Summary
Mozzie orders the vehicles in his convoy to leave the lagoon. He orders the men to disperse and make themselves anonymous until he tells them to regroup. He also orders several of his men to take Angel Day away to a large southern city. Mozzie waits at the lagoon, where the men who freed Will and destroyed the mine come to meet him. They are carrying the charred bodies of the two mine workers, Chuck and Cookie. Mozzie says these former mine workers must receive a decent burial. But Will insists on leaving the men in Elias’s old tin boat on the lagoon. Mozzie and his men reluctantly comply. Mozzie tells Will that Joseph Midnight’s sons came to visit him. They told Mozzie about the deaths of his sons, Luke and Tristum. Midnight’s sons wanted to join the convoy, since their father had told them to leave Desperance, which “was no place for young boys anymore.” But Mozzie sent the boys on their way.
Mozzie leads his men walking along unseen, ancient paths, carrying the bodies of the three deceased boys in blankets wrapped with scented herbs. After walking for eighteen hours they stop and Mozzie disappears into the hills. From a distance the men hear strange noises in a language they do not understand. Finally, Mozzie emerges and he leads the men through a dingo’s lair into a cave. The cave has ancient stone tools and remnants of old fires. The men hear Mozzie and the spirits singing ancient devotional songs in a forgotten language and they are impacted by the deep spirituality of the place. Fishman leads the men through a narrow opening, through a labyrinth of strange corridors and dripping limestone chambers, past twisted tree roots and old skeletons. They arrive at an underground sea so large that waves ripple across the surface. Ancient wooden canoes are moored to the shore with grass ropes. Mozzie asks Will for help and they prepare the bodies of the boys in three canoes. Mozzie would like to go with the boys, but Will releases the rope and the three canoes float across the water. As the men turn away, Will sees seagulls gathered over the canoes, beating their wings to create a current that leads the boys to the spirit world.
Will hears a strange sound. He leaves the cave to find its source and is frightened to see a Gurfurrit search helicopter. However, seasonal rain storms prevent the helicopters from detecting the men. Mozzie and Will sense that a highly unusual storm and floods are coming. The men quickly set off on their journey, with Mozzie’s men heading south, and Will heading north in an effort to find out what happened to Bala.
Meanwhile, Mozzie’s men bring Angel south, but they veer from their intended path. They head to a lookout point famous from myths and the site of many devilish deeds. The last time the men driving Angel were in this town, white residents tarred and feathered them. This traumatizing incident was what led them to join Mozzie’s convoy in the first place. Now, the police arrest the three men for driving an unregistered vehicle and they take their car keys. Unsure of what to do, Angel leaves the car and walks a kilometer along the highway in her high heels. Mozzie’s men almost catch up with her, but before they are able to, Angel hitches a ride with truckers and she disappears into another world. Mozzie’s men have painful dreams of Angel. One zealot says he received a letter from Angel in his dreams, in which Angel tells of a mysterious, gray world where she spends her days unhappily fishing for snakes in cold, contaminated water. Meanwhile, Mozzie claims he has never heard of anyone named Angel Day and that he does not accept letters.
The towering black clouds of a cyclone develop right over Desperance. Will moves on with single-minded determination, but his body begins to rebel against the lunacy of heading directly into the wall of a cyclone. Will longs to rejoin Mozzie and his men but he resists and continues on. He believes he will reach Desperance by dusk. Looking through a clearing from a high point, Will is able to see Desperance. He sees that the residents are engaged in an annual ritual of chasing away fruit bats, and he is surprised they don’t realize a cyclone is coming. By the time Will reaches the town, residents are evacuating. The fearful white residents honk and curse at each other to go faster, as their cars slip and slide on the muddy road. Black residents wait calmly at the back. Will sees Joseph Midnight and they communicate in sign language at a distance. Joseph tells Will a huge storm is coming and he should join their car. Will declines, saying that he must try to find Hope and Bala.
