Sung by an Indigenous Siren: Epic and Epistemology in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.

One of Australia’s most distinguished Indigenous authors, Alexis Wright, stages the fleeting presence of a popular character of Northern European folklore, the mermaid, in an awarded novel of epic proportions. The mermaid is not a haphazard appearance in this Antipodean narrative, but one of the multiple, cross-cultural ways in which Carpentaria , first published in 2006, invites the reader to reflect upon the ongoing tensions between the disenfranchised Indigenous minority and the empowered non-Indigenous mainstream, and their serious lack of communication due to the antagonistic character of their respective universes, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of ruthless economic exploitation and the other in a holistic, environmentalist one of country. This essay addresses how Carpentaria, by writing across Indigenous and European genres and epistemologies, makes a call for the deconstruction of colonial discourse, for an invigorating Indigenous inscription into country, and for intellectual sovereignty as the condition sine-qua-non for the Indigenous community to move forward.

the mermaid tropeboth fish and human, unable to live on land but fatally attracted to it both defines the existence of, and appeals to, the merging of antagonistic worlds: water and land; foreign mainstream and indigenous margins; European invaders and Indigenous Australians who must learn to coexist and communicate across two divergent epistemologies that meet in Australia's coastal contact zone, both sea and land-bound. Hayward highlights that: … folkloric and subsequent popular cultural depictions of mermaids and related aquatic entities are manifestations of what might be termed an 'aquapelagic imaginary' that explores the boundaries between marine and terrestrial worlds and experiences in various ways. Given the closeand, as I argue, generative association between mermaids, maritime and island cultures in their original European context, it is unsurprising that a number of the socio-geographical locations to which the mermaid has been exported to and been depicted and elaborated within have close associations with aquatic spaces (2018: 3-4).
One can therefore claim that the mermaid trope befits Carpentaria as it, despite inherent difficulties, attempts to bridge these two worlds, making the fertile coastal strip around the condemned mining town of Desperance the focus of the novel's action; it is this liminal location between land and sea, Indigeneity and foreignness where the fringe-dwelling Indigenous leader Norm Phantom eventually restores an invigorating sense of country by recovering his Groper Fish Dreaming.
The mermaid trope also operates on a metatextual level. Charting narrative songlines with her story-tellingsomething that Kim Scott has described as 'storying' (Buck 2006) -Wright takes on the classical role of a siren whose epic chant of Gulf Country lures the reader away from a competing paradigmatic Australian epic, Capricornia (1938), set in the same area. This iconic mainstream epic about the Carpentaria region was written by afor his timeprogressive Chief Protector of the Aborigines, Xavier Herbert, who from a Western perspective addressed the taboo issues of 'black velvet' and 'coloured' offspring alluded to in the white barman's abuse of the black female body in Carpentaria. Using the mermaid trope as an overarching metaphor for the tense and conflictive nature of their interface, this essay addresses Carpentaria as a sustained intent to bridge critically across two radically different epistemologies, the Indigenous Dreaming and the European Real from an Indigenous standpoint that rewrites Capricornia's narrative and agenda.

Carpentaria and genre
An evocation of the sovereignty of the Indigenous mind, Carpentaria is concerned with the search for an original and authentic Indigenous voice in literature and in doing so constitutes a generic innovation. Ian Syson praises Carpentaria as "a remarkable and huge dreamscape novel [...] The range and diversity of form, content and influences [...] [are] astounding." Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988 Syson's analysis resonates with Wright's own view, as she chooses not to write fiction based on historical fact or personal history so as to avoid a Western encapsulation into realist linearity, progress, finality and authenticity, but envisages the novel more holistically as "an old saga [...] stories that travel across countries, ceremonies, songs [...] sagas that can take days singing the story of a country" (Wright 2007: 84). Within the Northern-European literary tradition, a saga can be understood as a "genre of prose narrative" that addresses medieval heroic characters and events from the Scandinavian, especially Icelandic, oral tradition, fictionalised in imaginative accounts employing an elevated style and building on heroism, loyalty, revenge and action rather than on reflection and inner motivation (BCE 2008). Wright's novel fits these terms in its use of the Indigenous oral tradition, Indigenous heroes and leaders, their loyalties and disloyalties, the revenge theme, Indigenous myth and legend, and its creation of a literary habitat and community through geographical locatedness.
