Wandering with Intent

by Kim Mahood

To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

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 compelling 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Australia, Memoir

256 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2022

About the author

Kim Mahood is a writer and artist based in Wamboin near Canberra.

She grew up in Central Australia and on Tanami Downs Station, and has maintained strong connections with the Warlpiri traditional owners of the station and with the families of the Walmajarri stockmen who worked with her family.

She continues to spend several months each year in the Tanami and Great Sandy Desert region, working on cultural and environmental mapping projects with Aboriginal traditional owners.

Reviews

[Tundra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kim take you on a fascinating wander through the spectacular Australian outback where she has spent much of her life. This series of essays explores how her experience of the land, the people who inhabit it and those who attempt to provide services, management and governance within it have shaped it. We glimpse into her thinking on why white an black people have struggled to shape a relationship that can effectively balance managing themselves and this delicate ecosystem. As Kim says this balance is fraught with problems of guilt, misunderstanding, miscommunication, family obligation and isolation.

“It’s here that I have been inducted into the rigours of two-way thinking, and taught how to let contradictions play through each other instead of trying to resolve them. …. I have learnt that too rigorous an attachment to outcomes disenfranchises the Aboriginal participants, and that the most important discoveries are often the things you aren’t looking for. I have learnt that serendipity is essential to success of a project, and that knowing how to leave space for serendipity is a skill that can only be learned through long experience.”

Her primary employment (interest?) is in “imaginative mapping “ of indigenous lands. Working with local Aboriginal people she collates and maps information on plant and animal resources, bush medicine, country types, water resources and any cultural information that the local people wish to include. She maps local language and knowledge in a way that is helping to preserve connection and maintain knowledge.

These essays are a glimpse into a life lived walking a delicate balance observing and participating in a place and culture that continues to be poorly understood but much discussed and judged. Kim’s gentle humour and insight gave me much to think about.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kim Mahood is one of our most interesting thinkers about the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.  Writing my review of her previous book Position Doubtful (2016) coincided with attending the Indigenous Language Intensive program organised by Writers Victoria, which was designed to guide non-indigenous authors to write respectfully about Indigenous people, their culture and history.  Kim Mahood has made it her life’s work to do just that.

As she says in the preface to Wandering with Intent:

To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt.  It implies risk and failure.  It is also the only way to find out whether something is possible.  These essays are a sort of written equivalent of hunting and gathering, of wandering with intent.  They are the product of my own wandering among the conundrums and contradictions of the cross-cultural world I've chosen to inhabit, and of my intent to understand and honour it. (p.xi)

In today's cultural climate of identity politics and cancel culture, it takes courage to traverse this territory.  For some, there are hard and fast lines that delineate who has the right to speak and write about Indigenous issues, and as we are already seeing in the context of the forthcoming referendum on the Voice, there are differing perspectives and disconcerting hostilities between First Nations themselves.  So what is it that impels Mahood to venture into this complex territory?

What compels me is watching relationships play out at the edge of cultural systems that baffle and subvert each other, where the frontier is still adaptive and resistant, the population is predominantly Aboriginal, and the land is a living entity that influences the lives of the human players.  It is a dynamic and volatile world that has been impacted by colonialism but has retained its Indigenous character, much of which is interpreted by the white world as dysfunctional, but which continues to function with remarkable tenacity.  I've spend years seeing the Indigenous people I know grow and change, take on responsibilities or avoid them, make choices about how to be the Indigenous player on someone else's agenda. (p.xiii)

This collection of 17 essays written over more than 15 years includes nine which were previously published... in Griffith Reviews 15, 36 and 63; (reissued in The Best Australian Essays 2007); The Monthly in 2015, 2017 and 2019; the Chicago Quarterly Review 2020, and in the Australian Book Review 2019.  Since I don't subscribe to any of these, I have missed out on every one of these remarkable essays so I was very pleased to see them published together in this must-have collection.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/12/12/w...

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mahood notes in the introduction to this volume of essays that the space for her kind of writing - that of a non-Indigenous woman engaging in cross-cultural exchanges around Indigenous communities - is changing, with more demand that Indigenous people get to control their own narratives. Nevertheless, this collection of essays, written over the last decade, takes on the topic with honesty, occasional humour and a sense of exploration.

