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Alexis Wright wins Stella Prize with ‘perhaps the great Australian novel’
By Jason Steger
Around the time Alexis Wright started work on her multivoiced life of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, she also began a vast, magical novel about Indigenous life in the face of climate change, global warming and government ineptitude.
The biography, simply called Tracker, won the Stella Prize for writing by Australian women in 2018. Now Wright has become the first writer to win the Stella twice, winning the $60,000 prize for that novel she started 10 years ago, Praiseworthy.
Alexis Wright wanted her novel, Praiseworthy, to be a big book in more ways than one.Credit: Simon Schluter
The other shortlisted writers were The Swift Dark Tide, Katia Ariel; Body Friend, Katherine Brabon; Feast, Emily O’Grady; Hospital, Sanya Rushdi; and Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead, Hayley Singer.
“What’s really unbelievable about winning the Stella for a second time is that it [Praiseworthy] joins Tracker,” Wright told this masthead. “I wanted to keep my own writing going when I was doing Tracker. I started the book when I went up to Darwin to work with Tracker Tilmouth and I went to the museum to study a display of local butterflies and the interest just grew from there. I spent years studying butterflies, moths and donkeys as well as trying to write the book.”
Alexis Wright’s Stella-winning novel
The Waanyi author’s epic satire, her fourth novel, is written in her characteristic style that melds a sort of Indigenous magical realism, lush prose, political anger and age-old ideas. It tells the story of a pestilential haze that settles over Praiseworthy, a fictional town in the Gulf country of northern Queensland where Cause Man Steel and his family live. He is looking to the future, wants to fight climate change and harness feral-donkey power to create a transport conglomerate to help his people.
Cause Man’s wife, Dance, is obsessed with moths and butterflies. Their sons, Aboriginal Sovereignty and the young Tommyhawk, have issues of their own – one disappears into the sea; the other thinks he’ll be rescued from the local men who have been labelled paedophiles by the media, adopted by a white politician and live in Parliament House.
Wright said when she started writing – her first novel, Plains of Promise, came out in 1997 – she wanted to challenge herself. She couldn’t see herself writing in expectation of what literature should be. “I continue to challenge myself in the way I do things. And I want our literature to resonate with anybody who reads it. I come from a storytelling culture and it’s part of my consciousness. I want those things to be in the writing, but I want to expand how we create literature.”
The chair of the judges, critic and festival director Beejay Silcox, said Praiseworthy was mighty in every way, “mighty of scope, mighty of fury, mighty of craft, mighty of humour, mighty of language, mighty of heart”. She said it was “perhaps the great Australian novel”.
Wright is concerned about climate change and the survival of Indigenous culture.
“I’ve been thinking about both things for a long time and what the future might be for growing numbers of poor people across the world, not just Aboriginal people in this country.
“I’m trying to create a story out of what science is saying [about climate change] and how that affects the reality of people. A lot of our people are living in really hard conditions and it’s getting harder. I’m just concerned about what the future will be, seeing that we don’t have such a good relationship with people understanding what the situation is for Aboriginal people.”
When Wright won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007 for her second novel, Carpentaria, it had a galvanising effect on Indigenous writing. Before then, Aboriginal art had been recognised throughout the world, but not Indigenous literature. That had changed now, she said. “We have many great, really brilliant writers ... I can’t even keep up with the excellent amount of writing that’s now coming out from all our mob.”
Wright was a fierce critic of the Howard government’s intervention in the Northern Territory in 2007, which she said was a waste of “millions, possibly billions for all I know. And that could have been put into something that Aboriginal people wanted”.
And she says the government is still not listening: “We just had the Productivity Commission’s report [on Closing the Gap in February] and the call for a systematic change. How many decades have I heard that?”
It’s been a busy time for Wright, and winning the Stella will only put more demands on her: “I hit this year running, and it hasn’t stopped.”
Praiseworthy had enthusiastic reviews in Australia when it was published last April, in Britain, and most recently the United States, where The New York Times described it as “the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century”.
“I wanted it to be a big book in more ways than one because we have to be thinking more seriously about things and also enjoying the world that we have,” Wright said. “So I have looked for the joy of being alive.”
There was more joy to be had in winning the Stella, again.
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