But Wright also works within the genre of the epic with Carpentaria, positing that "the everyday Indigenous story world [...] is epic," combining the merits of the oral tradition reaching back to "the laws, customs and values of our culture" with those of "epic stories of historical events" (2007: 84). Within the European literary tradition, an epic is a "long, narrative poem in an elevated style that celebrates heroic achievement and treats themes of historical, national, religious, or legendary significance". More specifically, […] primary (or traditional) epics are shaped from the legends and traditions of a heroic age and are part of oral tradition; secondary (or literary) epics are written down from the beginning, and their poets adapt aspects of traditional epics. The poems of Homer are usually regarded as the first important epics and the main source of epic conventions in western Europe. These conventions include the centrality of a hero, sometimes semidivine; an extensive, perhaps cosmic, setting; heroic battle; extended journeying; and the involvement of supernatural beings (BCE 2008, my emphasis).
As related narrative forms, it is probably best to see saga and epic as two genres that share a number of features in overlap rather than subcategorisation. As a polyvalent text, Carpentaria borrows from both literary conventions in celebrating heroic Indigenous achievements and treating themes of legendary significance such as the destruction of white civilisation and the survival of the Indigenous nation. It links the Indigenous oral tradition to the literary, and thus should be seen as a mixed epic. Moreover, it uses the centrality of the hero and his semi-divine character, Norm Phantom, and his ability to influence the weather through the Dreaming within the cosmic setting of the Gulf of Carpentaria, including its land, sea and sky. Lastly, heroic battle, as in Norm's struggle with local nature and his son Will's Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d'Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian andTransnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona confrontation with the mine, is joined to a multiplicity of quests by several Indigenous heroes and to the involvement of supernatural beings, such as the sea and bush ladies, and the groper fish.
In her self-reflective essay "On Writing Carpentaria", Wright highlights Carpentaria's uniqueness, in that Indigenous epic is ancient, mythical, historical, and contemporary at once; in other words, by collapsing history, the Aboriginal Dreamtime is taken into the present and made part of our contemporary world, blurring the Western distinction between story and history, fact and fiction. Thus, Carpentaria, "a novel capable of embracing all times," is, to follow the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner's cue (1968: 58), a transgressive "Everywhen", in that "this fictional work could not be contained in a capsule that was either time or incident specific". Rather, Wright meant it to be a boundary crosser: It would not fit into an English, and therefore Australian tradition of creating boundaries and fences which encode the development of thinking in this country, and which follows through to the containment of thought and idea in the novel [...] The fundamental challenge I wanted to set myself, was to explore ideas that would help us to understand how to re-imagine a larger space than the ones we have been forced to enclose within the imagined borders that have been forced upon us (2007: 81-2).
It took Alexis Wright a full decade to write Carpentaria, generating an epic tale as large and sprawling as her traditional Waanyi country at the southwestern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria, with a storyline of community and country meandering like its Serpent river and expanding and contracting on the perpetual movement of the Gulf's tides. While the novel's length has been critiqued as excessive (see Davison 2007;Devlin-Glass 2007;Pierce 2006;Sharrad 2008), Craig San Roque observes that Carpentaria needs its 500 pages in order to bridge "contemporary insight and ancestral integrity". He also argues that Wright excels at the complex task of transposing her own culture, her "known and familiar", into a shape, content, and structure that is intelligible, sensible and aesthetic to the dominant culture, "whose conceptions of love, death, hate, knowledge, truth and continuity are enfolded into a European grid system" (2007: 4, 19). The author's inspiration for her contemporary origin story is drawn from a commanding vision of the Gulf's "ancestral" Gregory River, which reminded her of the Rainbow Serpent myth and inspired "Carpentaria [as] a narration of the kind of stories we can tell to our ancestral land" (Wright 2007: 79-80), the novel's setting as well as main protagonist: I develop my novels on ideas of seeing how the land might respond to different stories. The land is [...] one of or even the central character. Most of the images and ideas relate to the land being alive and having important meaning, which is tied to the ancient roots of our continent. The people who populate the landscape of my writing usually come afterwards-after I have built a place for them (Vernay 2004: 121). Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988 Carpentaria is indeed "an Indigenous sovereignty of the imagination" (Wright 2007: 94), an attempt at intellectual Native Title through an imagined recovery of the author's traditional country. Wright's celebration of her Indigenous homeland is peopled with a variety of Indigenous characters fighting the despairing odds imposed by mainstream society. The first chapter's title, "From time immemorial", draws the reader into the endless time-space of the Dreaming, while its capitalised epigraph denounces the impact of white society on Indigenous girls in remote communities: The epigraph leads us to the Rainbow Serpent Dreaming, which tells us of the perpetual making and remaking of the river country that nowadays boasts Desperance, an outpost of Western civilisation hosting the divided society of the Indigenous Westside and Eastside mobs and white Uptown, which all three make competing claims on traditional land. The destruction sung to Indigenous culture and country by the suspect imposition of white civilisation and religion ("We know your story already") is questioned and unsettled by an Indigenous counternarrative of mythical Dreamtime proportions, moulded by the meandering tracks of the slow, sinuous and powerful Rainbow Serpent's movements through Waanyi country that determine the structure of the ensuing narrative (1-3).