[Fraizer · Rating 5 out of 5]

the ideas presented in some (not all) of these essays are as original as i've heard / read when it comes to cross-cultural working and living

[Jim KABLE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Australians, Interesecting

What a joy to read this collection of essays - of lives of Australians - First Australians and those of post-1787 arrival - together - making sense of both or all traditions - the kriol - the stories and ceremonies of dance and ritual - of religious traditions - of language - of superimposing and blending of stories and lives - and always the most positive of interpretations and generosity - and despite her protests at one stage - her beautiful prose, literary references and ability to make herself feel background to the bigger story playing out. What a woman. And in the pages I found references to two people related to old friends of mine - one in W.A. And one in western NSW. I highly recommend this book to anyone who truly wants to understand Australia in the 2020s.

[Eliatan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding collection of essays by a talented author, who speaks from personal experience but never tries to speak for the Aboriginal people. Kim makes it easy to fall in love with the red earth country she loves and the respect she has for a culture that has been all but destroyed by white settlers, and demonstrates the kind of understanding needed to a part of, but apart from, the people she clearly adores.

[Medha Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t normally read short essays or much non-fiction but this book will change that for me. I wish I had bought a copy instead of borrowing from the library so I could underline the text.

[Daniel Pelkowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would recommend this book to anyone, very interesting perspectives, and rich, raw, honest reflections

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of 17 essays written at various times covering a variety of topics from growing up on a cattle station, family relationships and the art and geographic worlds Ms Mahood inhabits in the central desert region of Australia. As with most of these types, some of these essays really moved me profoundly, while others were a bit harder to grasp. I was especially moved by her comparison of whitefellas who blow in to do good and those that are in for the long haul as well as her essays about her life growing up on the family cattle station and the interconnectedness of family and the help. A good read to grasp what life is like out in the bush.

[Susanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays provided a new perspective for me, and some understanding of the issues at the interface of cross-cultural meeting. The earliest essays were somewhat bogged down in government and policy details, but the personal side of Kim Mahood's extensive experience working with indigenous Australians shone through in later essays, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Combined with her mapping artwork and commentaries, this book offered revelations and reveals a deep and abiding love for country and its people.

[Vicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and thought-provoking essays, providing an insight into the complexities of living among and working with remote aboriginal communities. Drawing on her experiences over a lifetime of collaboration with remote communities, Mahood is uniquely placed to explain, observe and question the ways in which whitefellas and Aboriginal peoples and their cultures engage and intersect. The essays are approachable, funny and perceptive.

[Scott Vawser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am living in a remote Aboriginal community, hoping to learn as much as I can about the nuances of another culture. This book was enormously encouraging, challenging and insightful.
Even if you are just interested in Australian indigenous culture and its intersection with white Australian I would recommend this read.

[Rosemary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great essays that help 'white' people understand indigenous people, plus some family history. A very special book.

[Tim Waters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into issues confronting Indigenous Australians.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Compelling reflections on the precipice of two cultures, and on occasion stuck in its faultline but all the while observant.

[Nathaniel Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and fascinating.

[Chris Freudenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thoughtful essays.

[Melissa Stebbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of essays covers various topics related to the author's life living and interacting with remote communities in Australia. She offers fascinating insights into complex cross-cultural interactions between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

Lines of note:
The year she flew into Alice Springs and from there drove out into the Tanami desert instead of having the two weeks of driving from Canberra to acclimatise:
"It seemed that having departed from the orderly, over-planned surrealism of the national capital, I had arrived at its sinister twin" p 19

On the way white anti-racists can flounder out in the outback. Summarising Emma Kowal's argument in "Trapped in the Gap":
"Translated, Kowal's argument suggests that the way forward requires the victimised to let go of the advantages of victimhood, and for the stigmatised to relinquish the excoriating pleasures of the hairshirt. It's hard to imagine such ideas gaining traction in the current climate of racial politics but, as she points out, the existing model is gridlocked in its own contradictions."p 98

"I wonder if part of the failure to persuade many of the people out here to choose safer, healthier, whiter lives is because what we offer, compared to what they have, is just too boring" p 99
I noted this because apart from the whiter part, I wonder whether this is in a less extreme way is similar to how our son who has ADHD feels about our advice.

Some things I want to find out more about:
IPA's. I looked this up and found that there are a few of these down in Victoria.
The Emma Kowal book.

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful