Published in 2006, Alexis Wright’s epic novel, Carpentaria, quickly became a national classic. Described as ‘the greatest, most inventive and mesmerising Indigenous epic ever produced in Australia’ (Shoemaker 55) and a ‘huge audacious monstrous work of genius’ (Guest), it was awarded Australia’s most prestigious literary prize in 2007, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Although hailed as the ‘Great Australian Novel’, Carpentaria presents a major challenge to the settler project on which the nation state is founded.
Carpentaria is set in the fictional coastal town of Desperance in the Southern Gulf of Carpentaria in north-western Queensland, which floods regularly from monsoonal rains and tides. The novel focuses on the members of an Aboriginal family and the ways in which they negotiate the wide-reaching effects associated with the establishment of a multinational mine. It is a sprawling and multi-faceted narrative inhabited by a huge cast of human characters and non-human agents…