Abstract

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) is a highly significant event in Australian Literature, winning the 2007 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal among many other awards. The story constructs various fictional and real contemporary, historical, and Indigenous mythological events in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria in tropical, far northern Australia. It examines themes such as frontier violence, land rights, deaths in custody, impacts of mining, activism and the "Dreaming". Yet, its potential to influence the mindsets of sustainability exist beyond the literary, because while the novel is an exploration of the regionally specific perspective of its author, a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf, it also stands in metonymic eco-critical significance for all Australians. For the gulf country, with its extremes in seasonal shifts, experiencing flooding rains, cyclones, and intense heat and aridity presages the vulnerable future for all of Australia during climate change. This is painfully ironic, given that Australia is recognised as one of the most unsustainable and most environmentally vulnerable continents (WWF Living Planet Report 2010). There is, it is clear, recourse in Indigenous epistemologies. This paper investigates how Carpentaria, with its epic scope and experimental structure, suggests a new poetics and discourse for human engagement with the environment. The non-Indigenous reader is immersed in a startling and transforming story. The poetics constructing the novel normalises both cyclical temporality and communal cognition. The narrative incorporates climate and landscape as character rather than simply backdrop setting. Most importantly, it offers a non-didactic warning against human hubris in environmental interaction. This paper, using eco-critical analyses, proposes that such aesthetically innovative and compelling construction of narrative operates to dilute the anthropocentric nature/culture divide, a divide arguably at the heart of human destruction of the environment.