Delineating Ecoethics in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book

Abstract

Literary works of contemporary Australian Aboriginal writers are widely read for their engagement with expressions of resilience and resistance against colonial supremacy. But these works have a greater significance in modern times, as they carry forward the Aboriginal cultural traditions of caring for the country (an Aboriginal concept that comprises people, their culture, and all living and non-living entities in a place, including the land) and in vocalising the concerns that arise from grief for the loss of the natural environment. This paper investigates how Alexis Wright, in her postmillennial novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), redefines dominant ethical and aesthetic frameworks and tries to delineate ecoethics in these novels through a critical analysis of the representation of relationality and interconnectedness between Aboriginal people and their natural environment. By exploring the Aboriginal belief system as represented in the texts and its role in shaping Aboriginal environmental values, this paper argues that Carpentaria and The Swan Book embody ecoethics and offer a reimagining of deep ecological perspectives in contemporary literature.

1. Introduction

Literature plays a significant role in forming and reforming the value system of a society constituted by the religious, philosophical, and ethical aspirations of its members that ensure its survival and continuation. As the world has to face the challenges of climate change and ecological crises, value systems have to permeate into them new ideas of ideals that can sensitise the ecological leniency of the community members. This kind of radical shift can be fostered through some of the literary works that address readers’ ontological understandings by intervening in the epistemes generated by the Western post-Enlightenment knowledge traditions that are considered scientific and modern. The value system that emerged from the modern scientific outlook is not only anthropocentric but also dismisses the validity of non-Western traditions, such as those of Australian Aboriginal communities, founded upon the ‘sacred’ relationship between human and non-human entities in the natural environment. As a result, communities like Australian Aboriginal communities whose cultural knowledge is informed by this relationality live at the margins of mainstream societies and are still fighting for the retrieval of the traditional lands they have lost to the dominant communities and for the recognition of their cultural knowledge as having value and relevance. For Australian Aboriginal communities in these scenarios, literature ceases to be a creative endeavour alone and turns out to be a powerful medium to communicate their perilous state. Australian Aboriginal literature, like many of its contemporary counterparts, carries reverberations of the Aboriginal communities’ fights against injustice inflicted not only on the people but also on land and its living and non-living entities.

Therefore, studying these literary works of Aboriginal writers is a necessity of the time, as they point out the link between ecological and ethical concerns. This paper tries to delineate ecoethics in contemporary Australian Aboriginal literature, focusing on select works of Alexis Wright, an Australian writer belonging to the Waanyi Aboriginal community. By exploring the literary imaginaries in Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), this paper emphasises their cultural and ecological significance in enhancing the discussions and theories of ecoethics. By analysing the representation of Aboriginal relationality and interconnectedness as recounted in these novels, this paper studies the contributions of these literary works in making ecoethical concerns an inevitable part of the concept of social ethics. This paper also suggests that Aboriginal environmental values represented in literary works are shaped by the Aboriginal worldview and that there is an interplay of ecoethics and aesthetics in Alexis Wright’s works that critiques and calls for a shift in the dominant anthropocentric worldview. Following the Introduction, this paper dedicates a section to the explanation of the interconnectedness of social ethics and ecoethics. The section argues that social ethics should not be considered separately from ecoethics. The third section analyses the representations of Aboriginal country, interconnectedness, and relationality in the novels. In the fourth and final section, this paper establishes a relationship between ecoethical aspects of the novels and Aboriginal belief systems.

