In a country where the current Prime Minister, John Howard, still cannot issue an apology, let alone compensation, for Australia’s appalling record of genocide against its indigenous Aboriginal people, the name Phantom is symbolic of this family and of how the country has treated its indigenous people – as phantoms – those they hope will go away, disappear from sight. Wright never glorifies this struggle but she shows the huge price that the indigenous tangata whenua of Australia have paid to remain invisible, to resist or give up fighting against colonisation, when the odds seemed stacked against them. They are the phantom people – those who have survived despite the odds. After all, they, and all the other Aboriginal tangata whenua, people of the land, were supposed to be killed off by colonisation or made invisible through an enforced blood transfusion by now.Ĥ Hence their name – Phantom. The Phantom family have done well to stay alive in this system of colonial oppression. An epic struggle between father and son, involving the grandson, takes place with redemptive overtones by the end of the novel. The land becomes a character in the novel, one that is worth loving and worth fighting for.ģ Yet when Will Phantom and his mates do fight for the land, destroying some of the global mining company’s assets, he is seen as an outcast, a criminal by the ruling forces of corporate crime and even by some of those close to him, including his father, Norm Phantom. She lets us see this earth through the eyes of its Aboriginal inhabitants. She urges the landscape to come alive, sing to us. Her words get under our skin, seep through our veins. You are taken on a vast epic journey peopled with eccentric and yet strangely familiar characters, because underneath their eccentricities, lie elements of all of us. Her work can stand alongside all their best writers.Ģ Carpentaria is one of those delicious novels that work their way into your mind, heart, body and soul, just as The Bone People did.

Alexis Wright is already known as “one of Australia’s finest indigenous writers”. Let’s hope that Carpentaria wins it, and many more accolades. Wright’s first novel, Plains of Promise, was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Not since The Bone People took the world by storm and won its Maori author Keri Hulme the coveted Booker Prize, deservedly, has a book of this magnitude appeared from indigenous Australian/Aotearoan authors that could captivate its readers with the power of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. 1 Alexis Wright is a Word Carver whose tattoo, in Carpentaria, recalls ancient ancestral spirit journeys.

Carpentaria alexis