Wandering with Intent
Kim Mahood
Wandering with Intent
Kim Mahood
Winner The Age Nonfiction Book of the Year 2023
In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention - art, country, people, and writing. Her lyrical evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.
At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.
‘Wandering with Intent rises beacon-like from turbulent ground. Characterised by rare grace and care, and often unfurling into beauty, Mahood’s essays are essential- anyone driven to understand how the faultlines between black and white Australia might shape us for the better should read this book immediately.’ - Quentin Sprague, author of The Stranger Artist, winner of the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction
Review
Margaret Snowdon
This is a rich and enjoyable collection of writings that combines Kim Mahood’s reflections on art and literature with her unique life experiences. Moving between desert and coast, between the sparsely populated remote interior and densely populated cities, the 17 essays make for fascinating reading. Mahood says these pieces are ‘the product of [her] own wandering among the conundrums and contradictions of the cross-cultural world [she’s] chosen to inhabit, and of [her] intent to understand and honour it’. What emerges is the extraordinary wealth that Australian culture contains, and what can be achieved when the very ordinary limitations of unimaginative policies and attitudes are discarded. More than that, the essays reveal a world of poetry and difference, with a treasure trove of literary references acting as counterpoint to the complexity and richness of life in remote communities and in the vastness of Australian deserts.
Within the collection, readers will find Mahood’s 2012 essay ‘Kartiya are like Toyotas’, which became recommended reading for people going to work in remote First Nations communities. Both enlightening and entertaining, it also reads like a metaphor for bureaucratic organisations or government departments. Two other essays about the mythical Night Parrot draw together an intriguing collection of history, Indigenous knowledges and references to other authors and films (from D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Porter to Penny Olsen’s book Night Parrot and Rob Nugent’s 2016 documentary Night Parrot Stories). Though the essay is ostensibly about man’s obsession (and it does seem to be a white male thing) with finding this mysterious species of bird, Mahood turns it into a meditation on the human psyche.
The titular essay, ‘Wandering with Intent’, and several other pieces also include descriptions of Mahood’s art practice and the many artists she has worked with. Recollections of place and experience merge with descriptions of artistic process to conjure up not only visual imagery but also the depth and breadth of an artist’s life.
Margaret Snowdon is from Readings Carlton
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