By the time Will gets to town, the surging water is up to his knees and the wind is blowing so strongly that he must hold on to poles to avoid being knocked over. Will goes into the Barramundi bar and is surprised to find Lloydie Smith, the barman, is there. Lloydie has tied himself with ropes to the bar because he does not want to leave his lover, who is a mermaid trapped in the bar's wooden planks. Will tries but fails to get Lloydie to go upstairs. Will finds some food and manages to get upstairs to the hotel just before the ground level is flooded. Will survives a long and torturous night. The sounds of the storm churning water and debris all around him are deafening. The water and winds threaten to tear down his shelter. Norm feels the presence of other people at the hotel. He has visions of the old Pricklebush people of his youth, standing in the rain, fighting for an opportunity to tell him their stories. He hears the voices of Norm, old Joseph, and Mozzie.
Will has a vision of an unknown beach. There, he sees Norm standing in the water, stirring the mud with a stick. He recalls seeing his father do this in the past, and Mozzie explaining that his father was engaged in a ritual to make storms for his enemies. Will also sees Hope walking over clouds in the sea, and Bala riding on the back of a fish, trying to catch up with his mother. Will tries but is unable to speak to or catch up with his family. Will becomes obsessed with finding the beach where he believes Hope, Bala, and Norm are. He goes to an open verandah looking out from the hotel, and when strong winds jolt the building, Will is thrown into the sea. Moments later the tide washes the whole hotel away. The turbulent waters carry Will out to the ocean, along with masses of garbage, debris, and dead animals. At night, Will grasps something slippery and manages to climb up onto it. In a ray of moonlight, he sees it is a floating island of garbage about a kilometer wide.
Over time, birds, bees, and insects inhabit the floating garbage island. The tides carry seedlings and plants begin to bloom in abundance. Worms multiply and create a deep, nutrient-rich soil. Will enjoys a wealth of food and grows strong and hopeful. He occupies his time studying the patterns of the water and the stars, documenting the species of plants on the island, and building a boat from debris. After a few months, however, Will becomes depressed and hopeless. He confirms his suspicion that the island is caught in a repetitive, circular current. He finds that his boat is not seaworthy, since ants have eaten the wood and the nails have rusted and turned to dust. The same dream tortures Will each night: he sees his father’s green boat nearing the island, but when he goes to look for the boat it never lands. He spends his days obsessively searching the island for something that may be causing this recurring dream. He scans the sea for ships, but only sees pirates' mistreated prisoners, who become a feature of his nightmares.
Norm and Bala find Hope on the beach of the island they are inhabiting. Hope remembers nothing of falling from Gurfurrit's helicopter or surviving for five days at sea. Together, they work for weeks to rebuild Norm’s green boat so they can leave the island and return to Desperance. As they work together, Norm and Hope argue and speak sharply with one another. Norm thinks that Hope is stupid and crazy. He believes she has bad, thin blood from the Midnight family. Hope tells Norm they must find Will soon, and she begs Norm to listen to her as she recounts her dreams about Will. Hope dreams that Will is inhabiting a floating island of wreckage. She describes the island in great detail and explains that Will is trying to reach them but he is unable to. Norm becomes sick and tired of Hope and tells her to stop sharing her crazy ideas.
When the boat is finally ready, Norm, Hope, and Bala set out to sea for forty days and forty nights. Norm and Hope continue to argue. Hope is terrified of the sea and Norm worries she will pass this fear onto Bala. Norm becomes obsessed with the idea that there is a clandestine presence aboard the boat that is trying to do away with him, and he repeatedly demands that Hope list everything she has brought with her. All the while, Norm navigates according to the stars and their constellations. Eventually he feels the currents bringing them closer to Desperance, and he is delighted to hear a loud chorus of frogs as they near the shore. As they pull up onto the shore, Norm cannot recognize any familiar features of Desperance. There is nothing and no one left. Norm pulls Bala up onto his shoulders and they continue walking through the mud.
Before long, Norm realizes that Hope has left them and they are alone. He wants to call out to Hope to tell her she is stupid and to stop her. But the blinding light of the sun prevents Norm from turning in Hope's direction. Hope takes Norm's green boat back out to sea. She is so caught up in her determination to row with the tide and find Will that she does not realize that hundreds of groper fish are helping to move the boat through the water. Norm recognizes Hope’s audacity and believes she will find Will and bring him home. Norm tells Bala that one day, after the grasses have grown and he has caught a big fish, his mother and father will come to get him. He tells Bala they will go home, and leads his grandchild back to the site on top of the serpent spirit’s nest where Angel built their previous home.
