Position Doubtful:
mapping landscapes and memories
Overview
Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir Craft for a Dry Lake in 2000, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners; the mining companies have arrived; and Indigenous art has flourished.
Comedy and tragedy, familiarity and uncertainty, are Mahood’s constant companions as she immerses herself in the life of a small community and in groundbreaking mapping projects. What emerges in Position Doubtful is a revelation of the significance of the land to its people — and of the burden of history.
Mahood is an artist of astonishing versatility. She works with words,
with paint, with installations, and with performance art. Her writing
about her own work and collaborations, and
about the work of the desert artists, is profoundly enlightening, making
palpable the link between artist and landscape.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Paperback
- 210mm x 135mm
- 336 pages
- 9781925228946
- GBP£14.99
- 12 January 2017
Categories
Awards
- Longlisted for the 2017 Australian Book Industry Awards, Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year
- Shortlisted for the 2017 Australian Book Industry Awards, Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year
- Shortlisted for the 2017 The National Biography Award
- Shortlisted for the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards
- Shortlisted for the 2017 ACT Book of the Year
- Shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Non-Fiction Award
- Longlisted for the 2017 CHASS Australia Prize for a Book in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Praise
‘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.’
‘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.’
About the Author
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.