ABSTRACT
Alexis Wright is an Australian Aboriginal writer from the Waanyi community in the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Swan Book (2013) is her third novel after Plains of Promise (1997) and Carpentaria (2006). In keeping with Wright’s previous works, The Swan Book depicts a world deeply imbued with an Australian Aboriginal ontology in which materiality and spirituality, life and death, and knowing and being are all entangled.
The text presents a peculiar form of katabasis which circumvents the Western distinction between world and underworld. As such, The Swan Book not only reaffirms an Australian Aboriginal epistemology and ontology but also rewrites the katabatic narrative as an Aboriginal journey through a world transformed by climate change and colonialism in which near-future Australia is represented as a “hell on earth”. More precisely, the narrative defamiliarizes the descent into the underworld undergone by the protagonist Oblivia Ethylene by depicting a world informed by Australian Aboriginal epistemologies in which spirits of the dead roam freely in the world of the living, influencing their lives and memory but also affecting the unfolding of the storyworld. In this configuration of the storyworld, the world of the ancestors is brought back to the surface along with their memories, making them visible and heard (both literally and figuratively) despite their silencing by colonialism and capitalism.
This essay is structured in four parts. First, it provides the context of The Swan Book by briefly presenting Aboriginal epistemology and ontology as well as Australian colonial history. In the second part, it analyses how The Swan Book makes use of the motifs of descent and ascent to characterise its protagonist Oblivia Ethylene as a liminal figure caught up in an oscillating pattern between remembering and forgetting. In the third part, it details how the plot of Wright’s narrative can be construed as Oblivia’s katabatic journey across a hellish Australia towards Melbourne and her anabatic return to the swamp country. Finally, in the fourth part, it shows how the epilogue reconciles Oblivia’s epistemological and spatial katabases and anabases by grounding them in a song cycle about droughts.
