Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Our colleagues at read This routinely hosts the brightest and best writers from Australia and around the world. Today, we're going to hear a conversation with Alexis Write. Alexis is one of Australia's most gifted and important writers. Her previous books, including Carpenteria and Tracker, have won numerous literary prizes, and her latest Praiseworthy, was just awarded this year's Miles Franklin. Michael Williams is the host of read This, and he's with me now.
Hi, Michael. Hi, Ruby, Michael.
I know you're a big fan of Alexis Wright's work, so I wonder if you could start by telling me a bit about what drew you to her writing.
She is an absolutely phenomenal author, and her two thousand and six novel Carpenteria is a modern Australian classic. I recommend if I'm talking to anyone about kind of what are the books of Australian literature over the past kind of twenty years or so, that you need to read.
Carpenteria sits atop any list. Alexis is a member of the Way New Nation So she comes from the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpenteria and she spent decades working as an activist and an advocate for her people, and wrote some kind of amazing works of non fiction, one called grog Nation that she wrote very early in her career. But her novels just absolutely kind of reconceive what you can do in the realm of literature in Australia.
They're exhilarating to read, they're really terrific reads, but they're also really important books.
And Michael praiseworthy. It also won this year's Stellar Prize, and it's received critical acclaim both in Australia and internationally. So what is it about this book that has everyone in agreement?
It's very funny to call a book praiseworthy and then have it attract so much praise. It feels like kind of nominative determinism or something. But it is in every way a praiseworthy book, as you say with it. Alexis has achieved a whole lot of firsts. She's the first writer to win the Stella and the Miles Franklin Award for the same book. She's the first writer to win two stellar prizes. This book's won a heap of awards, and I think it's in no small way because of
a book that feels really timely. It's a book part about climate crisis. It's a book about Aboriginal sovereignty. It's a book about the ways in which the failures of policy, of imagination and of empathy in Australia today function and the effect it has on people's lives. I cannot recommend it more highly.
Coming up in just a moment, Alexis Wright is the twenty twenty four Miles Franklin winner.
Back when I was at university, I did my honors thesis on the Miles Franklin Award. I know, I was very cool. It was a useful lens with which to think about Australian literature. At that point, the award had been going for about fifty years and despite a spotty history, it remained the country's pre eminent literary prize, and it was supposed to be for the work of literature that
reflected Australian life in any of its phases. Now you'd think that sounds like a generous, open set of criteria, one that you'll be able to accommodate a change in culture and a multiplicity of voices, but by the early twenty first century it had congealed into favoring a particular kind of Australian narrative, historical novels, novels with rural settings, anglocentric, predominantly mail. For a time, the award made the news only when there was some kind of controversy attached, rather
than to celebrate the winner. Helen Darvill manufactured a Ukrainian ancestry for herself and led her publishers in a traditional Ukrainian dance when she won, before being exposed as a grifter. Another year, judges disqualified Frank Moorehouse's Grand Days because it was set overseas. Yet another year, every one of the shortlisted authors was a man. That last one led to the creation of the Stellar Prize, also named after Myles Franklin, to provide a counterweight to the limitations of the more
established award. But somehow the award has prevailed. The Stellar Prize clearly led to a shakeup and a greater sense of awareness by Miles Franklin administered that Australian life, in any of its phases meant more than just sepiotoned realism, and this year, for the first time, the same book has won both the Stellar Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. It's a book that's also won a slew of other prizes,
including Britain's prestigious James Tate Black Fiction Prize. Its author became the first person to ever win the Stellar Prize twice and join the limited ranks of people who have
won the Miles Franklin multiple times. Judges called it an astonishing feat of storytelling and sovereign imagination, saying it's a capacious work singing the songs of unseeded lands that bears witness to the catastrophic transformations wrought by white fantasies against which indigenous ingenuity still stands, its connection to country unbroken. The book is called Praiseworthy and its author is Alexis Wright. She joins us today, I'm Michael Williams, and this is read.
