Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright’s latest novel, Praiseworthy, defies description. It is a unique outpouring of language with its own shape and form. Rather than a lineal narrative structure, it weaves in and out, like the ripples of a whirlpool, or the waves of the ocean, picking up, capturing for a moment, then tossing down, winding back on itself in a restless motion that is cyclical, never straight. Thus as readers we come back to characters and their stories in a recurring flow that continues endlessly.

It is set in a far northern Aboriginal community called Praiseworthy, a town that has become wrapped in a mysterious haze. The character Widespread, alternatively called Planet or Cause Steel, has come up with one solution to the problems of climate change, and champions the vision of a renewable transportation conglomerate based on donkeys, harnessing those age-old beasts of burden running feral in the country. His wife Dance can’t listen to him, instead focussed on the magical world of butterflies and moths. Cause Steel’s oldest son, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, the words Cause loves best, is bowed down with guilt and contemplates suicide, and his youngest son, the fascist Tommyhawk, is obsessed with the social media stories of rapists and paedophiles in Aboriginal communities and craves rescue by the beautiful white mother of Aboriginal children, the minister in her white palace of the Australian Parliament. And then there is Ice Pick, Major Mayor of the community, an albino black man, who campaigns relentlessly for Praiseworthy to become an iconic white assimilated town.

There is a fury underlying the words. Tommyhawk has become so distressed by the news stories of rampant paedophilia in Aboriginal communities, he is afraid of his parents, afraid of all adults in the community and desperately appeals for rescue by the Australian government which supposedly loves sacred Aboriginal children. Aboriginal Sovereignty, the young man who slept with his promised wife whilst she was still a few months underage, has become labelled a criminal, one of the paedophilic scourge that must be wiped out; he wades out deeper and deeper into the sea, and then has a moment of panic as he realises he has left behind his plastic Basics card. And there are refugees on a sinking boat who reach out to help another unknown drowning person in the ocean. All this, within a world where Country is being suffocated by the climate change effects wrought by white colonisers.

Alexis Wright says that Praiseworthy gave her a deeper understanding of the importance in following a literary vision, ‘a literary vision that refused to be contained or restrained’. In this way she breaks new ground in Aboriginal literature, and in literature in general, much as James Joyce did when he reinvented the form of the novel with his book ‘Ulysses’ (1920). Wright’s novel weaves a new form, perhaps best represented by the image of the butterfly trail on the cover, weaving through time, curving back on itself and flowing on. Praiseworthy is the 2024 winner of the Stella prize, the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award 2023, and shortlisted for a number of other awards.

Themes: Country, Racism, Aboriginal community, Climate change, Persecution.

Helen Eddy