that nobody will listen to, you know, or what they have to say. And I'd seen it over and over. And of our senior people wanting to explain something really important. And people just

not listening, you know, just, oh yes, yes, and hadn't heard them at all. And, um, so this has, this book should be written in the way that they speak. And, uh, you know, I thought of Gabriel Gassi-Marquis, you know, writing, you know, he, he had that sort of thought too when he wrote A Hundred Years of Solitude that he had to write that book in, in, you know, in, in the, the voices of, of, you know, his aunties, you know, his older, the older people in his family. And, um,

And I, and I thought, this is the way I have to do this book. And, um, so I went home and I, I knew that if I wrote the book, you know, and I had to rewrite the book and, um,

taking a lot of time and not, you know, holding down a, you know, a full-time job, which I didn't tell my husband, that I'm going to take some risks with this book. And because I knew if I wrote it in the voices of our old people, it may not get published. And I struggle with that. I struggle.

Every morning I'd get up and work on this book and I'd dismiss it and say, well, this book has to be written in this particular way. And so I did that and then continued on until I finished the book. So it was rejected by most publishers or practically all except one.

in the country, and not that we had at that time a lot of publishers anyhow. So another friend, Nicholas Jost, who has been a friend through all my literary career, he said, why not send it to Ivor Indic at Giramondo? And Ivor was just starting up his publishing industry, his publishing company, and

and I, you know, and he was handpicking what he wanted to publish. And, uh, and, um,

in the few books that he would publish a year. And I thought, you know, he probably won't want to publish this book. And he liked the other publishers who, you know, they do want to make some money out of what they publish and he has to too. And so he probably won't want to publish it. I was still living in Alice Springs at that stage and he sent me an email and asked me a number of very hard questions about why I wrote the book, how I wrote it.

and which I answered the best I could. And, um,

And I thought this was really the last I'll hear from him because I didn't know Ivor at that stage. And he came back and he said, I want to publish this. I'm really happy to publish it. And he was fantastic. And it was a relationship that was built up from there. And the book went on and won, I think, won five major prizes that year, including the Miles Franklin Award.

I'm so glad you mentioned 100 Years of Solitude. That's one of my favourite books of all time. It's fabulous. Yeah, well, mine too. Let's come now to Praiseworthy, your most recent book and the Stella Prize winner. I'm holding it up.

It's a big book in every sense. For our listeners who haven't heard about it, haven't read it, can you just give a taste of what Praiseworthy's about so people can understand and can go and get the book themselves? Well, what can I say? It's a very good book. LAUGHTER

Well done. Your publisher will be happy.

And of course the Stella Prize judges agreed with you. It's a very good book. No, it's a book that it took 10 years to write and I knew I was doing other things at the same time. I was working on Tracker. I started Tracker and Braceworthy at the same time. The tracks was quite ill and

Tracker is a big book too. It's a collective memoir of Tracker's life. He was quite a really, well, he was exceptional. He was exceptional in every way. So that was a big, big task, but I wanted to finish that first. And then it came out and I,

And at the same time, when it was finished, I took on the position of above-year chair in Australian literature at Melbourne University. So I continued. The holidays are all about sharing with family. Meals, couches, stories, Grandma's secret pecan pie recipe. And now you can also share a cart with Instacart's Family Carts.

Everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are, so you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams, or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart, and then share the meals and the moments.

Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus, enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply. 231. That's the average number of apps used by many companies. This leads to a lot of context switching that can distract employees and costs your company. Luckily, Grammarly can help. Grammarly is a great way to get started.

Grammarly's AI works in over 500,000 apps and websites, making it easy for your team to crank out clear, on-brand emails, documents, messages, and more. In just one click, they can go from blank page to first draft, all without leaving the page they're on.

Grammarly has 15 years of experience building effective, secure AI that can be implemented in days with minimal IT overhead. It goes beyond basic grammar to help tailor writing to specific audiences, whether that means adding an executive summary, fine-tuning tone, or cutting out jargon. Join 70,000 teams who save an average of $5,000 per employee per year using Grammarly. Go to grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more. Grammarly.

