Summary
Carpentaria is set in the town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The narrator describes how the land and the sea in this region of Northern Australia were formed by an ancestral serpent. The serpent crawled on its belly through wet clay soils underneath the mudflats, leaving tunnels in its wake. Then the tunnels collapsed to form valleys. Then sea water flowed through the valleys, forming bending rivers that cross plains, dunes, and mangrove forests. The serpent created many rivers before creating one final river, beneath which it continues to live in an underground network of porous rocks. The serpent’s being is said to permeate every aspect of life in the region, especially for the Aboriginal river people. Their knowledge of the river, passed down from generation to generation, enables them to adapt to its extreme and changing conditions “in a place that is sometimes underwater, sometimes bone-dry.”
Desperance is an Australian frontier town that was built during colonial times. It used to be a port but during the last century the river changed course and the town lost its harbor waters. On the edge of town, in a “human dumping ground” surrounded by a dense thicket of dry plants called Pricklebush, Normal Phantom lives with his Aboriginal family. The settler families do not see the Phantoms as a part of the town. But in the eyes of the Aboriginal people, Normal has the power to “grab hold of the river with his mind,” just like his ancestors, the river people. He spends long hours out on the river and has encounters with fish and reptiles. Everyone in the town knows Normal and knows that this is his river.
One day, the local council decides to change the name of the river to “Normal’s River.” This coincides with the arrival of the first multinational mining company to the region. At the ceremony to officially change the river’s name, mining executives and politicians line up to take a photo with the old hero Normal. Many local Aboriginal residents, including Normal, oppose the mining company and voice their criticism. Then a dust and rain storm disrupt the event, sending the outsiders into a panic. Over the years, despite the traditional residents’ opposition, foreign companies establish more mines in the region. Years later, after the mining stops, museums of the region’s mining history become a local tourist attraction. Yet, this official version of history makes no mention of Normal Phantom and the Aboriginal people.
Normal Phantom is married to an Aboriginal woman named Angel Day. Angel looks for a place for them to live for days before she eventually chooses a spot next to the swamp. However, from day one Normal says the place is located on top of the nest of a snake spirit that makes his bones ache and makes it hard for him to move. Norm asks Angel to find a new place to live but she refuses. The couple has six children and they all live out in the open air protected only by a tree and a tent made from blankets. Eventually, Angel begins to build a house out of scraps and debris that she salvages from the waste dump on the other side of the road. Norm does nothing to help. One day Norm goes out to the river and he does not come back for weeks. When he returns, Angel tells Norm that he can’t come back and he stays away at sea for five years. When he returns he tells Angel that he is prepared to hang around, and the couple has their seventh child, Kevin.
One day Angel goes to the dump and finds an old clock and a statue of the Virgin Mary. This is trash from the Council’s office in Uptown. Upon leaving with her new items, Angel feels the other people scavenging at the dump are staring at her and she yells at them. She tells them they have no right to be at the dump since they don’t have the permission of the traditional land owner, who was Norm’s grandfather. The others, tired of Angel repeatedly talking down to them, reply angrily and a fight breaks out. Warring groups form along the lines of “tribal battles from the ancient past.” People injure each other. A large woman in a white dress tries to hit Angel with the statue. Before she does so, Will Phantom, Norm and Angel’s young son, fetches a lighter and lights the dump on fire. Everyone scatters.
The following night, the Phantoms’ Aboriginal neighbors pick up their belongings and move to the other side of town, where they begin to set up makeshift dwellings. Their move causes a ruckus and the white settlers of Desperance complain to the Council about the Aboriginal camps. At a meeting, Stan Bruiser, the town’s mayor who got rich by investing in mining, makes racist comments about Aboriginal people and rouses the town’s residents. A delegation goes to Norm and Angel’s house, where Angel talks down to the visitors and threatens to sue them. Frightened, the delegation prepares to leave, until Stan Bruiser shows up drunk. He harasses Angel and Norm chases Stan away with a knife.
A very intense cyclone named Leda passes through Desperance. In the storm, an experienced seaman is thrown from his boat and loses his memory. Lightning surges up from the sea and heads in a line toward the coast, finally going up a tree and exploding in thunder. The storm, combined with intense bushfires in the south, has many strange effects that unsettle the residents of Desperance. Everything takes on a red hue, including their skin. Too much moisture in the air causes all the clocks in town to stop working at exactly the same time.
Then, a disheveled white man emerges mysteriously from the sea, crossing kilometers of mudflats to reach the shore. The first to observe him is Captain Nicoli Finn, an old man who wears a smelly army uniform, claims to be a spy, and is regarded as crazy by the townspeople. Finn rings the emergency bell and the townspeople gather at the shore to watch the spectacle. They loudly share different ideas about this man’s origins as the Aboriginal residents watch from their hiding spot in the long grasses. For the most part, the scene reminds the white residents of their colonial origins and they get emotional. The white residents of Desperance come to view Elias as an angel.
