AustLit

'To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

'In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia, where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention — art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.

'At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.' (Publication summary)

'Imagine the document you have before you is not a book, but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears, and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter.

'For the past twenty years, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to roam the harsh and beautiful desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional landowners; the mining companies have arrived; and Indigenous art has flourished.

'By immersing herself in the life of a small community and its art centre, and in her ground-breaking mapping projects, Mahood has been seeking to understand her own place in the country she loves, and to find a bridge across the fault line between the profoundly disparate cultures that inhabit it.

'Position Doubtful is a meditation on that experience. Containing astonishing writing about art and landscape, it is a beautiful and intense exploration of memory and homecoming. Written with great energy, insight, and humour, Position Doubtful is a unique portrait of black-and-white relations in contemporary Australia.' (Publication summary)