Chapter 9 from Kim Mahood’s book of essays Wandering With Intent. This had previously been published in The Month;ly, December 2018 as At The Edge of Comprehension. This file is attached.
‘The Man in the Log’
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 lyrical 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.
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 nonfiction 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.
YOU CAN ALSO CHECKOUT THIS STORY TOLD BY PITJANJATJARRA WOMEN on commonground.org. See Below.
https://www.commonground.org.au/bedtime-stories/the-man-in-a-log
mparntwemedicalsociety.com 