ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the critique of so-called postcolonial magic realism in which point to critics refusal to allow markers of difference in texts to be significant. It proposes reading Carpentaria through a different paradigm, and this is the paradigm of radical uncertainty, an impossible dialectic. The chapter argues that Indigenous Law cannot be seen from a Waanyi point of view if one is no. Waanyi Rainbow Serpent, and that time and again the Law falls out of the scene of white Western imagining it falls out of the scene people can see or know. Deborah Bird Rose on the conception of the Law among the Yarralin of the Gulf of Carpentaria: Law is a serious life and death business for individuals and the world; it tells how the world hangs together. In postcolonial literary criticism, gestures are made, of course, towards difference and the word dialectic runs through this criticism like a talisman that could ward off charges of neo-imperialism.
