On the day she decided she had finally finished Praiseworthy, after almost a decade of writing and rewriting until she was happy with every one of its 700-odd pages, Alexis Wright went out to her garden in Melbourne’s north-east, and started furiously weeding. “It was like another edit!” she laughs. “And that garden was weeded within an inch of its life.”
Wright, an Indigenous Australian novelist – one of the Waanyi people from the Gulf of Carpentaria – has written four novels since 1997. Her most recent, Praiseworthy, described by the New York Times as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”, was an exhilarating, exhausting labour. “It took me a while to come down from it,” the 74-year-old says. “I didn’t realise how much emotional, physical energy I was putting into it.”
Since the novel was published in Australia, it has won two of the country’s most prestigious prizes, the Stella prize and the Miles Franklin, as well as the James Tait Black prize in the UK. In October, as the world waited to hear who would be the next Nobel laureate in literature, Wright’s name was among the favourites. Even though the accolade went to South Korean author Han Kang, it was a “dizzying day”, Wright says. “A lot of people tried to contact me – we got lots of offers to publish Praiseworthy in other languages, which was quite amazing. But gee, a Nobel prize … there’s many, many great writers in the world I admire, who need to win a Nobel prize.”
As with all Wright’s work, the serious, the farcical, the magical and the overtly political exist side-by-side in Praiseworthy, in which a man drives into the desert in search of the perfect donkey. The buzz around her latest novel has drawn new attention to her back catalogue around the world. In Australia, Indigenous people are often spoken for or about, but rarely listened to, she says. “The truth is, we have simply become other people’s subject matter in the stories they tell,” Wright wrote in a 2016 essay titled What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story? As well as her 2013 novel, The Swan Book, in which a mute girl wakes from a decade-long sleep and becomes the trophy wife of the first Aboriginal prime minister of Australia, there is her 2017 work Tracker – a biography of Eastern Arrernte activist Tracker Tilmouth – which is published in the UK for the first time this month.
Tilmouth was born in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in 1954, the sixth of eight children who were all removed from their father’s care by government authorities when their mother died. This was a common fate for Aboriginal children up until the 1970s: the Stolen Generations, who were placed in missions, reserves or foster care in the hope they could be forced to assimilate into white society. Tilmouth was around four years old when he was sent to Croker Island with his two younger brothers; the three small boys didn’t even know they had other siblings until they were adults.
Tilmouth was forever shaped by being separated from his family; as an adult he struggled to find his place back in his community, but he worked hard to understand its politics and culture and learned the local languages. He found work as an interpreter and community advisor, eventually becoming director of the Central Land Council, representing Aboriginal communities living over 776,000 sq km. “He didn’t like anybody to treat him as a victim,” Wright says. “He always felt he had to look after his brothers, which left him with an acute sense of responsibility for others. And he was able to read any situation and survive it.”
Wright herself was born in 1950 in Cloncurry in north-western Queensland. Her father was a white cattleman who died when she was five, and she grew up with her mother and grandmother, who told her stories about Waanyi country, where their family had been forced off their lands in the 1930s. As a “hotheaded” young woman, Wright was enlisted to take the minutes at community meetings, where she learned more about her people’s concerns – “land claims, mining rights, the whole box and dice”. She began working as a researcher for Aboriginal advocacy groups and legal services in Queensland and the Northern Territory, and eventually moved to Canberra, where she became head of research at the National Aboriginal Conference.
By the 1980s she knew wanted to write. Fiction was “a way of telling the truth”, so she went hunting for other authors who could show her “how someone who comes from a long and broken culture writes about their country, their history”. She turned to Ireland and the Americas: Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez – “because I couldn’t see that sense of scope in Australian literature back then”. By the time Wright and Tilmouth met in Canberra, he already had the ear of every politician and bureaucrat who might be able to make his grand dreams for Aboriginal Australia a reality.
“Tracks was such a force of personality. Everyone loved him,” Wright recalls. “He had a great sense of fun but also he was a great thinker. If he was on a flight, as soon as it took off he’d be out of his seat, walking down the aisle and talking to people, cracking jokes. It was his business to know everyone, because everyone might one day be able to help him.” Tilmouth had one goal: Aboriginal sovereignty. “He knew the corridors of Canberra up and down. He would just walk into any minister’s office, no appointment – someone would be making him a cup of tea before they even realised,” she laughs. “He’d ring up a prime minister in the middle of the night. That was the person he was. Sometimes people could get annoyed with that, but he had business to do.”
Wright was intrigued by this charismatic visionary who was brimming with ideas to improve life for their people: plans to extract gold from the land; establish cotton farms; even breed crocodiles to supply their skins to high-end fashion designers in Paris. (Praiseworthy’s main character Cause Man Steel, who dreams of saving his people in a grand scheme involving wild donkeys, is partly inspired by Tilmouth.) But they didn’t always see eye-to-eye. He’d frequently call her up late at night – “‘Wrighty, I want you to write something about such and such,’ usually some politician that he didn’t like,” she says. During one long car trip, he “threatened to roll the car he was driving and kill both of us” – to end a six hour argument they were having over “the value of having principles”. But just like everyone else, Wright loved him, and admired his vision for Aboriginal Australia, to turn northern Australia into what is known as a food bowl: thousands of kilometres that would provide crops, dairy, fish and meat to the rest of the country, which could, one day, create a separate Aboriginal economy that would give his people their sovereignty back. “Governments will always say, Aboriginal people have got to be self-determined – but how do you make that happen? We’ve seen the dismal failure of a lot of government attempts to do things for us and they still haven’t learned. But Tracker was trying to make it happen,” Wright says.
By the time Wright began writing Tracker, she was already a renowned author: she’d published four books, including two novels, 1997’s Plains of Promise and 2006’s Carpentaria, which won the Miles Franklin. With each book, “I was taking bigger risks, setting myself a bigger challenge – and Tracker felt risky”. Rather than write a straight biography, Wright spoke to more than 50 people – including Tilmouth himself – to produce an oral history of his life, in the “Aboriginal tradition of storytelling practice for crossing landscapes and boundaries, giving many voices a part in the story”, as she wrote at the time.
“A long time ago, I realised I didn’t want to fit in anyone’s box, particularly what was expected around what an Aboriginal person should write,” Wright says. “So I’ve been testing myself, in trying to create a literature that speaks about this country. I don’t want to just write about myself or what’s happening in my house. Literature needs to be more than that.”
Tilmouth died of cancer in 2015, at the age of 62. When Tracker was finally published two years later, it won the Stella prize, Australia’s leading award for books by women, which “surprised me more than anyone,” she says. “I wish Tracker had been alive. He would have loved to have been there. I could just see him swanning around all these feminist women – by the end of the night, they would have all been in love with him!”
Even with everything else happening in her career, she’s pleased Tracker is being published internationally: Aboriginal voices telling their own story to the world. “I think times are changing,” she says. “Australians have been quite prepared to read literature from the UK or America for years. We make the adjustments for different ways of speaking, thinking. And if the UK wants to open up to the world, they will find it is an amazing, vibrant place!”
• Tracker by Alexis Wright is published by And Other Stories. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
