I will thus interrogate the ways in which the novel tends to reconfigure the upside-down hut in order to advocate a discourse that engages Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. In this article, I will take up Judith Wright’s claim and definition of Australia as a “hut that’s upside-down” to contend that Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, written forty-five years later, deconstructs the components of the nation and the upside-down hut. Judith Wright’s claim, which illustrates her ecological commitment and desire to connect with Indigenous Australia – a connection which was even more significant through her relationship with Indigenous poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal – highlights how realities were forged through the colonial perceptions inherited from Europe and how issues of belonging stemmed from a distorted vision of Australia, more specifically its specific environment. We are caught in the old nineteenth-century split of consciousness, the stunned shock of those who cross the seas and find themselves, as the Australian ballad puts it, in a “hut that’s upside down.” (Wright 1961, 30) We do not yet speak from within her, but from the outside: from the state of mind that describes, rather than expresses, its surroundings, or from the state of mind that imposes itself upon, rather than lives through, landscape and event.

Wright insisted on the idea that settler-Australia was still enmeshed in the colonial past and had a colonial perception about landscape and the space of the nation:Īustralia is still, for us, not a country but a state – or states – of minds.

1 In her seminal paper “The Upside-Down Hut,” published in 1961, Australian poet Judith Wright argued that settler-Australians were living in a hut that was “upside-down” considering that they could not connect with the natural environment.

Carpentaria wright