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 her 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 should 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 male. For a time, the award made the news only when there was some kind of controversy attached, rather
than to celebrate the winner. Helen Darvel 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 Myles Franklin administrators 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 Mumutiple. 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 Right. 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 One Year Nation from the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpenteria. Her two thousand and six novel Carpenteria, for which he won her first Miles Franklin, is an enduring classic. Its follow up, The Swan Book, a future set response to the no mo Than 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 Hays 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 Wright 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, bit 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 a need to defend her people and country. Right is a ferocious warrior. She is 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 offer run away from my mother or what 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 wary lady and she couldn't read it 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 hands 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 would 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, you know, it was quite a long walk, and she'd call into anybody's house, whether they were aborigin all or not Aboriginal people, and made herself very comfortable. She would expect people to welcome her and give her 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 now we're number in the hundreds maybe more. I don't know, but there's a lot that's pretty great.
In a lecture that you gave at the Sydney Opera House 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 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 Gulf of 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 yes, she did teach me to see things differently and to just imagine differently, 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 about 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 talking 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 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 you know, for our own people, in our own organizations, and for our concerns and land rights. I think I was very fortunate that, you know, I 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. They 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 theytgenous people are doing across the world, 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 be 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 almost 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. And 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 book. 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 the story, it's also about the tone that I wanted to capture in the book, that rhythm. And I knew that, as you said, neeter to be written off key in a different rhythm. And I thought about what we say in the golf 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 Digery doo, your darky collapsticks, women singing ceremony, and it's a slow beat and those sounds that come from the earth, in instruments made 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 nonsensical 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.
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 patients and that's what they were aiming for, to teach young people that you needed to have patients, extreme patients and dealing what we're dealing with. And I do have a lot of patients, and you have enormous patients, but at the same time, you know there's storms brewing it. I watched storms and seeing,
you know, the storms that created for us. And I see the story ORMs in the Gulf of Carpenteria and a huge and 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, cors Van Steel and his family, and chairs why she felt this book was so important to write. Now, here's some more from the Males. 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 Hays 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 a 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 cause Mans Steel.
You know he's a culture dreamer, and he says a visionary, and he decides his scope to bring these people over the burning planet. And you know, he's obsessed with it all, and he can see, like anybody can see, that they'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. 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.
Not necessarily tracker was a far more sophisticated fisionary in a way in terms of developing stateable 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 thinking about this and he is going to use his own brain power to try to figure it all out. And he's clapped out sedan and he's going to travel all over the country and he's going to fulfill his vision of creating this global tradesport company that will replace maybe quantity.
Replace the kangaroo with a donkey, is the only.
Way, well, well, the kangaroo is it is a native animal and honor that 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, and I wanted to think about what happens to people for generation to generation of bad decisions made on their behalf and there 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 of 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.
They see new people, but 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 through that 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're say in the book his 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, hope that people would understand that, you know that, oh what am
I saying? And I think there's there's kind of be a realization is that you're not going to get an understanding of our people from social media or soundbites or manipulation and what 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 bring this, you know, out
in some way. It's it's it's I don't think this book could be It could have could have been less than 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 global warming and the world getting harder and more things to be really insecure about about as 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 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, 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 anyone's box, you know, about how I should write and 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 story is 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 under statement there.
So yeah, it's and 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 and and I'll take risks in what I do, how I write. You know, I did that with Carpenterrier. You know, started from Carpenterier and that was his huge riss and it really didn't get published.
And until one, you know, until I've indic you know, my publisher at 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 here, it really is. You always says, 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.
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 zenius. I grew a garden of zeneus last year after I've finished Praise with when we got published, they were gigantic, they were huge, but she had small sinia 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. You couldn't plan the Zeneus.
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 packages seeds each year that always going to grow in the garden, and I got the chance and I just put the all 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 after that decade. Alexis Right.
Thank you so much, Thank you, Michael. It's such a joy talking to you. As always.
Alexis writes Praiseworthy and all of Alexis's other books are available now and you can read that Tony Birch profile of Alexis and Praiseworthy in the Monthly. Thanks for joining us for this special episode of Read This. We'll be back to regular programming next Thursday. Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames. This episode was mixed by Atticus Basto. Original compositions by Salton Fetcher. Thanks for listening, See you next week, and a big congratulations Alexis Right.