Land theft and its repercussions are invoked on the opening page, where the novel’s central character, Cause Man Steel – “a culture dreamer obsessing about the era” – is introduced alongside the rest of his storm-country people: The novel also contains Wright’s most explicit portrayal of the theft of an entire continent of Aboriginal country by white invaders more than two centuries ago, the ensuing clash of Aboriginal and white Australian laws, and the ongoing traumatic fallout. Reading it is a heady, almost vertiginous experience. Praiseworthy seems to be both set in an infinite daily present and unmoored from time completely. In The Swan Book (2013), set 100 years into the future, the fractured narrative spirals through time and space like the grass seeds of Wright’s ancestral savannah. Wright first broke with conventional linear time in Carpentaria (2006) to convey this unity of all times and stories in Aboriginal cosmology.
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