ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Kim Mahood’s memoir Craft for a Dry Lake (2000), in which she revisits the mythical outback Australia of her childhood. Craft was written in the height and heat of the reconciliation era (1990-2000). The author’s personal reflections are weaved into the analysis of the influence that fathers and masculinity play in shaping rural, white women’s sense of belonging and self-possession. Mahood’s father’s death drew her back to her childhood home, in the Tanami Desert. Land rights had returned the country to Warlpiri, the traditional owners. Drawing upon Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s concept of white patriarchal sovereignty and Mark Rifkin’s settler common sense, the chapter analyses the racialised and gendered politics of place. Overtly, it is a tale of mourning and a search for resolution with fathers, but more so it is an encounter with Indigeneity: sovereign Aboriginal women and place-based politics. It is a memoir of the anatomy of settler colonialism. The fragility of Mahood’s settler certainty is exposed. However, it was the beginning of an unsettled life and a cognitive shift, which enabled her to learn to live in an Australia that has an Aboriginal history, present and future.
