AustLit

Wright describes what drove her to write her novel Carpentaria, stating that 'For a long time while I was exploring how to write Carpentaria, I tried to come to some understanding of two principal questions: firstly, how to understand the idea of Indigenous people living with the stories of all the times of this country, and secondly, how to write from this perspective.'

This review describes Carpentaria as a political novel that is also personal. It discusses the novel's style and argues that '[t]he narrative voice of Carpentaria is a storyteller’s voice; its narrative context, an eternal present as lived by a community for whom history and myth are interwoven. Just as the serpent is both the region’s river system and the totemic RainbowSerpent of Aboriginal creation stories, so the novel occupies two parallel time zones, or streams of activity, one linear and the other part of an infinite spiritual cycle’ (Source: review.

In this essay, Hall argues that the floating island of rubbish in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria can be seen as a Foucauldian heterotopia.

'I argue in this essay that Australian writer Alexis Wright's 2006 novel Carpentaria and New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter series (comprising of the novels Dreamhunter (2005) and Dreamquake (2007)) call up the matter of region and the waste of modernity to secede the form of nation. As fictional spaces overlaying real places, doubling with a world of dreams and an underworld of nightmares of colonial violence, these novels also move beyond the form of realism.

'Reading the Country is a journey into Roebuck Plains, near Broome in Australia's far north-west; it is an exploration of the meaning of place, an attempt to chart the relationships between people and those specific places in which they must find a place to live. It is a journey through landscape into language and ideas, and personal and cultural location.' (Source: Publisher's Blurb, 1996 Revised Edition)

Despite the stereotype of post-colonial Australian society as secular and irreligious, a radical concept of the sacred, located in place, has pervaded its literature. Australian writers again and again break away from received, orthodox notions of religious experience, imagining a transformed post-colonial sacred in Australia.

For Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies 'place' has had a particularly post-colonial function in contesting imperial cultural forms, including received forms of religion.

Ravenscroft argues that 'white critical efforts to make meaning' of Carpentaria have portrayed Wright as indebted to novelists such as Patrick White and Frank Hardy, and have also tended, 'in moves that refuse the text's unfamiliarity' to try to categorise the novel as a work magic realism. Ravenscroft goes on to offer, 'first, a more detailed critique of so‐called postcolonial magic realism in which I point to critics’ refusal to allow markers of difference in texts to be significant; indeed, to signify at all.

Aitken discusses some of the political context around the time of Wright's Miles Franklin Award win, and also states that the novel 'is not an activist tract.' He discusses the narrative and the style, and concludes by stating that Carpentaria 'is the most surprising novel I have read this year, not least because of its astonishing optimism.' (Source: review.)

Wright discusses what her aims were with Carpentaria, and how she has been influenced by her grandmother in Cloncurry who told stories in a way that brought all times together, which is what Wright also tries to do in Carpentaria. She also discusses her literary influences.