This a show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Alexis Writer is a member of the Juan Yew nation from the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpenteria. Her two thousand and six novel Carpenteria for which she won her first Miles Franklin is an enduring classic. Its follow up, The Swan Book, a future set response to the Northern Territory Intervention, is a personal favorite, and her polyvocal oral history of visionary Aboriginal leader Tracker Tillmouth,
won the Stellar Prize in twenty seventeen. Around the time she was working on Tracker, she had the idea for a new novel, a big novel. Praiseworthy is the name of the fictional town at the heart of that story, a town that has been enveloped by a cloud of hayes, part unsettled ancestors, part environmental disaster. Alexis is an extraordinary author, and I wanted to introduce her today with words that
do her and her contribution justice. And I'm going to defer to the words of a previous read this guest, Tony Birch, who wrote a profile of her for The Monthly. Tony wrote, Alexis right is an Aboriginal woman. From January twenty sixth, seventeen eighty eight until this day, the moment you read these words, no group of people on this continent have suffered greater human rights abuses than Aboriginal women. Their country has been vandalized and stolen, as have their
loved ones. Every conceivable barrier, beit the gun, a prison cell, a racist education system, men has attempted to silence them. To understand the failures of systems of racism and abuse is to know courage and tenacity. Alexis Right is as strong as any person I know. Never mistake her auntiness as a sign. She's a pushover for when push comes to shove and she feels an no need to defend
her people and country. Right is a ferocious warrior. She's also loving and generous, and we will always need her. I began our conversation by asking Alexis about her grandmother, a woman I know played an important role in her conception of storytelling.
Well, she's somebody that I love dearly. From a very early age, I would often run away from my mother or away from home, and as soon as my mother turned her back, I'd be over the front fence and heading to her place. From about the age of three, she lived on the edge of town. She just had a house of corrugated iron place and it had dirt floors. She didn't have any electricity, and she was a fantastic gardener, and that comes from the Chinese side of the family.
Her father who had a market garden sort of vegetables and up at Lawn Hill in the Gulf of Carpent Terrier where he met my great grandmother, who was a warn you lady, and she couldn't read or rite, but she had a great interest in the world and people around her. She often went walking around the dry riverbeds and down the rubbish tip to get old tin cans for her pop plants, and she liked to visit people along the river bank who were camping. She'd always stop
and say hello and have a talk. She liked meeting people and talking to people. She'uld go to town every other day because she didn't have any electricity. She had an old kerosene fridge and so she would go to town to buy some small things that she might need for her cooking. Usually she loved to cook cabbage stew and rice, which is very good. It's a very popular
dish amongst Aboriginal people across Northern Australia. When she went to town, it was quite a long walk and she'd call into anybody's house whether they were averaged all or not averaged all people. It made herself very comfortable. She would expect people to welcome her and give her, you know, a glass of water if she needed a glass of water, or make her a cup of tea. She just had this ability to treat everybody equally and expect to be treated well in return.
I think that's a nice way to approach the world.
Yeah, she was just a beautiful person, and I became like her little shadow. I think she had lots of grandchildren. We have a very big family. I have a lot of cousins and you know now we number in the hundreds, you know, maybe more, I don't know, but there's a lot that's pretty great.
In a lecture that you gave it the Sydney Opera back in two thousand and one, you said your grandmother had stories to explain everything who we are, who each of us were, and the place on our traditional country. That was very deep and special to her. She was our memory. She was what not forgetting was all about. It was through her that I learned to imagine.
I think so I learned to imagine through her because of the way she described everything around her. At the story. You know, she would tell just how she saw the world. It was a very cultural way of seeing things, and you had to be able to imagine these things, and I did. And she always talked about her homeland, you know, up in the golf carpenteria. She always wanted to go back because it was a time when people weren't able
to stay on that traditional country. So she always talked about that and the way she would describe it, it just seemed like the most beautiful place in the world. But it was a hard place too. But yeah, she did teach me to see things differently and to just imagine, and I think that was my saving grace. Really. I think I was very fortunate to have had a grandmother that I could be close to, because it was a struggle for my mother, and my father died when I was very young.
Did she talk to you differently because you were a child? Do you remember? I mean, did she edit stories or did she shape the world a particular way for you as a child.
I listened to her talking to other people, talking to family, you know, family members would come to Grandma's place and they'd all sit outside and drag tea and talk and tell stories and gossip. But also there were stories about traditional cultural things that were just spoken about in passing. So I just picked up a lot of that when I was a child. I don't think you know she especially sat me down just to tell me your particular stories.