2. Ecoethics and Social Ethics

In aiding in the creation of a world society that thinks and acts ecologically, an “epistemological project” (Code 2008, p. 187) in the field of ethics is being carried out in which the concepts of ethics are constantly scrutinised, especially for their anthropocentric nature. The emergence of newer or revised versions of ethics, sometimes identified as applied ethics like bioethics, environmental ethics, or ecoethics, can be attributed to the synonymous use of the concepts of ethics and social ethics. D.D. Welch says that “social ethics is rooted in the notion that all ethics are social, in an important sense, because they are socially constituted, embedded in a social matrix” (Welch 2012, p. 134). Being ethical is generally considered a desirable social behaviour in a society. Yesim Isil Ulman opines that “by promoting the values of social responsibility, solidarity, and social utility, social ethics has been proposed as the basis of a rational, moral, egalitarian, pluralistic, democratic society rising on the pillars of human rights and human dignity” (Ulman 2016, p. 2640). The conceptualisation of ethics, thus, is intrinsically “social” and “human” at its core. The relationship that human society shares with the physical environment (natural as well as built environment) and the non-human, which contributes to the health and wealth of a society, does not come under the purview of social ethics largely. The natural environment plays an indispensable role in generating a “sense of belonging”, thereby adhering the members of a society together. Moreover, the sophistication of a society is measured by the distance it keeps from those who live a life closer to the natural environment, which forms the “other” in Western anthropocentric discourses. The existing tendency embedded in being “social” and “societal” to discard and dismiss it as the “primitive other” forms the basis for the discrimination and marginalisation of Indigenous communities worldwide. Otto Kinne proposes that there is a need to “enlarge the traditional concept of ethics to embrace not only Homo sapiens but also environments and coexisting forms of life” (Kinne 1997, p. 2), especially in the era of anthropogenic climate and ecological crises. An alternate worldview (a non-anthropocentric one) is not only necessary but is considered a solution to ecological crises, suggests Lynn White, as he identifies the anthropocentric religious philosophy of Christianity as the root cause of the crises in his essay (White 1967).

Aldo Leopold, in his essay “The Land Ethic”, affirms the necessity of considering ethics in “dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it” (Leopold 1949, p. 203). For him, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land” (Leopold 1949, p. 203). The need for new environmental ethics has been pointed out by Richard Routley (1973) from Australia, as Western ethics is human-centred. Holmes Rolston III also recognises the importance of encompassing environmental ethics in the ambit of ethics:

Contemporary ethics has been concerned to be inclusive: the poor as well as the rich, women as well as men, future generations as well as the present. Environmental ethics is even more inclusive. Whales slaughtered, wolves extirpated, whooping cranes and their habitats disrupted, ancient forests cut, Earth threatened by global warming—these are ethical questions intrinsically, owing to values destroyed in nature, as well as also instrumentally, owing to human resources jeopardized. Humans need to include nature in their ethics; humans need to include themselves in nature.

(Rolston III 2003, p. 518)

Paul R. Ehrlich, in his article “Ecoethics: Now Central to All Ethics”, argues that the basis of ethics should be ecocentric rather than biocentric. He adds that “The rapid worsening of the human predicament means that applied ethical issues with a significant environmental connection (what I call “ecoethics”) must be dealt with without waiting for the more interesting theoretical issues to be resolved (if they ever will be)”.

(Ehrlich 2009, p. 417)

Beginning as a few isolated responses, the discussions on the need for eco-centred ethics gained momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, giving shape to the field of environmental ethics or ecoethics by constantly engaging in the debates over rejection of anthropocentrism and acceptance of the “intrinsic value” (Samuelsson 2022, p. 267) of the natural environment. The project of extending the ambit of ethics to include non-human entities has created divisions among environmental ethicists on whether to consider environmental ethics as a branch of applied ethics or just an extension of ethics. And some ethicists consider environmental ethics as not addressing many issues related to conservation and management practices (Minteer and Collins 2008) and demand “ecological ethics”, putting the synonymous use of the concepts of ecoethics and environmental ethics in uncertainty. Subscribing to Cheryl Glotfelty’s argument that “… in its connotations, enviro- is anthropocentric and dualistic… Eco-, in contrast, implies interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts” (Glotfelty 1996, p. 20), this paper uses the prefix ‘eco’ over ‘environmental.’ Adopting the term eco as in ecology or ecosystem, ecoethics emphasizes the significance of making relationality (between the human world and the non-human world) a guiding principle in every human endeavour, generating ecological thinking that constitutes a non-anthropocentric worldview. Some recent scholarship suggests that Australian Aboriginal cultures have such non-anthropocentric and ecocentric models. Gratani et al. (2016) argue that the indigenous environmental values are human values and that they guide communities’ understanding of how the natural world should be viewed and treated by humans.

3. Aboriginal Country and Relationality

Adopting ecoethics is not always ebbing away from Western traditional ethics towards a new set of ethics. It can also be done by valuing those non-Western religious and cultural traditions that practice and celebrate the bond between human beings and the natural environment. Among various environmental movements and philosophies of the West, Deep Ecology, which advocates for a radical shift in the “dominant social paradigm” (Devall 1980, p. 300), has acknowledged the contributions it took from Eastern spiritual traditions and the Native American religions and traditions. “This ‘ecocentric’ religious approach accounts for their cultural success for thousands of years and can provide modern humans with historical models for the human/Nature relationship” (Sessions 1987, p. 106). “Deep ecology”, in Bill Devall’s words, “seeks transformation of values and social organisation” (Devall 1980, p. 303). From the perspective of deep ecology, in Devall’s words:

The person is not above or outside of nature. The person is part of creation on-going. The person cares for and about nature, shows reverence towards and respect for nonhuman nature, loves and lives with nonhuman nature, is a person in the “earth house hold” and “lets being be”, lets nonhuman nature follow separate evolutionary destiny (ibid.).

