Kim Mahood is a writer and artist who grew up in Central Australia and on Tanami Downs Station. She has worked closely with Aboriginal people across Australia’s desert regions, maintains strong connections with Warlpiri and Walmajarri people, and has extensive experience in cultural and environmental mapping projects in the Tanami and Great Sandy Desert, western New South Wales, the Top End, Perth, and Fremantle, and the Great Victoria Desert. She is the author of two previous non-fiction books: Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) and Position Doubtful (2016, and the co-editor of Desert Lake: art, science and stories from Paruku (2013). Her work has received numerous awards, and is published in literary, art, and current affairs journals.
‘My book of the year … If anyone’s written more beautifully and
modestly about this country and its people I’m not aware of it. I
think it’s a treasure.’
*The Age ‘Best Books of 2016’*
‘Position Doubtful leaps straight onto the shelf occupied by the
great accounts of inland Australia. Theatrical, confessional,
masterly descriptive, it is hard to find one word to sum up the
achievement. Possibly it lies in the word character: in the brave
character of the author herself, and in the spacious, beautiful,
and unforgiving character of the Australian landscape and the
people who dramatically take on its shape in these pages.’
*Roger McDonald, author of Australia’s Wild Places, When
Colts Ran, Mr Darwin’s Shooter, The Ballad of Desmond
Kale*
‘There is something profound about the directness and clarity with
which Kim Mahood writes about her art, and her life, in particular
her relationship with the land she grew up in and on, and her
relationship to the indigenous people who have lived on that land
much longer than she. As Mahood writes of — quite literally —
building a map that is both geographic, social and cultural, you
feel that she has, ever so gently, shifted your view of the world.
Position Doubtful is a remarkable, intelligent and mature work. I
really loved it.’
*Sophie Cunningham, author of Warning: the story of Cyclone
Tracy, Geography and Bird*
‘Kim Mahood is an astonishing treasure: an accomplished artist and
writer who is equally well-equipped to navigate both Aboriginal and
settler Australia. Her lyrical yet unsentimental memoir is a story
of honouring the knowledge that two cultures have mapped upon each
other, a lesson the entire globe needs to learn.’
*William L. Fox*
‘[Mahood] is a talented writer whose mastery of the language is
absolute. The combination of an artist’s eye, a mapmaker’s
precision, and a wordsmith’s playfulness makes for a work of
captivating beauty … a significant and timely work.’
*Weekend Australian*
‘Mahood is a writer of country. Her chapters unfurl like the
ribbons of red dunes. She says “this is a kind of love story”, and
so it is, a love of land, not purchased acreages, but country,
birth country. Apart from family and close friends, she says,
“there has been no other love in my life as sustained as the one I
felt for a remote pocket of inland Australia”. Country can get its
fingers around your entrails, particularly if it owns them. That
grip makes your movements cautious with the knowledge that, while
you might move away for a time, the elasticity of your own gut
drags you back. Mahood is dragged back. It can be excruciating
reading the words of a non-Aboriginal person recording their
impressions of a brief visit to Aboriginal community, but Mahood
belongs to country and it blesses her with that most refined human
sensitivity, doubt. She is not tempted to improve or judge the
communities of her country because she prefers to love them; the
whole buckled, lovely and jumbled chaos of the land. The rich pulse
of country makes the heart quake with recognition. Position
Doubtful has the scale and delicacy of desert and records genuine
Aboriginal voice and emotion. Its breadth means that it is
frequently visited by death but Mahood records those deaths with
solemn grace while continuing to rejoice in the vibrance of the
land with a calm and dignified joy. A book for people who love this
country as if it were their mother.’
*Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu, Fog a Dox,
Convincing Ground*
‘Position Doubtful attests to an eye that is unfailing and a
lifetime of looking … She sees what she sees, and comes to her own
conclusions … Powerful.’
*Australian Book Review*
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