Craft for a Dry Lake

Kim Mahood's first book, Craft For a Dry Lake, was much awarded when it was published in 2000, but somehow it passed me by. I came to Mahood's writing via her other books, Position Doubtful and Wandering With Intent, but Craft For a Dry Lake really sets the foundation for the later books and fills in much of the detail of Mahood's early life that has led her to where she is now.

The influence of Mahood's late father, Joe, looms large over these pages. Kim was raised in the Tanami Desert, though her family later moved to Queensland, and the struggle she has returned to the desert to face is rooted deep in her childhood. This land belonged to her family, but it's not their land (the cattle station has been returned to Aboriginal ownership). All her life, she has worn her unusual childhood with both pride and otherness -- yet returning here after many years, she is unsure how to integrate her memories, her sense of self, with the intellectual knowledge that this place was never really hers. She is pulled back to the familiar places, and yet deeply conscious of how alien is her presence there.

It was particularly interesting to read about this inner conflict, because I was aware from the later writing how she has resolved it -- she spends part of the year in the desert, living and making art with the First Nations community, and part of it back in the city, where she can live out the other part of her identity. Mahood has a nuanced, complex understanding of the intensely complicated relations between white and Black Australia, between history and present and future, between personal experience and the weight of the past, and I hope she keeps writing about it. I'm hungry for more.