Alexis Wright at a city hotel. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

The Australian novelist Alexis Wright spent some time with students of the Jadavpur University department of English last week. They knew that the 57-year-old lady of the Waanyi peoples wasn’t quite your regular author, that she had spent most of her life as an activist and researcher working for Aboriginal rights and Indigenous government.

She is visiting India from 25 January to 5 February in the wake of her 2006 novel Carpentaria winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award (Australia’s biggest, and one of the most prestigious in the world) in 2007. Her talk on Thursday, “Post Colonial? Dark Side of the Nation”, was organised by the Australian High Commission, Oxford Bookstore and the university’s English department, and the author addressed a very full Vivekananda Hall at Jadavpur University.

Albeit soft-spoken and apparently even frail, she spoke with warmth and an edgy elegance, of her lifetime of research and activism. And writing: her long battle against and documentation of alcohol abuse in Tennant Creek in Central Australia (on which her 1997 book Grog War is based), the last Australian government lead by John Howard (to whom “the idea of Indigenous government was just too big”) and its demeaning and exploitative treatment of the Aboriginal peoples, her self-education in literature from around the world wherever people had an ancient attachment to their land, and finally, the making of Carpentaria.

Wright spoke of the novel drawing from her experience in her own land, and the arrival in it of a multinational mining company. The protests were long and, ultimately, almost unavailing. “I know people who’ve worked every day of their lives until the day they died.”

Finally, the mines arrived, the groundwater was (at least in part) contaminated, and sacred sites were damaged. Carpentaria, she says, came over six years of wondering about the questions that otherwise people could not ask, because they were too busy surviving. Colonisation, she concludes, is a present reality in Australia.

The book, she admits, is no easy read. “I wanted to take Australian literature and throw it over the boundary… I always credit my own people for teaching me how to read and write in the first place, and not the universities I have been to.” Carpentaria is very much about “giving something back to my own people”, in as authentic a way as possible, without giving away that which is sacred to the Aboriginal peoples.

Though not unduly celebratory about the claims that Aboriginal cultures have been substantially rehabilitated, she talks about hope. While the activism for Aboriginal self-government, she thinks, has achieved little in concrete terms, she knows people who ask for it without the ability to consider the compromise that is assimilation.

And the book had an overwhelming reception. Aboriginal peoples look on it as a redefinition of possibility. India would like to see more of her, even as she wishes to see more of India.