According to Nonie Sharp, the interface of Indigenous and non-Indigenous culture is structured as "an epic on several planes that knits together meanings underlying the lives of the Waanyi people of the Gulf country of far north Queensland with local stories of responses to new invasions" (2007: 62). The novel goes far beyond the Western containment the first chapter's epigraph suggests and undoes its capitalised weight by the bulky impact of its interwoven, heteroglossic stories in double-spaced small print. The large print of the secondchapter's epigraph fixes the novel's Indigenous inscription and sprawling structure as the remedy for present-day despair: . Thus, the powerful Rainbow Snake's stirrings of literary creation eventually don't suggest Armageddon for the Indigenous mob, but "honour" the town's name in wiping it from the face of the earth with a devastating cyclone. A tropical storm slowly builds up throughout the text in magic-mythic interplay between the sea, sky, land and their superhuman mediator, the 'ghosted' Indigenous Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988 Sharp therefore argues that Carpentaria spins "a powerful allegory for our times: the Earth's retaliation in Gaia-like fashion, responding to the deep tramping marks of our footprints on the climate, on the places of both land and water" (2007: 62). Other critics have also drawn attention to Carpentaria's political agenda as ecologically inscribed, promoting awareness of the interconnectivity and interdependency of all life forms in their local habitats.

Carpentaria and epistemology
In Nourishing Terrains, Deborah Rose addresses epistemologies from an eco-scientific perspective, closely linking respect and care for the local natural environment to the observance of Indigenous belief systems known as the Dreaming or Dreamtime. Thus, the dreaming is at once timeless and local by dictating the Law of the land and so becomes Stanner's Everywhen. She calls attention to how these belief systems foster non-hierarchical economies of mutual benefit between the different constituents of a local habitat, connecting all country horizontally and laterally rather than vertically and hierarchically, in a binding manual of good environmental conduct: The totemic metaphysics of mutual life-giving draws different species into overlapping and ramifying patterns of connection through benefit. Many of these benefits are not immediately reciprocated. Rather, they keep moving through other living things, sustaining life through the twin processes of life for itself and life for others (2004: 295-297).
This analysis provides a sustained critique of the racial, gendered and classist hierarchies and economies generated by the capitalist exploitation of the Australian land. Thus, Rose specifies that Indigenous epistemologies "resituate the human" by conferring subjectivity as sentience and agency on country; by the reciprocity of all life processes; by kinship with nature through human and non-human totems; and by calling humans into action rather than having them act autonomously, so that "country, or nature, far from being an object to be acted upon, is a self-organising system that brings people and other living things into being, into action, into sentience itself" (2005: 302-3). Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988 (Renes 2002). The generic denomination 'Aboriginal Reality' more accurately posits the Indigenous life experience as the basis of an Australian epistemology in which narrative flows from a sovereign universe whose spiritual and material effects solicit the colonial legacy of the Enlightenment. Carpentaria as an instance of 'Aboriginal Reality' cannot be read within the constraints of academic criticism as its narrative, style and structure spill over the discrete borders and niching of Western genre and knowledge.
