Summary
Norm looks out the window and watches his friend Elias leave Desperance. He feels very sad, as the two have spent many, mostly silent hours fishing together. Elias confidently follows the morning star out to sea, but Norm feels he is heading toward a certain death. Norm wonders if he is actually watching the spirit of Elias, who always seemed to be from another world. Norm wants to go out and say goodbye to Elias but he is unable to move, as he feels that Uptown is watching to ensure that nothing interferes with their verdict against Elias.
During Elias’s time there, “Desperance had become a boom town with a more sophisticated outlook now, because it belonged totally to the big mine.” Company people spy on the Aboriginal residents. Norm and the other residents of Westside believe that Uptown should stretch their security net across the wasteland known as the “distance of tolerance,” so that it protects their homes as well. The elders tell Norm to go Uptown to “be a troublemaker.” In response, Norm tells a story that represents his view of what trouble really is. When his father was a young boy, fire burned his hair when a bolt of lightning struck the tree at the center of Desperance. He ran into the desert to hide without water. White settlers on horses chased him but he managed to escape, hiding in a wild dog den.
Norm is disappointed in all of his sons, including his once favorite son, Will, who he chooses not to recognize, as well as his youngest son, Kevin, who is sixteen. Kevin was once recognized as the brains of the family. The Phantom family sent him to a white school but Kevin did not like it there. He envied his friends who went out to play and fish. When they finished high school, Kevin's friends went off to work in road construction, and Kevin, weak and extremely clumsy, was left at home, unsure of what to do. One day, Kevin went down to the mine and asked for a job. He only lasted one day, until an explosion covered him with debris and rendered him “an idiot.”
Later, Kevin gets into a drunken fight with old enemies of the Phantom family, members of Joseph Midnight’s Eastside mob. Among those who chase Kevin home in a pickup truck is Noelie, a cousin to the Phantoms and an abusive, on-again-off-again partner to Girlie, the Phantom’s youngest daughter. Girlie, backed up by her sisters Janice and Patsy, aims a rifle at Noelie and his crew drives away. The sisters then turn their attention to Kevin, who is drunk, wielding a knife, and wearing a t-shirt covered with swastikas. Kevin is close to having a convulsive fit, and the three sisters hold him down until he collapses into unconsciousness.
Mozzie Fishman is an Aboriginal man who believes there is “no good whitefella government governing for blackfella people anywhere,” and that white settlers control Aboriginal people using the bible and grog, a cheap liquor. Mozzie leads a convoy of followers that travel across the backroads of the country in battered, fixed-up cars, picking up sick and downtrodden people. The convoy travels during the dry season and returns to Mozzie’s hometown of Desperance before the Wet season begins. Mozzie and his Aboriginal followers are devoted to continuing “an ancient religious crusade along the spiritual traveling road of the great ancestor” of their land. They follow something called “the Dreaming.” Wherever they go, they bring the “Law ceremony” with them, and they see their one aim in life as “keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony for the guardians of Gondwanaland.”
White people hate and fear Mozzie, who says whatever he wants. Mozzie is grandiose, calling himself a "nuclei" and saying he will cause a nuclear fusion as yet unseen by humankind. All the Pricklebush Aboriginal people also fear Mozzie and hope he never returns to Desperance, since he causes trouble with Uptown. Mozzie has a known affair with Angel Day, but this doesn’t stop him and Norm from being best friends. Still, Mozzie annoys Norm, who doesn’t want anything to do with the convoy and tells Mozzie to stop acting like a white man. One day, Angel Day leaves both men to run away with “a common black man.”
Mozzie Fishman’s convoy arrives at their last camp before reaching Desperance. Will Phantom rides in the car next to Mozzie. When Mozzie’s followers stop at their secret fishing spot, they are alarmed to see a white man fishing out on the lagoon. Looking more closely, they decide the man is dead and resembles Elias. The convoy leaves the lagoon and returns to Desperance. Back home, Mozzie decides their sighting is a message that Elias has reached the spirit world safe and sound. Mozzie also realizes that the depressed Will, who is like a son to him, left the convoy and stayed at the lagoon.
Mozzie recalls how Norm disowned his son when Will went to live on the Eastside, with the granddaughter of Old Cyclone. Old Cyclone was the father of Joseph Midnight, the ringleader of the Eastside mob, which has warred with the Westside mob for centuries. Cyclone believed in magic and “brought lies to life,” such as the story of Abilene, the monstrous, territorial pig. When Cyclone’s relative Uncle was found dead, the Westside mob blamed Abilene, but the Eastside blamed Norm Phantom, who was arrested as a murder suspect. The Eastside mob showed up at the trial drunk and the judge dismissed the case.
Rather than returning to Desperance with Mozzie Fishman’s convoy, Will Phantom, a young rebel accused by the government of sabotaging the mining industry, remains at the lagoon. He goes into the freshwater and finds that Elias’s boat is filled with bags of sea fish, caught not long ago. Will believes the master fisherman has fished sea fish out of a mud hole. Will notices that Elias’s body and boat are tied down with rope. He tries to get Elias and his boat out of the lagoon before a storm sets in.
Then a helicopter appears and moves in closer to Will. Confused, Will tries to signal to the pilots, thinking they don’t see him. Eventually, it becomes clear the pilots are mine workers who have tampered with Elias’s body to set up a trap for him in the hopes of hunting Will down. From the helicopter, someone shoots at Will, who escapes by crawling underwater and hiding behind a log. The storm begins and the helicopter leaves. In the darkness of the stormy night, Will manages to retrieve Elias’s boat and body and bring them uphill to safety. Will’s older brothers, Donny and Inso, who work for the mine, along with two other mine workers, come to look for the boat. But Will moves swiftly like an animal and they do not see him. He spends the night in a cave.
