Story-Making, Story-Telling and Story-Keeping in Carpentaria

This paper revolves around the core principles of story-creation as defined by First Peoples in Australia. It focusses on the many dimensions of this distinctive narrative approach in Alexis Wright’s magnum opus, Carpentaria (2005). Indigenous Australian notions of time, place and story-making are crucial to the argument. Finally, the paper interrogates the links between the poetic and story-telling oeuvre of the famous Indigenous Australian leader and poet of the 1960s and 1970s – Oodgeroo – and the masterful novelistic approach to story-telling exemplified by Carpentaria.