Alexis Wright

Alexis Wright FAHA (born 25 November 1950) is a Waanyi (Aboriginal Australian) writer. As of 2023, Wright has produced four novels, one biography, and several works of prose. Her work also appears in anthologies and journals.

Quotes

• it was exactly like what the old law people had always said would happen if you look after country, country will look after you.
  • Praiseworthy (2023)

• [Aboriginal Sovereignty] had become tied into the chosen shame of a continent stolen from his people by a pack of racists, who had turned the argument against the people whose land they had stolen, and whose intergenerational lives have never recovered from so great a loss.
  • Praiseworthy quoted in interview (2023)

• In the Aboriginal world, we deeply understand that all animals that belong to this land are our close relatives. We understand the importance of our close inter-connectivity with everything in our world. This is the ancient wisdom that we must follow. If we care for our country, the country will care for us.
  • "The black summer bushfires killed 3 billion animals. They are our relatives; they deserve to be mourned" article (2023)

• We cannot be guided by an ethos of neglect, brokenness of heart, misery of spirit that will lead us into a future world devoid of joy. The world’s combined humanity must sing the planet up with careful songs, songs of responsibility and respect.
  • "The black summer bushfires killed 3 billion animals. They are our relatives; they deserve to be mourned" article (2023)

• We are going to need the greatest creativity we can find to work on the ever-increasing complex problems facing our combined humanity. We cannot afford a government censoring education and knowledge.
  • "The road ahead is hard. Now is not the time to kill off studies in the humanities" (2020)

• Of course we will require a greater workforce in health and technology, but we will also need an even greater workforce with the imagination and passion to improve the health of our combined humanity, and our connectedness with the only planet we can survive on.
  • "The road ahead is hard. Now is not the time to kill off studies in the humanities" (2020)

• All the governments of the world need to act now and act urgently to turn this planetary nightmare around before it is too late, because this warning of the magnitude and acceleration of biodiversity loss is a global crisis with dangerous implications not only for one million species but for human health and long-term survival.
  • "We all smell the smoke, we all feel the heat. This environmental catastrophe is global" article (2019)

• The Aboriginal caretakers of their traditional country have always understood its power, and why it is so important to care for the land through developing an important system of laws that created great responsibility for caring for the stories and powers of the ancestors. These narratives of great and old wisdom are the true constitution for this country, and urgently need to be upfront in the national narrative in understanding how to care for it.
  • "We all smell the smoke, we all feel the heat. This environmental catastrophe is global" article (2019)

• This is the only planet we know that supports life. We would do well to see the world as a sacred site that is holy, speak to our planet with kindness, and protect it as such.
  • "We all smell the smoke, we all feel the heat. This environmental catastrophe is global" article (2019)

• It’s a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again...English is my language because of the history and what I try to do, and I did that in Carpentaria in particular, is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking
  • Interview (2014)

• Truly all it is is commitment, belief and dedication to the task and understanding in yourself that you will do it, even if it seems unbelievable at the time.
  • advice for writers, from interview (2014)

• Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them.
  • Carpentaria (2006)

Interview (2018)

• I have felt very privileged to know and to have been able to work with many senior Aboriginal people of great wisdom and intellect. I could name many Aboriginal people right across Australia who have influenced my thinking in a lifelong journey of trying to understand how to see, feel and understand our world, and fight for it. Their perspective and worldview is huge and cosmopolitan in its outlook. Our world is one that teaches the benefits of having eyes wide open, to be attuned to a spiritual understanding of the environment and self-knowledge, and this leads to having an ability to maintain and build internal worlds of visualization and exploration, to hold a vision. Perhaps this helped me to create a novel such as ‘The Swan Book’.

• I think that it is amazing to have a culture where stories were treasured over countless millenniums, and kept sacred to this day. It is a unique undertaking to have a governing system that was built to ensure the sustainability of the country, and built on the idea of preserving peace and cooperation between people. When you look at it in this way, this was a far more sophisticated form of culture than ones that seek to colonise others or create wars. These laws and spiritual ideas about country are known and understood by every Aboriginal person, and I think because there is such emphasis on stories, storytelling is almost second nature to most Aboriginal people.

• (what is one thing that you want people to take away from The Swan Book?) AW: Just to be kind to the world – it is the only one we have, and to be kinder to each other and to see the beauty and genius in all our cultures, and to see the beauty and right to exist and thrive of the creatures sharing this planet with us. The Swan Book asks for respect and the need to gain greater knowledge and respect for the responsibilities that Indigenous peoples have for the good stewardship of the world.

The Swan Book (2013)

• Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll's house. Little stars shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! it thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighborhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains. Inside the doll's house the virus manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal, and if it sees a white flag unfurling, it fires missiles from a bazooka through the window into the flat, space, field or whatever else you want to call life. The really worrying thing about missile-launching fenestrae is what will be left standing in the end, and which splattering of truths running around in my head about a story about a swan with a bone will last on this ground. (first lines)

• In every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction. (p5)

• Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.

• People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that.

• The girl convinced herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad. (p64)

• After clouds, always mist, and another ghost story to tell. (p187)

• She remembered Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions once saying that no story was worth telling if no one could remember the lesson in it. These were stories that have made no difference to anyone. Old Aunty was fading away forever. But... even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered. Ah! The truth was always forgotten. (p210)

• The important public officials, passionately depicting themselves as unified people, were obsessed with imagination, narrow though it was in their minds. Well! Aesthetics was all. (p265)

Interview (2013)

• We have to think big...'We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.

• No matter what happens to you, you can maintain your own control about what you believe and who you are.

• I've seen that harshness in policies handed out to Aboriginal people over decades, and it doesn't seem to get any better. That's how the politics are played out: not doing the best you can do for someone, but working out how you can beat your opponent. So the swans are a different way of pausing and reflecting on what's happening in the world, and doing it in a light way.

• We've got a beautiful country, a beautiful world, why not enjoy it?