Enterprise Ready AI. Praiseworthy in all that time of those two big things. And yeah, it's a big book in every way. And I wanted to try to capture the spirit of the time. So I was really, really concerned about a number of things. I was concerned about global warming, you know, in 10 years ago. And to this day, it's more a paradoxical

to everybody in the world, I think, that we've got a situation here, you know, with global warming and we've got an emergency situation. But, well,

We're not dealing with it too well. So I was concerned about that, and I was concerned about our own Aboriginal world and our capacity to develop our own future. And combining those two things together, I developed a story about trying to examine those questions. What capacity do we have or poor people, millions of poor people across the world have to develop

to work towards a future in a global warming situation? And how will the rest of the world, the North, treat the poorer people of the world as the situation becomes more urgent and a problem and there may be millions more people

who become refugees across the world, who become landless and there could be all sorts of issues in terms of land being stolen from them. All sorts of things could happen. And how do we deal with all that? So anyway, putting the story into a story of a family, an Aboriginal family here on a community and they're trying to examine that community's ability, a place called Praiseworthy, its ability to

to work towards its future. And you have a main character, a man called, sometimes widespread, sometimes planet and cause man still, who is asking the question, what's plan A or what's plan B? Do we have a plan at all? And he's trying to figure out how can he take his people

you know, over the burning planet and to be able to tell, you know, to survive, to be able to tell the tale on the other side, he's going to build this transport conglomeration. And so he sets off and he's going to use his own brain power and very little else to capture this creature

right donkey that's going to lead this transport conglomeration and uh he can he can i he's only got a clapped at falcon um to get around on a you know really uh rough terrain in northern australia and and across different places and um to capture donkey one by one you know this is a book that's also um talks a lot about the intervention years in the in the country and um

and how that was rolled out originally. And there was a lot that was said about it and said about Aboriginal people, really bad things and to destroy our confidence and our trust and to take down what had been built up in terms of ideas of reconciliation, etc.,

Yeah, it's a good book. I worked hard on it and I worked hard on it for 10 years and even while I was doing other things, there's not a day or a time that went by that I wasn't thinking about this book and how to do it.

And how to make it stand up. How did it feel when you got told you'd won the Stella Prize, having won it once before to win it a second time? Well, you don't expect these things to happen at all. And you'd be a fool to expect anything to happen in terms of literary prizes or anything.

things like that and you know I don't write for those prizes you know I write for the challenge that I set myself and to see what I can do and work hard at it and I think they're important I really think you know works of scale

are really important in this particular time that we're heading into because it's so confusing, it's complex and we don't know where we're going. And we need to develop more empathy and compassion for each other, for all people and because we're going to be able to, we're going to need to be able to work towards that type of future where, you know, we have, we can...

try and understand what we've got in common rather than what we, you know, don't have in common. So I really believe that we need a, you know, we have to work harder towards having a literature literate world where it's people are compelled to write works of scale and people are compelled to read more deeply into literature

What's happening to us? And we can't just get it in soundbites and we can't just let, you know, people who work in that type of way, you know, of just creating division and on no basis. So anyway, those are the reasons that I believe work to scale and deep thinking is really key.

the order of the day for this this era that we're moving into

Well, thank you for Praiseworthy, which is a work of scale. I can think of no better way of concluding our talk together than referring to Virginia Woolf. Of course, as you would know, this podcast is named for Virginia Woolf's very famous statement that if a woman is to write, she must have a room of one's own. And so I want to use a Virginia Woolf quote and get you to respond to it.

Virginia Woolf says, books are the mirrors of the soul. What would you say? No, I think that's right. And certainly, I think it's soul work.

that, that word you're doing as a writer. And, um, when you, you put the time and, you know, and, and deep thought into, into what's happening, it's, you're looking really deep in your soul and your consciousness and, um, to try to, you know, work out, you know, what's going on and, um, you know, what, what's possible and what's stopping things from being possible. And, uh,

I think it's from going back to the young woman who thought, why can't things be fixed up today, you know, or not tomorrow? You know, it doesn't take too much to fix up a problem if you put your mind to it. I like that. Writing is soul work. Alexis, thank you for this conversation. I very much enjoyed it and thank you for praiseworthy. Thank you, Julie. I really appreciate and I love talking to you and a great pleasure to meet you and I wish you well.

Thank you.

Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepard, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecott, with editing by Liz Kean from Headline Productions. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl at anu.edu.au. To

To stay up to date with the Institute's work, go to giwl.anu.edu.au and sign up to our updates or follow us on social media at Jewel ANU. You can also find a podcast of one's own on Instagram.

The team at A Podcast of One's Own acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Thanks for listening, and we hope you'll join us next time.

231. That's the average number of apps used by many companies. This leads to a lot of context and tab switching that drains employee focus and costs your company. Grammarly can help. Grammarly's AI works in over 500,000 apps and websites, making it easy for your team to write clearly and on brand without disrupting workflow.

Join 70,000 teams who save an average of $5,000 per employee per year using Grammarly. Go to grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more.