Not surprisingly, Wright has an idiosyncratic view of her epic's configuration; she visualises the novelistic structure and content resulting from "our racial diaspora in Australia" as "a spinning multi-stranded helix of stories": [. Indeed, readers of Carpentaria must work hard to make sense of its heteroglossic tapestry of intermingled accounts in which the true heroes are marginalised Indigenous tribesmen i ; tribal guerrilla warfare develops into heroic acts; language mixes mainstream English and Indigenous speak; everyday reality blends with the Dreamtime; quests develop out of old and new songlines and walkabouts; and its supernatural powers simultaneously invoke Christian and classical characters and Dreamtime ancestors, of which the mermaid is only one example. It is for the manner in which Carpentaria imposes a recovery of Indigenous culture and an agenda of Indigenous self-definition and self-determination onto European conventions that it inscribes itself in the peculiarities of a genre that Alexis Wright tentatively coined Aboriginal Reality.
In his analysis of Carpentaria, the Jungian psychoanalyst Craig San Roque's ecopsychological tack avoids subsuming Indigenous reality and myth into the hierarchical Freudian framework of his discipline and takes this agenda into literature. He laments that his Australian peers are often not open to "the indigenous faculty of imaginationthat is to say, imagination alive in the specific context of the local environment -in 'country'", and flags Alexis Wright's writing as a positive example for its productive/promiscuous interconnection of "ancestral themes, nature experienced, contemporary fact" (1-3, emphasis added). Driving his eco-psychological argument further, Michèle Grossman sees Carpentaria as an antidote to Freud's traditional patriarchal account of Indigeneity by the way the novel configures an all-embracing awareness of identity rooted in the 'oceanic' effacement of the distinction between the Self and the surrounding world:  (Roberts 2011), at odds with his proposal of civilisation as a repressive means to curb individual desire and ensure social conformity.
Grossman's Lacanian discussion of Freud and Rolland's thoughts on socialisation and civilisation takes us back to the mermaid, who is a symbol per excellence for the communal, female sphere of the oceanic whose 'bliss' the child has to give up in the Freudian account to complete the process of education and reach its resulting state of grace: the emotional and physical isolation and self-control provided by Western civilisation. It is worth noting Philip Hayward recognises this psychoanalytical legacy in his mermaid study Making a Splash (2017): […] the particular psychoanalytic paradigms I drew on […] were formulated within a highly specific context; that is, the bourgeois milieu of late 19th/early 20th Century Vienna, where Freud and colleagues practiced and, more broadly, Europe and the Eurocentric metropolitan society of North America where psychoanalysis became established and formalised in the 20th Century (2018: 4).
The mermaid easily reads psychoanalytically, as the creature's feminine upper body contrasts with the phallic connotations of its powerful tail, and is therefore poised between the male and the female (Hayward 2018: 3). Her undeniably erotic nature (Hayward 2017: 13) makes her luringly and deceptively attractive, both passive and active, symbolising both safety and threat. In line with the latter, Grossman uses the metaphor of "a world forever at war" regarding Carpentaria, significant in that throughout most of the novel, the Indigenous mob is divided over traditional ownership and so never 'safe'. Joseph Midnight and Norm Phantom, the local Indigenous leaders, are "stubborn old mules who anchored their respective clans in the sordid history of who really owned different parcels of the local land [...] The old war went right up the coastline to Desperance and out to sea" (426) and will not stop until their respective children, Will and Hope, manage to bridge the mobs' differences through a firm bond of love. Carpentaria's 'oceanic antidote', then, pits the modern, familiar world of Christian faith and civilising zeal against the ancient Secret-Sacred Dreamtime belief and regenerative power of the Rainbow Serpent. It is their incommensurable epistemologies that solicit each other throughout the text in unsettling ways: This double-or-nothing proposition marks out the territory of Carpentaria. It's a novel in which the doppelganger effect of indigenous and settler ways of being and knowing is fully, furiously, sustained as tandem stories and lives variously intersect and diverge, yet remain haunted by the shadows of others' truths and lies (Grossman 2006: 10).
