“Plenty of business going on”

Abstract

Australian Aboriginal author Alexis Wright contends that place is not separate and isolated unto itself but is instead part of a whole environment. While Carpentaria Country is a place of both end and beginning, then, where character and reader can find hope in the underlying bond between story, person, and place, it can also be explored as part of the national, extended literary place. Structurally bracketed by cyclones, Carpentaria is a story about hope in a land of the imagination in which a prophet emerges from a cyclone to warn of a town’s hypocrisy and to offer a chance for cultures to come together. When he is rejected, scapegoated, exiled, and murdered, a second cyclone catastrophically destroys the town, presenting in the true sense of apocalypse an opportunity for change and renewal of people and place. With this use of the apocalyptic cyclone trope, Wright’s novel situates within a national literary context: the sub-genre of Australian climate literature in which the apocalyptic cyclone as a trope of destruction, epiphany, and renewal plays a major role in relationships between Australian society, place, and community. As one of a group of Australian literary works within the context of that sub-genre, Carpentaria can be seen not only as a powerfully individual work of literature but also as one in which the spiritual as well as the physical experience of the Australian literary cyclone can bring together the conscious with the unconscious in the landscape of the mind as we seek to understand through story our extended relationships with place.