Wandering with Intent

essays
Kim Mahood

‘No one writes about walking the swaying tightrope between remote First Nations and non-Indigenous worlds better than Mahood … she has little time for apologetic hair-tearing, finding meaning in enduring personal relationships and environmental connection, deep respect for Country and suspicion of those outsiders, black and white, who claim to know what is best for community people. Every big-hearted city-dweller planning to visit or work in a remote community should be required to read Mahood. She is provocative and profound.’

Michael Winkler, The Sydney Morning Herald

‘There is a deep sense of searching in this collection; of wandering with the intent of trying to understand more deeply a place that Mahood describes as ‘central, necessary, cross-wired into my neural circuits and the geography of my body’… Although Mahood is mapping the country in her attempt to understand it, she is not trying to conquer the country, or to know it in a Western epistemological sense. Rather, she resists certainty and instead emphasises listening in order to understand the many truths and meanings that reside in places. Mahood’s work is an important contribution to a growing body of writing about the inland that is being shaped by women’s perspectives, both black and white, who are ‘less oppressed by the existential void, less impressed by the explorer narratives’ and bring a ‘very different sensibility, and one whose time has come’.’

Sharryn Palmer, Australian Book Review

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‘This collection of essays, some previously published, on the enigma of cross-cultural consciousness is a master class on unravelling complex issues in fluently lucid prose … The compassionate intelligence of these essays underpins literature's redemptive arc.’

Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times

‘This is a rich and enjoyable collection of writings that combines Kim Mahood’s reflections on art and literature with her unique life experiences … Recollections of place and experience merge with descriptions of artistic process to conjure up not only visual imagery but also the depth and breadth of an artist’s life.’

Margaret Snowdon, Readings

‘[Wandering With Intent] is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how the Australian frontier is by no means a thing of the past.’

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, The Conversation

‘Kim Mahood is one of our most interesting thinkers about the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.’

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

‘With Kim’s finely-tuned observations and rich descriptions of people, places and topics you really do feel as if you’re accompanying her on a journey. And, it’s fair to say that each essay, paragraph, sentence and word has been written with a delicate yet poignant and powerful touch. There are many words to describe Kim Mahood’s writing but, for me, the word ‘insightful’ tops the list. Wandering With Intent is definitely not a book to be skimmed or rushed. It is a book to be savoured slowly.’

Selena Kirby, Australian Rural & Regional News

‘She is clear-sighted, compassionate, readily amused but not easily fooled … Each essay is superbly crafted.’

Judges’ comments from the 2023 Age Book of the Year award for nonfiction

Praise for Position Doubtful:

‘Position Doubtful probes through layers of understanding of the people and land where she was born, across the Tanami Desert to the East Kimberley; it is rich with insights delivered with sensitivity and honesty.’

Australian Book Review

Praise for Position Doubtful:

‘Kim Mahood writes with insight and without condescension of the Indigenous community’s struggle to maintain traditions and cohesion in the face of marginal existence, poverty, health problems and rampant alcoholism. [Position Doubtful], despite containing a great deal of death and desolation, is a ringing affirmation of life in all its messy, muddled, half-resolved possibilities.’

New Internationalist

Praise for Position Doubtful:

‘Sometimes lyrical, sometimes grumpy, sometimes elegiac, but always frank, Position Doubtful ranges across the wide meaning of country, extending past landscape into story, family, history, politics, geology, art, memory, and belonging. It is a vivid and memorable book.’

Lisa Gorton, The Age

‘Wandering with Intent rises beacon-like from turbulent ground. Characterised by rare grace and care, and often unfurling into beauty, Mahood’s essays are essential: anyone driven to understand how the faultlines between black and white Australia might shape us for the better should read this book immediately.’

Quentin Sprague, author of The Stranger Artist, winner of the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction

WINNER OF THE 2023 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR NONFICTION

To essay means to try, to endeavour, to attempt — and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention — art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.

At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candour, humour, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.

Michael Winkler, The Sydney Morning Herald

Sharryn Palmer, Australian Book Review

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Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times

Margaret Snowdon, Readings

‘[Wandering With Intent] is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how the Australian frontier is by no means a thing of the past.’

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, The Conversation

‘Kim Mahood is one of our most interesting thinkers about the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.’

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

Selena Kirby, Australian Rural & Regional News

‘She is clear-sighted, compassionate, readily amused but not easily fooled … Each essay is superbly crafted.’

Judges’ comments from the 2023 Age Book of the Year award for nonfiction

Praise for Position Doubtful:

Australian Book Review

Praise for Position Doubtful:

New Internationalist

Praise for Position Doubtful:

Lisa Gorton, The Age

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Details

Format:Paperback

Size: 234mm × 153mm

Extent:272pp with 8 pages colour picture section

ISBN (13):9781925713251

RRP:$35.00

Pub date:1 Nov 2022

Rights Held: World

High-res cover:Download Image

AWARDS

2023 The Age Book of the Year for Nonfiction - Winner

CATEGORIES / tags

AUTHOR

Kim Mahood

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.

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We publish books that matter — narrative and literary nonfiction on important topics, and the best of local, international, and translated fiction.

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