In Grossman's understanding, as a locally specific, non-hierarchical and non-exploitative form of knowledge, it is the Indigenous approach that takes the upper hand in this narrative, against "those who claim authority over it without accepting responsibility for its care and management". As she argues, "Carpentaria is a swelling, heaving, tsunami of a novel" : Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988, whose oceanic rhythms of fictional imagination turn the biblical threat of a terminal Armageddon into a cleansing deluge for the Indigenous Australians by annihilating all vestiges of Western civilisation on the local coast. This matches Craig San Roque's decolonising perspective that "the bruising truth is that Australasia and Oceania are locations of 'end times' for many, and 'new times' for others" (2007: 4), in the crucible of life and death configured by Desperance, whose culture is based on the exploitative, materialistic, destructive economy of local mining.
The novel names locations, entities and characters with an ironic, premonitory touch. The town Desperance is both the Western outpost where exploitative capitalism can show its meanest face and the uncanny margin from which Indigenous culture can write back and decolonise. Desperance is also named after its founder, Captain Matthew Desperance Flinders. This toponym ambiguously shuttles between doom and hope by engaging different morphological possibilities across a variety of languages. Its connotations range from 'desperate', 'despair' (English), 'désespoir' (French), 'desesperado' and 'desesperanza' Easy' reveal and mock their respective personalities, while a blurring lack of identity is suggested for a whole range of anonymous inhabitants taking their last name after the Jesuslike Elias Smith, a visionary who came to Desperance from the sea. Responsible for Indigenous dispossession and dislocation, the Gurfurritt Mining Corp is reminiscent of the powerful Century Zinc mining company's impact on Waanyi country (Devlin-Glass 2006: 82;Wright 1998;Wright 2001: 135-43), its phonetic transcription of the expression 'go for it' blatantly referring to its unscrupulous land-grabbing policynowadays embodied by the imminent destruction of the Great Barrier Reef through the Adani coal-mining project, which receives Federal support.
Irony in Carpentaria engages with the town's history from an Indigenous perspective. The seaboard town's natural marine economy is cut short by the changing tracks of a meandering "river that spurns human effort in one dramatic gesture" (3). It cuts its port off from the sea, and the economic activity shifts to the exploitative impact of mining. However, Lloydie's luring mermaid and a mine explosion foreshadow the destructive tidal wave which turns Desperance onomatopoeically into a "boomtown" (98) and returns the area's life-sustaining link with the sea. Norm's grandson Bala's perception of the location as a "big yellow snake" places the destruction wrought by the cyclone in the mythical realm of the Great Creation Being. And Norm's relief that "[t]hey were home" is based on the secure bearings provided by his Groper Dreaming, overruling the fact that "he could not discover one familiar feature of Desperance" at their arrival. The clima(c)tic D-day of the local habitat's rebalancing has D-/decapitated the alien presence of white civilisation and reinscribed the coastal strip as the locus of 'Esperance' for its host of Indigenous characters, enabling them to "sing the country afresh" from an epistemologically-valid and environmentally-sound perspective . ii Given the current impact of storms, flooding, and mining on the Australian continent's environment and economy, Desperance's fate as foreshadowed by Lloydie's impossible love Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d'Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian andTransnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona for the mermaid stands as a metaphor for Australia's destruction by the global capitalist production system, in its impact through extraction and climate change.
Craig San Roque takes his eco-psychological critique into an analysis of the unique ways in which Carpentaria reveals its disquieting truths to mainstreamers. Praising Alexis Wright as a skilful, didactic and generous translator of the unconscious into the conscious, San Roque commends Carpentaria's deconstruction of Freudian analysis, and highlights its engagement with a country and society fallen upon hard times: have not yet managed to control the incest wish, unlike Westerners. As Freud considers the management and sublimation of the oedipal incest wish in the nuclear family unit to be at the root of all human civilisationart, society, religion, justice, ethics the imposition of patriarchal and colonial authority is conflated and justified; this, in turn, creates a social underclass of 'primitive natives' in alleged need of Western civilisation for the management of their so-called child-like state. Thus, it is mainstream initiative and control that is put in charge of their purported progress and improvement modelled on the example of the West. Aileen Moreton-Robinson deconstructs the Freudian inscription of white prevalence and privilege from an Indigenous point of view. She writes to this effect that "the belief that the assumption of patriarchal white sovereignty is morally right and legally correct" has a fatal consequence: The disadvantage suffered by Indigenous people is not perceived as an effect of this assumption; rather, the implication is that indigenous people lack the core values required to contribute to the development of the nation (2007: 100).