The conceptual underpinnings of Deep Ecology could be discernible in the Australian Aboriginal worldview. The Aboriginal cultures, the oldest living cultures in the world, and their worldview, the longest-continuing belief in the world, do possess eco-centred traditions and practices that can challenge the dominant Western anthropocentric worldview. As the Aboriginal communities believed that the land was created by their ancestors, they considered it sacred. But the intensity of the connection the people shared with their traditional lands dwindled with the arrival of the colonisers from Great Britain. The clash for land ownership was won by the colonisers at gunpoint and with a misleading but powerful narrative of the terra nullius (land belonging to no one). And terra nullius, as a doctrine, “remained the law in Australia throughout the colonial period, and indeed right up to 1992” (Banner 2005, p. 95), despite the fact that it “was not a standard feature of colonial land policy” (Banner 2005, p. 98).

In the colonial discourse, the British legitimised the forceful land acquisition by stamping the sustainable culture of Aboriginal people as barbaric and uncivilised, lacking knowledge of land “use”. Richard Broome writes, “The British government, influenced by Cook and Dampier, viewed non-farming Aboriginal people as not owning land, and therefore did not offer them a treaty. This infringed the rights of Aboriginal people and lowered respect for them from that moment on” (Broome [1982] 2019, pp. 18–19). Moreover, the expropriation of Aboriginal land resulted in frontier conflict. Henry Reynolds points out that the frontier conflict was an “unimaginable catastrophe” (Reynolds 2021, p. 189). He elaborates on the impacts of frontier conflict in the following excerpt:

What the colonists thought of as brief punitive expeditions may have caused far greater havoc than they appreciated. Family groups were torn apart, kinship networks were severely disrupted, and when elders were killed much of the collective knowledge and wisdom was lost forever. And the trauma was magnified because it was often the case that all the rituals surrounding death had to be abandoned (ibid.).

As the Aboriginal people were denied the right to own their traditional lands, they were forced to move to missions and reserves created to accomplish the “colonial mission” of civilising the natives. Removing people from their traditional land not only made them bereft of land and access to resources but also rootless because the land was the source of their story and history. Consequently, the severing of ties with their land led the community members to resiliently deal with intergenerational trauma and put them in constant struggles to reclaim their cultural identities in (post)colonial times. Therefore, decolonisation, for Aboriginal, people involved celebrating their cultural knowledge, reclaiming their history, and showcasing their resilience through various means. Bruce Pascoe, an Aboriginal historian, writes a counter-narrative to the terra nullius and the “hunter–gatherer” narratives in his book Dark Emu (Pascoe 2014) as follows:

But as I read these journals, I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating, and harvesting seed; preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscapes—none of which fitted the definition of a hunter-gatherer.

(p. 2)

Aboriginal authors have, on the other hand, explored literary genres to write about Aboriginal cultural traditions, as well as the plight of Aboriginal people in a dominantly white society. Alexis Wright is one such writer who brings together her cultural inheritance and the contemporary issues of racial conflicts, police brutality, political interventions, and dispossession of land faced by Aboriginal people in her works. Wright, who belongs to the Waanyi community, is not only an important literary figure but also one who stands at the forefront of the fight for the rights of Aboriginal people. Her novels, Carpentaria and The Swan Book, selected for this study, reflect various issues faced by the Aboriginal communities in (post)colonial Australia. But it is noteworthy that the politics of justice traced in these works is not confined to the human members of the community; as for Aboriginal people, the community encompasses all the non-human entities of the natural environment, including all the physical features of the land. According to Fabienne Bayet-Charlton, “Aboriginal people perceive the Australian landscape as their cultural domain” (Bayet-Charlton 2003, p. 173) and consider themselves as “an integral part of the Australian landscape” (Bayet-Charlton 2003, p. 171). The idea of being bonded to everything around is based on the Aboriginal belief of “belonging to the country”. An explanation of this relationality is evident in the words of Ambelin Kwaymullina: “Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human—all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle” (Kwaymullina 2005). The “giant, intricate web of belonging” that Melissa Lucashenko compares to “the world wide web” connotes the practice of interconnectedness in Aboriginal culture. She writes, “We lived in it, we breathed and loved and birthed and died in a world wide web of connected life” (Lucashenko 2019). Aboriginal songs and stories have been playing a crucial role in reaffirming this interconnectedness for centuries. “Through our stories of country”, writes Wright, “we know how closely related and interconnected we are, not only to each other but to everything else in the continuous cycles of life” (Wright 2022). The connection the Aboriginal stories establish between people and their country has “immeasurable value and power to hold” them “unfalling and unfailing” (Martiniello 2024).