I just heard them through her talking and other family members talk together, and her talking to people wherever she went.
How much do you think those heard conversations in your life, and you know, whether their gossips or their old stories or whatever the stories they are have infused and influenced the way you approach your writing practice.
I think the writing practice comes from a number of things, Michael. Part of it comes from my conscience that's been shaped by people like my grandmother and family members, and also through the work that I've done through my life working for our own people, in our own organizations, and for our concerns and land rights. I think I was very fortunate that you had access to some really great orators
from our world. I think I was very lucky and fortunate to have had access to people like that who were always given us guidance as younger people, and in fact they are about my real university and where I really learned, you know, from coming through you know, a school system that wasn't particularly something that I could embrace. And there's when I less school, there was a number of older people, you know in our world who you took on a younger people like us, like myself, and
taught us. They've virtually taught us to read and write. They taught us to have an inquiry in mind, and to imagine and to research and you know, find ways. They expected us to do all these things. When I first started working, you know in our world, you know, with a lot of people like that, they would have meetings, you know, and they would go on for hours, and
that want someone like me to take the minutes. They expected me to write down every word, not just the points of what came out of the meetings, but write down every word. And I guess we didn't have money to buy a tape recorder, okay, with the human tape recorder. But it was more than that. It was an education that were teaching people like myself to listen to here, to think, to see what's happening in our world and who we are, you know, what culture is all about.
And they expected us to go out do the reading, do the writing and find out what are the indigenous people are doing across the world. You know, what's happening in the legal system in other places in the world that could help us here. I then studied literature from across the world, and I still do that to find out how I could write the type of writing that I'm doing now. It's been something that I'd be building for a long time now. To reach something like praiseworthy.
I mean, it's such a towering achievement and so utterly your own voice, your own rhythms. The thing that strikes me above all else about this book is the ways in which you've found entirely a kind of different register in the way it's done. In one interview you talked about to write it, you knew you had to write it off key from regular fiction and find that different, different note.
That's right. I thought really deeply about how to write this book. I knew it would be a big book. I didn't realize it would be this big. And you know, I wanted to write a book that the spirit of the times, and I was deeply concerned about environmental issues.
I'm deeply concerned about our ability as Aboriginal people to cope with climate change, and you know, we've gone through a climatic change in the past with the longest living culture in the world, and I thought really deeply about those things and how did our ancestors survive over tens of thousands of years. So I was thinking about that and trying to figure out how to put this book together. And it's not just a story. It's also about the tone that I wanted to capture in the book, that rhythm.
And I knew that, as you said, beter to be written off key in a different rhythm. And I thought about what we say in the Gulf, we're of one heartbeat, and I wondered, well, what does that heartbeat sound like? And I felt it sounded like a slow rhythm, and that's you know, the sound of digeral dooah, darky collapsticks, women singing, ceremony, and it's a slow beat and those sounds that come from the earth in instruments made, you know, from in a country, and that's the tone I wanted
to bring it in this book. So I've really worked and reworked and reworked to make that tone consistent throughout the book.
I can't I mean, this seems like a non sensical thing to say, but you achieve a kind of sense of slow urgency. You know, the book is never less than kind of furious and grief stricken and full of these kind of big emotions, but manages to temper them through a kind of prevailing spirit of patience or a long view. When I spoke once years ago, and I remember you saying that when you were younger, you were a real hothead and would you know, fly off the
handle about things. And I'm interested in a career in advocacy and activism, caring about these issues and these ideas, and caring about your community and trying to find ways to impress upon an audience the urgency of the thing. How did you find the way to slow down while retaining urgency.
Oh, this is something I've been taught as well, is that to take the long view. I think that right in those minutes years ago taught me a lot. Patients, and that's what they were aiming for, to teach young people that you needed to have patients, extreme patients and deally what we're dealing with. And I do have a
lot of patients with enormous patients. But at the same time, you know, there's storms ruined and I watched storms and seeing you know, the storms that created for us, and I see the storms in the Gulf of Carpenteria and are huge, the mighty. And the book in the way is a response to so little we know about our world and what's happening in our world and how it's shaping and reshaping us. And I wanted to explore all those things.