In the face of the havoc wrought by the Western irruption into Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria's inscription into Aboriginal Reality necessarily makes an antidote to the crippling Freudian account of incomplete, stunted adulthood. Wright writes: Carpentaria should be written as a traditional long story of our times, so the book would appear reminiscent of the style of the oral storytelling that a lot of Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988 (Langton 2008: 155, 158).

Carpentaria and Capricornia
Despite its expansive Indigenous inscription, critics have pointed out that Carpentaria follows the structure, content, style and humorous tone of the epic novel Capricornia, written some seventy years earlier by the mainstream author Xavier Herbert (England 2006;Perlez 2007;Pierce 2007;Sharrad 2008;Syson 2007). Herbert held the post of Chief Protector of the Northern Territory Aborigines for a brief period between 1935 and 1936, and delivered an origin story of the Gulf area from a white settler's perspective, dealing with cross-cultural contact through the issue of 'black velvet'. Paul Sharrad notes some parallels suggesting that Wright's unwritten intention in writing Carpentaria was to decolonise Herbert's text: It is not hard to see a transition from Norman to Wright's central character, Normal, just as it is possible to hear an echo in his termagant wife, Angel Day, of Herbert's hotel keeper, Daisy Shay (40). These small intertextual ties serve to show up the more significant relations between the two novels, manifest as corrective surgery from an Aboriginal viewpoint. Although Herbert created something of a scandal for making explicit the then illicit relationships between white and black Australia and revealing the inhuman disregard for the mixedblood offspring of such connections, his narration is relentlessly external and from a white perspective. If his central concern is the problematic issue of how to treat 'half-caste' Australians, Herbert's anchor character Norman frequently Coolabah, Nr 27, 2019, ISSN 1988 These echoes cause Carpentaria's authenticity to be inflected by Capricorniaalbeit only to a certain extent, as Wright never makes allusions to Capricornia as a source of inspiration or reference in her interviews and essays regarding her writing, or clarifies whether she has read Herbert's novel. Rather, she holds that she works from the sophistication of the ancient Waanyi storytelling tradition and a series of South American, Magical-Realist authors vi to produce a provocative decolonising tale that is familiar as well as strange.
Does the former imply that, rather than Indigenising the characteristics of a European-style epic, the similarities are just coincidental, wrong-footing some readers into believing the case for an Australian precedent where none exists? While Peter Pierce notes that "Wright knows well that Xavier Herbert's comic epic, Capricornia (1938), will be on our minds", Jane Perlez mentions that "Wright said she chose the title 'Carpentaria' as a celebration of the ancestral lands that her mother and grandmother, members of the Waanyi nation, were forced from, and not as a nod to Xavier" (Pierce 2006: 13).
This contradiction suggests that Wright insists on Carpentaria's originality out of a concern to "create in writing an authentic form of Indigenous storytelling" (Ashcroft et al. 2009: 212-13, emphasis added). She therefore denies the existence of a Western prequel, defies inscription in the Western literary tradition, and insists on an independent Indigenous configuration of truth through fiction. No doubt Wright adopts a trickster stance in maintaining a revelatory silence on the question of Capricornia's presumed precedence. This silence appears politically inspired and embedded in the problem of the uneven balance of power underlying the hybridisation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary genres and content. It is with both of these fields that the author is obliged to work when transposing the oral into the written. Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden maintain that the discursive struggle inherent in hybridisation tends to raise discomfiting issues of the Capricornia-Carpentaria kind: In Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung and Mudrooroo's Master of the Ghost Dreaming trilogy, Dreamtime tropes are the medium in which the authors satirise colonialism, westernisation or urbanisation [...] In doing so, they deploy literary forms as diverse as magic realism and, in the case of the elder Watson and Mudrooroo, more populist and inventive forms, such as gothic, fantasy thriller and dirty realism. Within western paradigms, such symbolic systems are available for re-use and hybridisation within western genres. However, within both communities questions increasingly arise about the