Praiseworthy, Alexis Wright, Giramondo
Bursting-full of irony and playfulness, Alexis Wright’s extraordinary, epic new novel is an Indigenous Infinite Jest, an antipodean Ulysses. It’s a mountain of magic realism that points to the experiences of and expectations on Indigenous people as they steer between tradition and modernity, and to the way the language of contemporary Australia is jimmied into use, bent at weird angles, hollowed out, hanging like a malignant cloud, like the mysterious haze that hangs over the town at the centre of the novel.
‘Praiseworthy’ is the somewhat ironic name of this northern community, where local man Cause Man Steel, a Don Quixote-type character, also known mockingly as Planet and Widespread for his ambition, is trying to get a step ahead of coming climate catastrophe and fossil fuel shortages by setting up a global transport business based on feral donkeys, which are in plentiful supply in the Top End, and which he collects one-by-one in his battered old Ford Falcon.
He runs into some logistical problems. The townspeople are underappreciative to say the very least – they complain about the stink, and the spirits complain about the disruption to their eternal sleep, as Planet herds the donkeys at the local cemetery. Planet’s wife Dance is also less than enthusiastic, spending her time instead chasing butterflies and trying to figure out how she can be rescued by the Chinese. Meanwhile, the donkeys don’t quite live up to the expectations set by the ancestor spirits who have appeared to Planet in a dream. He is looking for a perfect silver donkey, but only ends up with grey ones – here Wright is hinting, I assume, at how mainstream Australia focusses on the exceptional, exemplary Indigenous figure, while also perhaps hinting at how Indigenous endeavour is judged to be insufficient no matter its extent. Dance is the east-coast imagining of Indigenous culture – vague spirituality and nature – a counter to Planet’s entrepreneurial, ingenious repurposing of a colonialist legacy for the future prosperity of him and other Indigenous people in his orbit.
Characters epitomise various attitudes to Indigenous Australia. Wright’s satire is not subtle, but it is delicious. Planet has two sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk. The latter watches secretly as his older brother wades out to sea and disappears. The townspeople don’t pay much attention to AbSov, as Wright abbreviates his name in a mimicking of a modern cultural trend, until he disappears, then they lament the loss of their Aboriginal Sovereignty and criticise Planet for spending time on wild schemes instead of searching for Aboriginal Sovereignty. Tommyhawk, on the other hand, has spent too much time on the internet and believes the community is full of sexual predators (he thinks his parents are because he is told by the media that they are everywhere), and longs for the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra to rescue him with an air force plane, to whisk him off to the city of plenty. The townspeople think he is a bit creepy.
Planet’s impediments to success are compounded by the townspeople’s suspicion that his ambitions have killed off Aboriginal Sovereignty. Tommyhawk thinks Planet may have even sold Aboriginal Sovereignty’s body to a museum (a reference to the colonialist practice of treating Indigenous bodies as scientific artefacts as well as to the idea that aboriginal sovereignty might now simply be only a historical relic). AbSov is in turn under suspicion for being a child molester – his girlfriend is slightly younger than he, and therefore underage.
In all this, Wright is sending up Aboriginal attitudes to government, and government attitudes to Indigenous people, as well as the kind of media chatter that pictures so-called remote communities as simply problems to be solved one way or another. Throughout, the mashed-up and turbo-charged language parodies political speak, political correctness, right-wing propaganda and the simplistic appropriation of Indigenous culture. Phrases relating to closing-the-gap, assimilation, human rights and Native Title are swirled around in an alphabet soup, signifiers are out-of-plumb, highlighting how practice often falls short of theory and all the phrasemaking smothers Indigenous reality. Wright is relentlessly innovative, with neologisms like ‘collapsology’, the comic symbolism in layers, and her pile-up sentences reflecting the festering of Planet’s plans and the townspeople’s growing annoyance. There is also a loving send-up of small-town hubris and dysfunction and the hybridisation of cultures that occurs as Indigenous people try to make their way.
Praiseworthy’s mayor is Ice Pick, an albino Indigenous man who believes the way forward is assimilation. As well as battling Planet’s project, in a parody of mainstream media Ice Pick broadcasts to the community that they shouldn’t kill their children but should love them like white people do. He tells them they need to be all one race: ‘Australian’, while a consultant is brought in to advise them to give up impractical ideas about aboriginal sovereignty and workshop positive thinking instead.
It feels like Wright, like a rapacious raw minerals global conglomerate operating in outback Oz, has mined to exhaustion the comedic and satirical possibilities of the landscape, so expansive is her vision. There is something appropriate about the heft of the book, its length perhaps paralleling the weight on Indigenous Australians, and matching the outrageous plot point of the overstuffed cemetery of (live) donkeys. At every turn of the page there is something to laugh at, and, importantly, some opportunity to reflect on the various impositions on Indigenous Australians.
Coburg Review of Books 