SERAN, ‘Fortunes and Fringe-dwellers’ | Australian Studies vol. 5 | 2013 1 Fortunes and Fringe-dwellers in Australian Aboriginal Literature: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria JUSTINE SERAN The University of Edinburgh | J.Seran@ed.ac.uk Drawing on Mudrooroo’s theory of fringe-writing, this paper argues that, as poverty criteria are relative to a country’s GNP but also its culture and traditions, labelling materially disadvantaged characters in Aboriginal literature as ‘poor’ perpetuates a colonial gaze and risks imposing totalising classifications upon the Other. From descriptions of Angel Day, queen of the rubbish tip, to the mine saboteur Will Phantom, the language of wealth suffuses Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, story of the Pricklebush people and their relationship with Uptown, the white sector of the fictional town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Under the guise of a timeless narrative of mythic proportions, Carpentaria can also be read as a powerful indictment of the Australian mining industry controlled by international conglomerates ignorant of the cultural wealth of the land and its people. By writing of a small community on the outskirts of a country town, situated at the margins of the margins, Wright immerses the reader in a world where the relativity of poverty and riches symbolises the relativity of the capitalist ideology of Western neoliberalism and the absurdity of a modern obsession with owning over knowing and hoarding over honouring. Keywords: Aboriginal literature, Postcolonial criticism, Wealth and poverty, Fringe- writing, Literature and the Bible The year 1901 saw the federation of the Australian colonies into states and territories, and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia. It is fair to ask: exactly how commonly held was the country’s wealth, given that Australia was settled on the basis of terra nullius and was thus morally unwilling – as well as politically unable – to recognise its first inhabitants? Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright received the Miles Franklin award, the most prestigious literary prize for Australian literature, in 2007. The same year saw the initiation of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, known as the Intervention, when Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal (conservative) government sent the Australian army to remote communities, primarily in the north of the country, to enforce drastic measures including outlawing alcohol and pornography for Aboriginal people only. The intervention’s ostensible purpose was to address what was perceived to be widespread child sexual abuse. The operation was seen by many, though by no means all, Aboriginal people as neo-colonial invasion. 1 In