Plains of Promise

Alexis Wright. Plains of Promise. St. Lucia, Qld. University of Queensland Press (ISBS, distr.). 1997. 304 pages. $17.95. ISBN 0-7022-2917-2.

With her first novel, Plains of Promise, Alexis Wright makes an impressive debut. The story of three generations of Aboriginal women, the book is a recent entry in the University of Queensland Press's Black Australian Writers Series, begun in 1990, which describes itself as publishing "award winners and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors." Although the series is currently negotiating the crisis of identity and authenticity which has recently convulsed the whole arena of Black Australian writing, its value to the Aboriginal literary community remains unimpeachable.

Nor does uneasiness about the authenticity of voice mar this novel. Wright's tribal affiliations connect her to the Waanji of the southern Gulf of Carpenteria, where she sets her disturbing story. The novel's jacket blurb aptly describes St. Dominic's Mission there, where much of the novel takes place, as practicing a "complex brutality of colonisation": simple, straightforward, and savage in its brutality, but complex in its motives, and colonial in its worst sense-that is, in its assumption of cultural vacuum in an area not only inhabited by people but by...