CW: Death or dying, suicide, references to Australian settler colonialism

Alexis Wright is the only writer to have won both the Miles Franklin and the Stella Prize. As of 2024, she is now tucking another Stella Prize under her belt. The first Stella came in 2006 for her novel Carpentaria, then the Miles Franklin for her biographical account of Leigh Bruce “Tracker” Tilmouth, Tracker, in 2018. Her latest Stella win for her behemoth of a novel, Praiseworthy, saw her speak at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF).

Wright, a Waanyi woman, was interviewed by Cheryl Leavy, a Kooma and Nguri writer and poet.. It is no doubt that Wright, having produced all 736 pages, always has a thousand brilliant thoughts in her head—any wandering was guided beautifully back on track by Leavy’s warm, concise comments and questions. The session covered the scope, history and writing experience of what has been called “the Australian Ulysses”.

At the beginning of the hour, Wright said that she was aware of the expectations of Australian literature and looked with intensity at a spot on the floor before she declared, “I don’t particularly want to be beholden to what someone else expects me to do.” Indeed, Wright is singular in the literary scene.

To those scared by the book’s size, fear not—this is not the product of a woman who failed to edit her ramblings, but a wealth of well-considered, intelligent creation in its shortest possible form. Wright explained that she was trying to match the book’s scope to the current climate, apparently both socially and literally. “How do you match that sort of scale?” Evidently, by penning a whopper of a book.

Hearing Wright break into reading a paragraph from the novel was like suddenly being plunged head-first into warm water: a shock to the system, as water floods your nostrils with its sheer, relentless force—but what a divine thing to surrender to. Wright’s prose washed over me, tugging at me with her steady, sure voice. Truly, you could see then and there how much of herself she had put into the book. Unlike some of her answers, there was no trailing off and no wandering that did not drag you right with it amongst meaningful description.

I attribute some of the distractedness I sensed in her interview responses to circumstance, and perhaps to the fact she won the Stella mere days before. There was one moment Wright seemed intent on having a good-natured jab at Qantas, but seemed to forget where she was going. However, generally, the vagueness that sometimes found Wright tangentially off down different paths did not seem of the doddery kind. It indicated a mind so full of connections, thoughts, ideas and knowledge that it couldn’t be helped being pulled every which way.

Her comments on society were anything but meandering. As she spoke with heart and precision of the epidemic of First Nations children dying by suicide, I was struck with a feeling of something churning in my chest, a gaping maw of recognition at the failure of Australia to protect the very people the land was ripped from. This is obviously not new, a grisly tradition our country’s government has of ignoring the rights, welfare and personhood of First Nations people. Wright, with incisive clarity, posed a question: if, as in her book, First Nations children are listening to the negative rhetoric pouring from institutions and communities, “What happens to our children? They can hear this!” In her example, her character Tommyhawk, eight years old, encourages his older brother, Aboriginal Sovereignty, to end his life so Tommyhawk can go live in Parliament with “a white family”. That is what happens to the children, and Wright does not shy away from it.

A striking thing is how Wright’s own speech mirrored her book’s mixing of harrowing and hilarious, a blend that resembles reality. Wright emphasised that she “come[s] from funny people,” and indeed her storytelling enraptured, setting off laughs across the room. Then, her pivots to the discussion of death and cultural erasure were seamless and clear. Leavy pointed out this quality of Wright’s writing, and to this Wright responded that there is always “funniness all around us”.

Humans are often told, in answer to our pleas, to “have hope. The thing that has stayed with me most about Wright’s talk was her challenge to this notion. “We’ve come through thousands of years… as the oldest living culture in the world,” she said. To Wright, Aboriginal peoples did not simply “have hope”—“they desired survival, and they worked at it”. The conviction in her voice was enough to light a bonfire.

At the end of this MWF session, Alexis Wright, a Waanyi woman of 73 years, stated gravely that despite all the talk, we are no closer as a country to understanding Aboriginal people. And I think that is the point of it all—Praiseworthy adds to the canon another brilliant work by First Nations writers who are fighting to ensure literary and cultural understanding of their joy, grief, struggles and life in this country.