Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west New South Wales.

This masterclass on Carpentaria will explore literary activism and resistance, the locale, notions of realism, insider/outsider knowledges of time and place, and waste and rejuvenation as a cyclic process of Aboriginal cosmology and world view. Centring her discourse on an agentic focus from the fringe, Wright works across two cultural spheres to create a textual embodiment of her people’s resilience and cultural survival. Author Alexis Wright also incorporates European history, legend and myths of place and settlement. It proposes a return to a holistic understanding of people and nature and creates contemporary storylines and structures recognisably drawing on Australia’s oldest cultural heritage, the Dreaming. The novel questions the race, gender, and class divisions that hold exploitative, capitalist relationships in place in Australia and employs an Aboriginal Reality to achieve its post-colonising thrust. Such neo-colonialism is given fictional shape through the destructive manipulations of the multinational Gurfurritt mine against First Nations sovereignty and through the stunting impact of small-town racism.

Published under John Howard’s conservative tenure in 2006, Carpentaria can be seen to denounce the neo-colonial powers in contemporary Australia that marginalise, reify, and stifle the Indigenous world out of agency.

Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, 2006, Readings.

Carpentaria by alexis wright