![]() ![]() Among these “ ‘edge’ people, all of the blackfella mob living with quiet breathing in higgily-piggerly, rubbish-dump trash shacks,” rivalries unfold, difficulties ensue and untoward events multiply. ![]() After all, as the narrator quietly observes, this idea that people should live in harmony “was a policy designed by the invader’s governments,” and not really anything inherent in human nature. In one lives a suggestively named old man, Normal Phantom, wise but somewhat feckless, given to making pronouncements in the voice of “a presidential Captain Hook.” Inside another camp are the Eastend boys, ne’er-do-wells deluxe, who have their difficulties with the neighbors. Around Desperance-waterless so long that no one can remember when it stood near water-snakes a ring of aboriginal encampments, each a little more desperate than the next. Perched on the infernally hot salt flats of northern Queensland, at some distance from a sluggish river full of mud and “serpents and fish in the monsoon season,” is a waterless port town named Desperance, the center of Wright’s stately epic. If you can call it civilization, that is. ![]() A dreamlike novel from Australian aboriginal author Wright of a dreamtime interrupted as Australian native peoples meet industrial civilization. ![]()
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