Elias lives in Desperance for many years. He comes to plug the hole left by his lost memory with the identity the Desperanians have constructed for him. But he also rejects their view of him as an angel and suffers from the burden of being regarded as a savior. The Pricklebush mob sees him at night by the water, counting stars, imitating animal movements and sometimes screaming at the top of his lungs. He speaks with them and goes out fishing with Norm Phantom.
Residents of Desperance worry about the security of the town. Every November before the wet season, the Council men stretch a “giant net made of prayers and God-fearing devotion” over the town to protect it from a cyclone. Every March at the start of the dry season, they retrieve the net. One day, the town decides to make Elias the town guard and he goes out every day to watch the coastline. Eventually, Desperance is affected by a series of mysterious fires, including the burning of the town’s historical records as well as the Shire Council office. Suddenly, the white residents of Desperance turn on Elias and blame him for these incidents. Elias criticizes them, saying they are stupid and ridiculous to have singled out one person to hang their destiny on. Offended, the Desperanians tell Elias to leave town and he obeys.
Analysis
Carpentaria opens with a paragraph of poetic prose in capital letters. The tone and imagery of this section is biblical, foreboding, and apocalyptic. Church bells ring. The “INNOCENT LITTLE BLACK GIRLS” who live in a place without peace look around themselves at the destruction that humans have caused and announce that “ARMAGEDDON BEGINS HERE.” Armageddon is an allusion to the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgment in the New Testament. This allusion foreshadows the novel’s setting in a conflictual place that is characterized by a high-stakes battle.
Desperance is a fictional town. But the region of the Gulf of Carpentaria is real. The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea that is enclosed on three sides by the lands of what is today called North Queensland Township in Northern Australia. The novel’s geographical setting is significant. The Gulf of Carpentaria faces Papua New Guinea and Indonesia to the North. The narrator says that following the fall of Desperance as a port, the residents found a new purpose in defending Northern Australia from the Yellow Peril. This is a reference to the real xenophobic and racialized ideology that was prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries, in which white settler Australians promoted a racist fear of the non-white, Asian Other.
The narrator then says that when “the Yellow Peril did not invade,” the townspeople found a more contemporary reason for existence: “to comment on the state of their blacks.” In this case, “blacks” is a reference to the Aboriginal inhabitants of the region. From the outset of the novel, the themes of colonialism and racism are front and center. Desperance is a colonial town whose white settler residents reject the region’s original inhabitants as outsiders and believe the town belongs to them. The town’s very reason for existence is a racialized battle, first against the “Yellow Peril” and then against the “blacks.”
Alexis Wright, an author from the Waanyi Aboriginal Australian people, explores white settler and Aboriginal identity over the course of the novel. The author challenges common narratives of Indigenous identity, including narratives of assimilation into and resistance against white culture. On the one hand, Wright represents Angel Day as “a genius in the new ideas of blackfella advancement.” She is a woman with a strong capacity to fight against white racism and colonialism. She becomes an example of Aboriginal autonomy by creatively building her own home. In a town where Aboriginal people were violently displaced by colonial settlers who claim the land is theirs, Angel has the courage to claim things as her own, such as the land by the swamp and the scraps from the dump. Angel views herself as aligned with Aboriginal people who denounce colonial violence and maintain a connection with their ancestral territories.
At the same time, her Aboriginal neighbors criticize Angel for believing that everything is hers and that she is better than everyone else. Angel tells the other people scavenging for scraps that they have no right to be at the dump, since Norm’s grandfather was the traditional owner of that land. While “the old Pricklebush people” recognize Angel’s special abilities to build a home from trash, they ultimately believe that “it was of no benefit to anyone if she had magical powers to make her more like the white people.” In this way, for some of her Aboriginal neighbors, Angel represents an aspiration to assimilate into white, settler-colonial culture—an aspiration they resent.
Wright highlights this conflict through the fight at the dump. Angel takes two artifacts that represent important pillars of white colonial culture. The clock represents time, and in particular, the capitalist mode of measured time that is the basis for success in the schools her children attend, as well as in business and politics. The Virgin Mary represents the Christian religion. More specifically, in the world of the novel, this figure stands for religion as a way to obtain individual riches. However, Wright ultimately makes it clear that Angel has no real interest in assimilating into white, Christian culture. Rather, she simply wants to access the more comfortable and prosperous life that the white, Christian settlers have on account of thinking that their whiteness and Christianity give them the right to displace, exploit, and violate others. The author further demonstrates this point when Angel repaints the Virgin Mary as a colorful, Aboriginal woman that resembles her.
In Carpentaria, Wright explores the origin stories of the Aboriginal peoples of the Gulf of Carpentaria as well as colonial origin stories. When Elias Smith arrives in Desperance, the narrator comments that his coming “generated an era of self-analysis not seen in the Gulf for a very long time.” The white settlers experience the mysterious white man’s arrival from the sea as an emotional reminder of their own heritage, since their forebears arrived to colonize this land in a similar manner. They claim that “all people were born without lands” and that they “came to the new world of Desperance carrying no baggage.” However, the narrator reminds the reader that this is not true history, but rather an origin myth that serves to create a white settler identity, justify violent colonization, and erase the Indigenous history of the land.
