Wandering With Intent

Wandering With Intent is the second book of Kim Mahood's that I've read, and I'd already come across a couple of these essays in the pages of The Monthly. Now the only one I have left is Craft For a Dry Lake, which was her award-winning first book. Mahood is an artist, writer and map maker who was born on a station in the Tanami Desert and grew up with First Nations people. Now she divides her year between living just outside Canberra and spending several months in a remote WA community.

Mahood has shrewd and compassionate things to say about white workers who land in these communities, filled with good intentions, and how they get worn down. She is subtle and insightful about working with elders to map Country, and the rich and wonderful things that can be achieved at the intersection between white and Aboriginal knowledges, when there is patience, respect and good will on both sides (it makes a nice change to read about some successes). She is also scathing about obstructive bureaucracy, and policies dreamed up in an office thousands of miles away. 

Mahood is about seventy, and she writes with wry good humour and perspective and anger and love about these people, her family. I can't wait to read her other book, and I only wish there were more.