“Country”, a recurring image in Aboriginal narratives, is a concept unique to Aboriginal cultures. The meaning of the term has a considerable difference from the English word ‘country.’ According to Deborah Bird Rose, ‘country’ is a proper noun in Aboriginal English, which means “a nourishing terrain” (Rose 1996, p. 7). She elaborates the concept further: “Country is multi-dimensional—it consists of people, animals, plants, Dreamings; underground, earth, soil, minerals and waters, surface water and air” (ibid., p. 8). The meaning of the term should not be confined to materiality or the physicality of the environment in which the community lives. Its scope transcends itself into “complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spiritual belief, cultural practice, material sustenance, family and identity” (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies n.d.). Thus, “relationality” can be considered as the undertone of Aboriginal practices, as with the concept of country that consists of many inseparable ideas. There is a reciprocity in the relationality in which a country is not a passive or a philosophical entity, as reflected in the words of Wright: “We say that we belong to this place, and we say that we are Country, that Country is alive, that Country is within us, that if we care for Country, then Country will care for us” (Wright 2024). Aboriginal laws impose a sense of responsibility and restriction on community members in their interaction with the natural environment—an approach that is basically ecoethical in nature.

The country portrayed in these novels is as prominent as any character, exercising its own will and power. As from the traditional viewpoint of the Aboriginal people, in Carpentaria and The Swan Book, it constantly interacts with other characters and contributes to the development of the plots. To the non-Indigenous readership, the portrayal of the country in these two novels suggests that the natural environment is constantly in exchange with human society, shaping and reshaping it; that it is not possible for human society to continue on its own.

Land, in these narratives, is not a passive entity and property as seen in Western narratives of the land. Agency and sovereignty are assigned to land in these novels, as one can see in the opening chapter of Carpentaria, which narrates the creation story of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Carpentaria is a country of water people whose life and destiny are determined by non-human forces, including their spiritual ancestors.

When it finished creating the many rivers in its wake, it created one last river…. This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and attached to the lives of the river people like skin.

(Wright [2006] 2015, p. 2)

The novel challenges the anthropocentric worldview that imagines humans as having to tame the natural environment around them. The futility of such an attempt is pictured in the novel: “In one moment, during a Wet season early in the last century, the town lost its harbour waters when the river simply decided to change course, to bypass it by several kilometres. Just like that” (ibid., p. 3). In The Swan Book, the catastrophic power of Nature is described in the following words:

Mother Nature? Hah! Who knows how many hearts she could rip out? She never got tired of it. Who knows where on Erath you could find your heart again? People on the road called her the Mother Catastrophe of flood, fire, drought and blizzard. These were the four seasons which she threw around the world whenever she liked”.

(Wright 2013, p. 6)

The Swan Book, thus, as climate fiction, narrates the story of Swan Lake, a swamp country, and its people’s resilience against climate change. The modern world is talking about post-planetary culture and space colonisation as a solution to the issue of climate change (Tabas 2020), while Wright, through her novel, redirects the readers’ imaginations to revive the lost ties between nature and human beings. The Swan Book presents climate change as a global crisis. The Aboriginal characters, as well as the non-human characters of the novel, have to combat crises at the local and the global levels. In the novel, repercussions of the colonial interventions continue to affect the Aboriginal people in times of the global climate change era as well.

