Kim Mahood is one of our most interesting thinkers about the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Writing my review of her previous book Position Doubtful (2016) coincided with attending the Indigenous Language Intensive program organised by Writers Victoria, which was designed to guide non-indigenous authors to write respectfully about Indigenous people, their culture and history. Kim Mahood has made it her life’s work to do just that.

As she says in the preface to Wandering with Intent:

To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt. It implies risk and failure. It is also the only way to find out whether something is possible. These essays are a sort of written equivalent of hunting and gathering, of wandering with intent. They are the product of my own wandering among the conundrums and contradictions of the cross-cultural world I've chosen to inhabit, and of my intent to understand and honour it. (p.xi)

In today's cultural climate of identity politics and cancel culture, it takes courage to traverse this territory. For some, there are hard and fast lines that delineate who has the right to speak and write about Indigenous issues, and as we are already seeing in the context of the forthcoming referendum on the Voice, there are differing perspectives and disconcerting hostilities between First Nations themselves. So what is it that impels Mahood to venture into this complex territory?

What compels me is watching relationships play out at the edge of cultural systems that baffle and subvert each other, where the frontier is still adaptive and resistant, the population is predominantly Aboriginal, and the land is a living entity that influences the lives of the human players. It is a dynamic and volatile world that has been impacted by colonialism but has retained its Indigenous character, much of which is interpreted by the white world as dysfunctional, but which continues to function with remarkable tenacity. I've spend years seeing the Indigenous people I know grow and change, take on responsibilities or avoid them, make choices about how to be the Indigenous player on someone else's agenda. (p.xiii)

This collection of 17 essays written over more than 15 years includes nine which were previously published... in Griffith Reviews 15, 36 and 63; (reissued in The Best Australian Essays 2007); The Monthly in 2015, 2017 and 2019; the Chicago Quarterly Review 2020, and in the Australian Book Review 2019. Since I don't subscribe to any of these, I have missed out on every one of these remarkable essays so I was very pleased to see them published together in this must-have collection.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/12/12/wandering-with-intent-by-kim-mahood/… (altro)

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anzlitlovers | Dec 12, 2022 |

Craft For A Dry Lake di Kim Mahood

An interesting back story of Kim's young years in remote regions of NT and WA. Presenting a view of the outback that was familiar to her but not to many Australians. She presents her revisit of the regions and sites she knew as a challenge to her relationship with her father, the region and to aboriginals.

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ElizabethCromb | 1 altra recensione | Nov 25, 2022 |

Position Doubtful: mapping landscapes and memories di Kim Mahood

I had bought a copy of Kim Mahood's new memoir Position Doubtful before I went to the Bendigo Writers Festival where she was in conversation with Susan Martin. Although I felt that Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) was a bit too long for itself and I lost interest in Mahood's identity issues with her father, nevertheless it was a book in which she wrote memorably about the beauty of the outback, and perceptively about Aborigines especially women. (And it won the 2001 NSW Premier's Award and The Age non-fiction Book of the Year). So I hadn't hesitated to buy the new one, and listening to Mahood talk about it at the festival ensured that I kept it near the top of the TBR pile so that I could get to it soon.

It's a book that repays slow, careful reading, and I was drifting through it when I was unexpectedly able to take up a place at the Indigenous Language Intensive program organised by Writers Victoria. So it was just serendipity that I was learning about ways in which non-indigenous authors could write respectfully about Indigenous people, their culture and history, when I was reading a memoir by an author who has made it her life's work to do just that.

Mahood's family were part of the pastoral industry in the Tanami district and she grew up enjoying close relationships with the local indigenous people who were employed there. Although the Tanami Downs Station is now in the hands of its traditional owners, the Warlpiri, she has retained her connections with them and with the descendants of the Walmajarri stockmen who worked for her father on the station. Torn between modernity and a need for quiet privacy, and her love of the desert country and the interconnectedness of life in indigenous communities, she spends part of each year in the Tanami and Great Sandy Desert region, working on projects with the people, who have given her a 'skin name' and treat her much like one of their own. To the reader it seems that part of her identity is enmeshed with theirs though she doesn't presume to claim any entitlement. In fact it seems to be the reverse: she has acquired obligations, some of which are onerous and tiresome, but others which bring her joy.

Mahood is an artist, a writer and a maker of maps, but the maps she makes are not like the ones in a school atlas. Like the maps my small students used to make about their weekends (instead of laboriously writing a 'journal' each Monday), Mahood maps story. It's a case of identifying the significant places, and showing that 'this happened there'. This means that the maps are not topographical and representational in the way that we are used to.

Horizon and ground, and the numinous ground between them of mirage and reflection...

These words, first scribbled in pencil in one of my drawing diaries from the 1990s, flag a preoccupation that continues to haunt my work. The tension between ways of seeing the landscape - the perspectival view of foreground, middle ground and horizon, and the bird's-eye view of a schematic, inhabited topography - mirrors the tension between ways of being in the landscape. (p.294)

Mahood's cultural and environmental maps are created collaboratively, and take a great deal of time and patience to make.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/26/position-doubtful-by-kim-mahood/… (altro)

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anzlitlovers | 1 altra recensione | Jun 18, 2020 |

Position doubtful : mapping landscapes and memories di Kim Mahood

https://shawjonathan.com/2017/03/11/kim-mahoods-position-doubtful/

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shawjonathan | 1 altra recensione | Mar 12, 2017 |

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