Coming up in just a minute. Alexis reflects more on the characters at the heart of Praiseworthy, Cousman Steele and his family and chairs. While she felt this book was so important to write, now here's some more from the miles, Franklin judges on Praiseworthy. Through its sheer, ambition, astringency and audacity, Praiseworthy redraws the map of Australian literature and expands the
possibilities of fiction. They said, beyond the environmental allegory of the Hayes and a world that feels on the brink of end times. The book is fiercely passionately engaged with questions of government control and self determination, reckoning with the failures of imagination, policy and empathy of contemporary Australia. At its core stands the steel family. The eldest son is called Aboriginal Sovereignty, and he's in a state of despair. His eight year old brother is consumed by the hateful
stories he reads on the internet. Their mother, Dance, has a deep connection with moths and butterflies and a desire to escape, seeking people smuggler to take her to China, and the family's father, the main character of the book, is on an obsessive quest to save both family and people. He's known as Widespread and Planet, but mostly by the name caused Man Steel.
You know, he's a culture dreamer, and he says a visionary and he decides he's gope to bring his people over the burning planet. And you know, he's obsessed with it all, and he can see, like anybody can see, that we're not getting much support here, you know, in recognizing our rights and what our rights really are and
our sovereignty here. So he's finding a way that he's going to take his people over the burning planet, and so they're going to be able to survive to tell the tale on the other side, which is what ancestors did and got shaped in that time. And it takes time, and we will survive.
You compellingly make the case for survival. But Cosman's donkey based vision, I mean, he's a wonderful figure in many ways. I understand that Cosman knows more than a bit to track a till mouth.
Oh not necessarily. Tracker was a far more sophisticated visionary in a way in terms of developing sustainable economic policy and an economic vision for Aboriginal people across Northern Australia or anyway. He had enormous vision, enormous ideas. And here's a totally different kettle of fish. But this is a person who is on a community who's not getting any support from anybody, and he's trying to create a vision to help his people ride through the storm of global warming.
So he's about this and he is going to use his own brain power to try to figure it all out. And he's clapped out today and he's going to travel all over the country and he's going to fulfill this vision of creating this global tradesport company that will replace maybe Quantus.
That's right, Replace the kangaroo with a donkey is the only way.
Well, well, the kangaroo is a native animal and honor. I think the kangaroo is going to do our bidding. But a donkey might, a donkey might.
The great tragedy of the book is while Corsman's on this quest for the next generation of the Steel family, for Tommy Hawk, and for Aboriginal sovereignty, the stories they're hearing, the stories they're being told, the national reality they've inherited, is one that is limiting their options and indeed steering them down paths that are not their own.
This is true, true, And I wanted to think about what happens to people for generation to generation of bad decisions made on their behalf and they're not being able to do a thing about it, and people spend their whole lives fighting or you know, for the chance to be able to design our own future. I've work with people in the past, you know, we're on ideas of abertial self government, and I always remember some of these really senior people, you know, who know this country back
to front. No, it's stories and it's you know, and so much about this country. It's not funny, and we don't hear them, and we don't understand what culture is all about, this long term culture that belongs here. And I wanted to explore those issues and those concerns and what happens to people when you make those people making
those wrong decisions. Government keep making those wrong decisions that take away that power that senior people would always say to me, we've always governed ourselves, we have always governed ourselves, And what do you do? And someone else says, they govern them for you, and they make the wrong decisions
all the time, what do you do? So I wanted to try to address that in the book, and address that idea of Aboriginal sovereignty, and through that young character, that beautiful young man who his father had named from birth Aboriginal sovereignty so you'd always remember who he was.
I think you say in the book he names him Aboriginal sovereignty because they're the only words his father loves to say.