The disruption of the Aboriginal land use patterns caused by the dominant Western anthropocentric land use pattern engenders the crises—political and ecological—in both these novels. In her study of Carpentaria, Maggie Nolan observes that “the mine itself, as a geopolitical and structural force, dominates the landscape of Desperance and is a source of conflict and division that exacerbates pre-existing and ancient tensions within the community” (Nolan 2020, p. 3). Mining is a manifestation of profit-motivated resource management, which stands in sharp contrast to the sustainable land management practices of the Aboriginal people. Another critic of Wright establishes similarities and connections in the portrayal of the struggles of Aboriginal people in these works in the following words:

Much in the vein of Carpentaria, The Swan Book assesses the politics of non-Indigenous land ownership and land management critically, with the abuse of natural resources inevitably leading to catastrophic environmental outcomes. As it was written in the wake of Carpentaria and against the backdrop of the Northern Territory Invasion, The Swan Book directly comments on the disempowerment, devastation, and corruption that result from any kind of trade-off with non-Indigenous, mainstream society in the struggle for sovereignty.

(Renes 2021, p. 89)

These works not only interrogate the values associated with one-to-one human–human or human–environment interactions but also reveal the Aboriginal value system or Aboriginal traditional laws born out of the complex web of interactions among various communities of people and the natural environment. Aboriginal customary laws, the codes of conduct to be observed by members of a particular community dwelling in the bioregion called ‘country’, therefore, are ecoethical in nature. The works, thus, deconstruct and decolonise the concept of ethics by instilling in it the ideas of Aboriginal ethics and Deep Ecology.

Aboriginal relationality and interconnectedness are further enunciated through the portrayal of the “intimate cooperation” that exists between the human and non-human worlds in these novels. Liz Shek-Noble states that The Swan Book demonstrates an ethic of country in which agency and respect are granted for non-human animals for “their contribution in maintaining ecological balance, interspecies relationships, and connections to the ancestral stories of the Dreaming (Shek-Noble 2022, p. 1)”. David Abram identifies an undeniable absence of non-human powers in Western culture. According Abram, “nature” has been reduced simply to a stock of “resources” for human civilisation and “the civilized eyes and ears are somewhat oblivious to the existence of perspectives that are not human at all…” (Abram 1997, p. 26). The relationship that the Aboriginal people share with the non-human world is portrayed strikingly in contrast to the one shared by the “white fellas”. It is strikingly similar to the idea of “becoming animal” envisaged by Abram in his book with the same title. For Abram, “becoming a two-legged animal” is to become “entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us. It seeks a new way of speaking, one that enacts our interbeing with the earth rather than blinding us to it” (Abram 2010, p. 4). “Wright depicts the price nonhuman animals pay for whitefella ways, contrasted throughout with Aboriginal people’s understandings of nonhuman others” (Atkinson 2018, p. 47), opines Meera Atkinson. She also points out the depiction of “inter-species affective communications and transmissions” (ibid.) in both Carpentaria and The Swan Book.

There is a similarity in the fate of Oblivia and the black swans in the face of climate change. Displacement from their home and dispossession of their country put Oblivia and the swans in distress. But they try to overcome the crisis by staying together. Oblivia “and the swans were caught in the winds of a ghost net dragged forward by the spirits of the country. The long strands of hair flying among the swans, holding them together, and those long strands capturing her, made her fly too, close to the ground, across the country” (Wright 2013, p. 326). The novel, according to Linda Daley, “provides an image of relational identity between a barely-human girl character and a group of swan birds complexly narrated by highly poetic means” (Daley 2016, p. 305). Like Oblivia, who has been guided by the black swans, the novel presents another character, Bella Donna, who gets help from swans during her voyage in the sea. Bella Donna, a climate change refugee, comes to the continent of Australia as guided by a white swan. She, who took care of Oblivia, is nostalgic about the white swans and possesses their stories. The character of Warren Finch, the future husband of Oblivia, shares a connection with brolgas. He belonged to the Brolga country and saw brolga dance in his country as a young boy. “Masses of brolgas danced before the boy mimicking his movements …” (Wright 2013, p. 110). Brolgas possess the memory of the boy, too; “it took them some time to gather up a distant memory of a boy dancing their dance” (Wright 2013, p. 122). This type of human–non-human bond is portrayed in Carpentaria between Norm and groper fish. There are instances of groper fish calling Norm to go fishing with them and leading him “up the river estuaries of yellow waters with the tide, to show him something special, places anyone would want to see…” (Wright [2006] 2015, p. 250). Similarly, the strong bond between Norm Phantom and the river, as recounted in Carpentaria, is worth noting:

The Pricklebush mob say that Normal Phantom could grab hold of the river in his mind and live with it as his father’s fathers did before him. His ancestors were the river people, who were living with the river from before time began. Normal was like ebbing water, he came and went on the flowing waters of the river right out to the sea.