Analysis
In Chapter 12, Wright continues to develop one of the novel’s major themes: nature. Mozzie’s men are worried that Gurfurrit’s helicopters will find them. However, seasonal rain storms prevent the mining company’s surveillance systems from detecting the fugitives. In this and many other instances in the novel, nature is far more powerful than the white settlers of Desperance or the neocolonial violence of the mining company. This powerful force of nature is strongly connected with ancestral spirituality, and it is an “ancestral spirit” that governs the land, the sea, and the creatures that dwell there.
The cave where Mozzie brings his men is an important symbol of this ancestral spirituality. In the cave, there is a direct link to their Aboriginal ancestors and to the spirit world. The ways of their ancestors are preserved and their language is still spoken. The narrator represents the cave as a living being: Mozzie’s men walk “through a narrow opening in the resting spirit’s body” and then “through the depths of the creature of the underworld’s belly.” This personification of the cave as a living spirit emphasizes a worldview in which all elements of nature, both animate and inanimate, are imbued with spirituality and meaning and must be treated with respect.
Old, wise people like Mozzie, Norm, and Joseph, who have a deep connection with this ancestral spirit world, are able to tune into it even outside of the cave. One way in which they do this is by following “tracks.” The novel frequently describes “ancient path[s] invisible to the naked eye,” “sea tracks,” and “Dreaming tracks.” These refer to the physical paths that humans, animals, and weather patterns have taken through the land and the sea for thousands of years. They also refer to non-physical paths related to their ancestral spirituality. Their knowledge of these paths, passed down from one generation to the next, enables the old people to live in harmony with and navigate their traditional territory.
As the novel draws to a close, the theme of divine justice becomes important. An enormous cyclone wipes out the town of Desperance. As Will takes refuge from the huge storm at the hotel on the top floor of the Barramundi bar, he has a series of nightmares and visions. Aboriginal elders from the Pricklebush feature prominently in these visions. They tell Will that “cyclones don’t come from nowhere.” Rather, the “powerful creation spirits” send cyclones when they are looking for “lawbreakers.”
The law that these lawbreakers are breaking does not refer to the legal code that the police and courts of Desperance are supposed to uphold. Rather, it refers to “Aboriginal Law,” which is the deep knowledge about living in harmony with nature that has been handed down for many generations. In Carpentaria, when people do not respect this ancient law of how to live respectfully with the environment, then the creation spirits seek divine justice through nature itself. The gods send a cyclone to eliminate lawbreakers. In this case, the creation spirits destroy the whole town of Desperance.
The destruction of Desperance paves the way for the themes of hope and renewal, which are central to the novel’s finale. The end of the novel has a reflective and hopeful tone. All of the garbage and contamination of Desperance is washed away by the storm. Out at sea, even garbage and ruins take on new life, becoming a land formation where vegetation and animals reproduce and flourish. Will reflects that the gods are undoing the world engineered by man and reshaping it “into something more of their own making.” He sees beauty and health in this “new creation.”
Even Norm, who has been bitter and frustrated throughout the novel, expresses hope. When Norm and Hope were stranded on the island and stuck in a boat for many months, Norm continued to express his hatred and judgment of Hope, since she is the daughter of his enemy, Joseph Midnight. But at the end of the novel, as Norm watches Hope disappear into the sea to search for Will, Norm expresses a sense of possibility with regard to his daughter-in-law. “It was at this point he started to believe in her and even how a woebegotten people like the other side could rise above themselves with audacity to discover hope in their big empty souls. He smiled, knowing she was going to find Will before it was too late….‘You bring him home.’”
The themes of hope and renewal that characterize the finale of Carpentaria are deeply connected with the theme of home. The novel begins and ends with the home on top of the serpent spirit’s nest. At the beginning, Norm hates the site where Angel built their home. But by the end of the novel, this site has taken on new meaning, and Norm acknowledges and values it as his family home. Norm begins to plan the house he will build, not just for him but also for Bala. Norm’s love for Bala warms his hardened heart, and he shares his sense of hope with the boy, telling him that one day, after he has caught a big, fat fish, his mother and father will come to get him. By the close of the novel, the reader truly appreciates the significance of Bala’s parents’ names: Will and Hope. Through sheer will and unrelenting hope, these two young people have managed to do what no one has done in hundreds of years: bridge the war between enemy families and reclaim their traditional territory.
