Kim Mahood: Craft for a dry lake

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Identity is a major issue for post-colonials, especially post-colonial artists, and the pursuit of it can, as it does here, lead to intense introspection, but also adventurousness as we chase down the shadows that both obscure and lend meaning to our lives.

Anxious, insecure, we muster the confidence to claim our place in the face of guilty and inevitable history. Some of us, of course, become brutishly assertive about our rights, but that, perhaps, doesn't make for such a good story as a journey sparked by a big question mark, and a need for answers.

When her father dies unexpectedly, Australian artist Mahood feels a powerful need to revisit the site of her childhood, and to uncover the lines between past and present, and between herself and her father. In her yellow Suzuki ute, with only her ancient dog Sam for company, she sets off (presumably from Canberra where she teaches in the School of Art) to the very heart of that "dead sheep with its legs in the air" that is Australia.

Mahood grew up in the Outback, an Elsewhere that embodies for Australians the mythologies of adventurousness and physical challenge as well as of spiritual quest. Her parents managed what was in the early 1960s the remotest cattle station on the subcontinent, Mongrel Downs (harsh, ironic names abound out there in the desert - Skeleton Valley, Graveyard, Gangster's Well, Bullock's Head Lake).

The people around her, apart from her loquacious parents, a sister and two brothers, were the rough men who found their way to the Outback - the "dreamers ... misfits and misogynists and escapists and eccentrics and criminals" - and the people who had always been there, the Aborigines.

Mahood always considered she had a special relationship with the Aborigines, the Napurrula of Tanami. Her earliest memory is "of black bodies, black skins, a warm, affectionate many-limbed creature of sagging breasts and sinewy limbs and tobacco-stained teeth. And with this memory came also the memory of being different ... "

She had two mothers: her own white one, and her black "skin mother" who gave her the dreaming of Pintapinta the Butterfly. "Back then," she explains, "when I received the name, when I was too young to remember, the country laid a claim on me which I cannot shake off."

As a young adult she transplanted to a different world, to the city. There, her stories of the Outback and her Aborigine-given identity gave her life "a glamorous and exotic edge". Having travelled back to the desert and spent more time with its people, she decides with brutal honesty her long-held notion that she has any real knowledge of or relationship with Aborigines and their culture was "flimsy posturing".

"What is real is the discomfort, the blank space, the awkwardness, the recognition that one earns the right to a relationship through time spent with people and country, and that in recent years I have not spent that time. My relationship with the country belongs to the past. Instead of being shattered by this insight, I am relieved," she adds. "It lets me off. I do not have to go on wearing the identity I have created for myself."

She monitors her responses to memory, places and people with dazzling acuteness and honesty, and this brings a real sense of immediacy to her writing.

Quite a bit of Craft for a Dry Lake is ruminative and slow. But Mahood is a terrific writer and, in among the meditations on bush and city, black and white, male and female, children and adults (all of which sit as easily with the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival theme of Worlds Within Worlds as comfortably as a bandy-legged cowboy sits astride his horse), she spins a great yarn. There are many Aussie archetypes in here, and anecdotes that contain that recognisable Aussie flavour of hilarity layered over the gritty realism of life in a rough place.

For instance, there's the fancy dress party that put flyspot Finke briefly on the map. Men dressed as women, women as men. But then "a band of fettlers from down the line got drunk at the pub and crashed the party, picking a fight with the first man they encountered. He shrieked and bolted, and the fearsome hairy-armed women of Finke removed their high-heeled shoes and waded into the fray. It took a while for the rumour of a band of Simpson Desert Amazons to die down ... "

It took Mahood six years to write this memoir, and it does have the rich texture of something that has been gone over and over. The result is vital and important reading for anyone concerned about issues of place and belonging Down Under. It's won a couple of major prizes in Australia, is now available here, and it's a stimulating read.

Anchor $26.95