(ibid., p. 6)

Wright, in her essay “The Ancient Library and Self-Governing Literature”, talks about her inspirations and reasons to write powerful fiction. One of them is the cultural significance of place. She says, “We live in powerful cultural places that have meanings and value to our people…” (Wright 2019). There is reciprocity in the relationship that the people share with their land. Aboriginal people believe that the land chooses its people, and they have the responsibility to take care of the country to which they belong. Major characters of both novels possess a strong sense of belonging to their country and show responsibility for taking care of the country. Normal Phantom’s connections to the river and sea of Desperance, Angel Day choosing the dumping swamp as ‘her spot’, and Will Phantom’s disapproval for a mine in his country show the attachment the characters have to their place in Carpentaria. In Carpentaria, Will Phantom wants to see the mine destroyed because it is creating problems for his people and their country. Pollution and displacement of the community from their land created by the mining company have serious repercussions in the Aboriginal communities. Family ties are lost, and the community members are in constant conflict. But there are also portrayals of Aboriginal characters, Inso and Donny, who stand in favour of the mine, for it provides the opportunity to overcome their pitiable situations. The mine “in their mind meant good food, as much as the money…” (Wright [2006] 2015, p. 180). In The Swan Book, the stories of Oblivia and the swans are intertwined with the story of the swamp. Oblivia leaves the comforts of her husband’s house, for it provides no sense of belonging to her. She returns to her country, where she shares her story with the black swans. She thinks she has a responsibility to take care of the country to which she belongs. Both novels showcase the interdependence of the human world and the natural environment. Human society cannot survive without depending on the natural environment. So, the novels urge to re-examine how one conceives of and practices social ethics.

4. Into Ecoethics

Hazel T. Biana and Virgilio A. Rivas pointed out, in their essay titled “Nature-based Religion, Plant Kinship, and Sustainability”, the role played by Indigenous nature-based religions in an era of anthropogenic climate change and ecological crises. They argue,

At a time when the world is at the threshold of climate collapse, Indigenous People’s spiritual orientation to environmental ethos, which also reflects the resiliency of their animistic values that have defined them as a people, offers a type of multi-species world outlook that modern humanity needs to embrace.

(Biana and Rivas 2021, p. 153)

A close reading of Aboriginal literature points out that the ethical aspects of their tradition are inseparable, relational, and closely connected to their natural environment. Their code of conduct is bound to the Law of the land, which they believe was created by their spiritual ancestors during Dreamtime. They share a predestined relationship with their country, and the interaction with their land is governed by the Law. “The inside knowledge about this river and coastal region is the Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages since time began” (Wright [2006] 2015, p. 3). Although Wright’s works exhibit traits of the influences of European narrative traditions, they have knitted Aboriginal reality into them. The Aboriginal reality with which Aboriginal people have lived for centuries is not easily comprehensible to non-Aboriginal people. As Carpentaria and The Swan Book try to replicate an all-embracing Aboriginal experience and time in them, they can be considered Aboriginal realism, a term Wright herself used to describe Carpentaria (Ravenscroft 2010, p. 211). “As a genre, Aboriginal realism posits Indigenous life experience as the basis for an Australian epistemology, in which Dreaming narrative flows from a sovereign universe whose spiritual and material effects question the legacy of the Enlightenment” (Renes 2022, para. 19). The adoption of Aboriginal storytelling, the portrayal of the giant serpent, the creation being, the interaction of various characters with the ancestral spirits in Carpentaria, the portrayal of the draughtswoman and the faith shown in Bujimala, and the Rainbow Serpent in The Swan Book point towards the use of Aboriginal realism in these works. These myths that form the basis of Aboriginal belief systems strongly associate with their land, making them eco-centred, which governs their interaction with human beings and non-human entities. Ecoethics is at the centre of aesthetics in Alexis Wright’s works.

There is a need to understand and appreciate the literary works written by Aboriginal writers from Australia, for they provide valuable lessons for modern society. The ethical perspective of modern society has to reconsider the place it gives to the natural environment, which is an important factor and force that shapes every aspect of society, from wealth to health, imagination, and creativity. Aboriginal literature from Australia, which carries its traditional cultural values, calls for an Aboriginal aesthetic that values natural environment.