The next day, the traveling bohemian priest Danny drives down the road by the lagoon, which has turned into a red muddy river. Danny says he drives his car through this muddy road every year to confirm he’s blessed by God. However, the mining company’s helicopter flies in to block Danny’s path. When Danny refuses to abandon his car and get into the helicopter, the mine workers slash his tires. The priest, a former heavyweight boxer from Ireland, forces the mine workers back into their helicopter and they leave. As the priest fixes his tires, Will, who has been watching from the hillside, appears. He puts Elias’s body in the back of the car and gets a ride back to Desperance through flooding waters. Back in Desperance, Will is glad to find that no one from his family is home. He goes to Norm’s fishroom and reminisces about his father’s outsize persona. Will leave’s Elias’s body in the fish room and rows out to sea.
Analysis
The narration of Carpentaria resembles oral storytelling, since the narrator appears to say what occurs to them, sometimes searching for the right words, and often sharing strong opinions about local people and events. Literary critics have described the novel’s structure and style as “anti-linear.” The narrator does not tell the reader about events in the order they occur, but rather jumps between different time periods over a fairly long timescale.
Chapter 4, “Number One House,” is a good example of this. The narration goes from Norm watching his friend Elias leave Desperance to describing the town's conversion into a boomtown owned by the mine. Then Norm tells the story of colonizers violently chasing down his father, followed by the story of Kevin’s injury at the mine. It is not always clear in which order these events occurred, nor does this seem to be the most important thing in the world of Carpentaria. Rather, events are linked by themes and emotions. Sometimes, themes or events repeat across generations, such as lightning striking the tree at the center of Desperance back when Norm’s father was a boy, and again when the terrible storm Leda hits the town.
This cyclical event, like many other events the narrator describes, challenges common notions of realism. However, the author Alexis Wright, when asked if she identifies her work within the genre of magical realism, replied: “You can call it whatever you like, but it’s not magic, it’s quite real and so what comes out of my mind comes from a whole lot of experience and knowing people and hearing people say things that are really important. You know, cause and effect: you do this and that will happen. […] It might be a good way of seeing the world.”
The author’s own comments suggest that rather than affirming magic or the supernatural, Carpentaria presents an understanding and description of events that is aligned with the sensibility and worldview of Aboriginal communities in the Gulf of Carpentaria. This worldview features ideas of time, space, and nature that are very different from dominant, Western understandings of linear time, geometric space, and the environment as a source of natural resources to be exploited for profit. In this way, Carpentaria actively challenges dominant, Western forms of narrative as well as colonial and capitalist worldviews. The author reminds the reader that dominant Western ways of understanding the world are highly local rather than universal, and that these worldviews have only become dominant through violent conquest.
In this section, the author introduces Mozzie Fishman as an important character. Mozzie represents yet another form of contemporary Aboriginal identity and resistance. While Norm, Angel, and other Westside residents resent the white residents of Desperance, they try to stay out of trouble with them so that Uptown does not interfere with their freedom and traditional way of life. Members of the Eastside mob, on the other hand, actively enter into beneficial agreements with white settlers and they participate in settler ways of life, like drinking at the town bar. Mozzie represents yet another way of relating to white settlers: he actively and fearlessly resists the power and influence that white people have over Aboriginal life. He and his followers believe that Black people should govern themselves and that white governments are harming and killing Aboriginal communities. For this reason, he rejects reconciliation and compromise with white people and proposes a total return to Aboriginal spirituality and ways of life.
For Mozzie and his followers, invisible white hands become a powerful image that represents this ongoing colonial violence. In the past, back when Norm’s father narrowly escaped his death, colonial violence was even more visible. White settlers actively hunted Aboriginal inhabitants. Now that Norm and Mozzie are adults, the greatest threat against their Aboriginal communities has been rendered more invisible. This shift is represented in Mozzie’s visions of invisible white hands controlling every aspect of Aboriginal people’s lives and even killing them. One example of this type of destruction is the mine, which harms Aboriginal lands and waters and sends spies in an effort to control their lives.
Carpentaria features vivid, metaphorical, and often highly satirical language. Satire refers to the depiction of people or ideas in a mocking, humorous way, especially in order to make a political point. Throughout the novel, the author uses satire to criticize the racism of Desperance’s white residents, the violence of their persisting colonial attitudes, and the hubris of the mining company which thinks it owns the town. Wright also uses humor, sometimes quite dark, to address the centuries-old battles between Eastside and Westside Aboriginal families as well as the internal battles within the Phantom family. Overall, Carpentaria addresses difficult themes, including colonial violence, climate change, white supremacy, racism, and rape, through a unique style of storytelling that weaves between tragedy and comedy, dark humor and illuminating wisdom, absurd moments of hyperbole and reflective moments of deep truth and connection.
One example is the description of the Phantom family’s interactions with the many religious zealots that come to visit them, hoping to exorcize the snake spirit that lives below their home. A blond guru leaves bread out for the devil. The Catholic priest, Danny, places a thousand crosses throughout the house. Yet the Phantom children only eat the bread. And the priest only discovers that the Phantom family “were the clumsiest people alive,” since they knock all of the crucifixes over. In this way, the author satirizes the hubris of Christianity and other religions that seek to impose their ways of seeing the world on other peoples.
As Mozzie Fishman and Angel Day recognize, this religious imposition has caused a lot of damage and violence to Aboriginal communities. Yet the Phantom family’s reaction to the zealots, and the narrator’s description of this, is not one of outright resistance, but rather of sideways satire. Is the Phantom family really clumsy, or do they knock over the crosses to reject the imposition of Catholicism? Wright’s use of satire reflects the ways in which many oppressed peoples creatively use humor, coded language, and well-hidden tricks to resist colonial and racist violence in their everyday lives.