That's true, and only words a lot of Aboriginal people love to say and say that they will and say they must and will continue to say it. I guess I thought it was necessary to write this book and and to really show the complexities and the growing complexities of what's happening here. And it's not all it's not cut and dry, and and I you know, I hope that people would understand that, you know that, Oh what
am I saying? And I think there's there's gonna be a realization is that you're not going to get an understanding of Aboriginal people from social media or soundbites or or manipulation and what a you know, a national narrative is about who or what Aboriginal people are. And there's a lot of depth here, and there's a lot of complexity. And this is why this book became what it was, because I wanted to try to to bring this, you know, out in some way. It's it's I don't think this
book could be. It could have couldn't have been less what it was, and I'm just amazed that I was even able to finish it. It's you know, it's I look at it and I'm in are of it because I don't think, you know, someone like me is capable of writing something like this. But I really think it's necessary, Michael, that we look at things, you know, and more deeply.
We have to, and as we move into a new era of you know, global warming and the world getting harder and more things to be really insecure about about our survival, that we need to really think about these things and really try to understand, and for me, one of the best ways to try to understand it is through reading. And I think that we need to be writing huge works of literature, and we need much more than this throughout the world well so that we can
create better understanding of each other. And as we move into the future, we're really going to need to It's a book I wanted to put, you know, to have a universal feel that you know, anybody could understand it anyway.
Alexis. I mean, firstly, I think it's reception not just here but in the US and in the UK suggests you've achieved that spectacularly. But also it's not just a tool in creating a more literature literate world because of the ways in which you are defining your own literary traditions in here, you're demonstrating how fluid those boundaries of what literature can be and what it can do.
Yeah.
Well, I decided very early in my literary career as such, I wasn't going to be trapped in in anyone's box, you know about how I should write, what I should write, and what literature is or what Australian literature is and I was going to write in my own way, trying to find the way that I could write in this country, about this country, and to consider it its depth in our history here, which it goes back, you know, thousands of years, not just two hundred and something years, but
thousands and the stories, the big stories, the interconnected stories here that are ancient. It's something that's I've been working on for a long time. And I'm happy with what I've been doing.
And that's some delightful understatement there.
So yeah, it's and I've always wanted to and I thought, if I you know, if I am to write, you know, I wanted to always challenge myself and to keep challenge myself and I'll take risks in what I do, how I write. Yeah, I did that with Carpenterier. You know, started from Carpenterier and that was his huge race. And it really didn't get published and until one, you know, until either Indic you know, my publisher at t Romando.
He looked at it and asked me some really hard questions about why I wrote it the way I wrote it, and then he said he'd be happy to publish it. And so he's been He's a great publisher. He really is. He's you know, I always say he's, but he's best publisher in the world.
It's a pretty phenomenal collaboration, the one between the two of you. It's great when a publisher is able to have the space for an author's vision and to help bring that vision to life. And I think watching the way the two of you have done that together over years now is one of the great satisfying stories of Australian literature.
Thank you, I'll be happy to hear that. I think it's a well.
I think you've given either many rolling reasons to be happy to hear things over the past little bit, and it's been thrilling to see that not only has the risk paid off, but that there's some deep reading and deep listening going on in response to praiseworthy and it deserves all the credit it's getting.
Grandma was a great gardener. She grew all sorts of things, so she grew Chinese cabbage, and she had an old fashioned flower garden. On one side. There were very old fashioned types of flowers, like a zennius. I grew a garden of zenius last year, after I've finished praise with when it got published. They were gigantic, they were huge, but she had small senior flowers in her garden. I remember that.
I love that you had to finish writing the book before you would let yourself indulge in go out to your own garden and do that that you couldn't play.
Yeah, our garden was totally overgrown because I just didn't have time. I didn't have time, and probably the last decade of doing Tracker and Praiseworthy at the same time, so I really didn't have time. All I did was think of the book or the job at hand, or whatever I had to do, and the book always stayed with me. But in the last three years, I had collected a few packers of z in as seeds each year that I was going to grow in the garden, and I got the chance and I just put all
the seeds in and they all came up. It was just amazing.
I'm very happy as a reader, and I'm very happy as a person in the world that this astonishing book is out there in the world. But I'm almost as happy for you. Alexis right that you finally got back to your garden after that decade. Alexis right, Thank you so much.
Thank you, Michael, it's such a joy talking to you. As always.
Thanks for listening to Alexi on Read This. For the next couple of months, we're going to bring you some of the best interviews from the show every Sunday. Listen out for conversations with Eric Beacher, Mary Beard, Bruce Pasco and more. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to read this, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There's a whole year's worth of fascinating conversations ready for you.