- Wandering With Intent, by Kim Mahood. Scribe, $35.
Kim Mahood is a writer, visual artist, and cultural mapmaker. She is non-Indigenous but grew up among First Nations people, her parents having held administrative and teaching positions in remote communities, and Mahood has since spent a lot of time in research and art associated roles across traditional country.
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This collection of essays, some previously published, on the enigma of cross-cultural consciousness is a master class on unravelling complex issues in fluently lucid prose.
A brief preface sets the scene: "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."
And indeed, she succeeds!
An early essay contains notebook jottings, reflecting a quick, reactive honesty to cultural dissonance that reminded me fondly of Helen Garner's diaries:
"JK turned up for work with his mouth swollen from a fight. I told him to take the ice pack off so I could punch him in the mouth for being an idiot ... whitefellas are always on stress leave, or about to leave, or have done a runner ..."
Whitefella burn-out related to being "unequipped, unprepared, or unsuitable" was once common, and an early essay "went viral" - based on a throwaway blackfella line suggesting Kardiya (whitefellas) were like Toyotas: "when they break down, we get a new one" - and remaining in circulation a decade after its publication.
This essay was included in Indigenous organisations induction material, and rightly so, since it contains key aspects of Mahood's concern for the struggle relevant authorities have encountered in trying to bridge a complex cultural divide.
Her narrative is enriched by intuitive sympathy for qualities offering official protocols the serendipity of help, such as "a natural skill at recognising which boundaries must be held and which can be more elastic".
And a sense of humour that "thrives on the absurdities and contradictions of daily life, and a sneaking admiration for the consistency with which Aboriginal people insist on being Aboriginal".
My favourite essay, "Flowers for Evelyn", tells of the funeral of an Aboriginal woman with whom Mahood grew up, receiving the skin name of Napurrula, making her Evelyn's sister in the Aboriginal kinship system.
Funerals are a sadly frequent Aboriginal ceremony, providing a tragi-comic flavour to spike their bleak reality, and Evelyn's was no exception.
The compassionate intelligence of these essays underpins literature's redemptive arc.
