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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
In Craft for a Dry Lake, Kim Mahood embarks on an extraordinary journey to her heartland - the outback of her youth. Compelled to revisit the haunts of her childhood by the tragic death of her father, Kim seeks to lay his ghost to rest, but instead finds herself faced with many of her own. Her adventures are interwoven with the echoes of childhood memories and peopled by an intriguing cast of outback characters. At times the lines between past and present become blurred as a daughter travels in the footsteps of her father, searching for a sense of place in this landscape she once called home. (Source: Trove)
Notes
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Dedication: To my father, whose death made the book necessary.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Position Doubtful by Kim Mahood : Lives of the Desert Mapped on an Artist's Skin
2016
single work
review
— Appears in: Brisbane Times , 14 October 2016;
— Review of Craft for a Dry Lake 2000 single work autobiography 'Kim Mahood, an artist who writes exceptionally well, is fond of the expression "paying attention". As is fitting. In her Craft for a Dry Lake (2000), a prize-winning memoir about growing up on a cattle station called Mongrel Downs, at the western edge of the Tanami Desert in northern Australia, she was paying attention to the way her father, the "outback", and the Aboriginal people shaped her. ...' -
Seeing the Cosmos : Ross Gibson’s ‘Simultaneous Living Map’
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015; 'In its reading of the journals of William Dawes, Ross Gibson’s 26 Views of the Starburst World offers a dynamic vision of the world. His entry into the landscape of Sydney Cove is characterised by and constructed according to the multiple ‘views’ of his title, each of which interrelate in various, shifting ways to coalesce into a narrative. The version of place which emerges is both strange and beautiful, challenging constructs of nation which depend on notions of locality and ‘rootedness’. Gibson’s text thus prompts questions of critical practice before place. What can be achieved in taking up a fragmented writing style? This paper investigates the manner in which Gibson reconstructs concepts of place and space in order to challenge contemporary understandings of the Australian nation. It questions whether or not a similar vision of place can be applied in other contexts, and examines the manner in which place comes to be doubled over in the act of reading.' (Publication abstract) -
y
Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir
London
:
Palgrave Macmillan
,
2015
12015783
2015
multi chapter work
criticism
'Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir traces the grief process through the lives of contemporary women writers to show how its complex, multi-layered nature can encourage us towards new understandings of loss.' (Publication summary)
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Reading Australia from Distant Shores
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 28 no. 1 2014; (p. 18-22, 257) 'A a doctoral candidate working in Australian Studies, Wawrzinek shares the difficulty to find quality Australian literature in Europe, particularly in Paris and in Berlin. With the increasing availability of ebooks via download,she is hoping that it will become easier to include lesser known Australian writers on reading lists in the European university and to access material that otherwise takes months to arrive via conventional methods of transportation. She says a sustained, ongoing program to support Australian authors, to speak about their work, and to engage in collaborative programs with European scholars and artists is needed to show the world that Australia is not just about Kangaroos and beautiful beaches.' (Publication summary) -
The Poetics of Ambivalence : A Postcolonial Reading of Kim Mahood's Craft for a Dry Lake
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 27 no. 2 2013; (p. 213-218) 'Horakova talks about Kim Mahood's memoir "Craft for a Dry Lake," one of the most complex representations of the Australian Outback, one that offers a "new history of the frontier." Framed as a homecoming journey to the Tanami Desert northwest of Alice Springs alter her lather's death in a helicopter crash, Mahood's narrative begins as a biography of her parents. She reflects on a childhood spent on the homestead among her family and both Aboriginal and white staff, and her eventual departure to the city in order to pursue an education and later her artistic career. Among other things, Horakova discusses the memoir's complexity consists in its ability to simultaneously build upon and write back to several well-established literary traditions. ' (Publication abstract)
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Memories of Earth (Somewhere Specific)
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: Dotlit : The Online Journal of Creative Writing , August vol. 4 no. 1 2003;
— Review of Craft for a Dry Lake 2000 single work autobiography -
Kim Mahood's Evolving Geographies
2007
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , August no. 42 2007;
— Review of Craft for a Dry Lake 2000 single work autobiography ; Blow-Ins on the Cold Desert Wind 2007 single work essay -
Sense of Place
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 13 May 2000; (p. 18)
— Review of Craft for a Dry Lake 2000 single work autobiography ; Into the Wadi 2000 single work autobiography -
Living at the Centre
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , October vol. 10 no. 8 2000; (p. 36-37)
— Review of Craft for a Dry Lake 2000 single work autobiography -
Enigmatic Memoir
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 225 2000; (p. 10-11)
— Review of Craft for a Dry Lake 2000 single work autobiography -
A Track Winding Back
2003
single work
essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 62 no. 4 2003; (p. 121-125) 'Mahood explores the relationship between physical and metaphorical journeys in the light of her return to where she grew up.' -- Editor's note, p.121 -
Red Ochre in the Moonlight : Cultural Self-Inscription in Kim Mahood's Craft for a Dry Lake
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Cultural Interfaces 2004; (p. 41-48) Balakrishnan argues that, in Craft for a Dry Lake, Kim Mahood 'turns away from the myth of the outback associated with her father and her childhood idealisation of it, and envisions a syncretic identity that partakes of both the white settler and Aboriginal traditions that constitute her heritage. Secondly, the notion of the child as an emblem of the self that remains deep within the individual recurs, so the autobiographical narration of childhood becomes a way of giving meaning to the self. Mahood, in Craft for a Dry Lake negotiates between these versions of subjectivity in her quest for authentic, albeit syncretic selfhood.' -
Intimate Strangers : Contemporary Australian Travel Writing, the Semiotics of Empathy, and the Therapeutics of Race
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Crossings : Bulletin of the International Australian Studies Association , vol. 9 no. 3 2004;
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 85 2005; (p. 69-81, notes 208-209) 'Increasingly, domestic white Australian travel narratives mobilise encounters with Aboriginality as contexts for political and ethical critiques of white hegemony that, in turn, reflect different manifestations of sympathetic white liberal discourses of reconciliation.... This paper focuses on how these narratives represent performances of a white Australian postcolonial sensibility towards Aboriginality that defines itself through a semiotics of empathy ... for Aboriginality, and how the co-ordinates of this semiotics shifted over the 1990s in response to movements in the Australian public sphere vis-à-vis the politics and ethics of reconciliation.' (Introduction) -
Kim Mahood's Craft for a Dry Lake: A Work in Progress
2006
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 66 no. 1 2006; (p. 91-105) -
Literature in the Arid Zone
2007
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Littoral Zone : Australian Contexts and Their Writers 2007; (p. 70-92) This chapter surveys and assesses from an ecocentric perspective some representative literary portrayals of the Australian deserts. Generally, it contrasts works that portray the desert as an alien, hostile, and undifferentiated void with works that recognise and value the biological particularities of specific desert places. It explores the literature of three dominant cultural orientations to the deserts: pastoralism, mining, and traversal. It concludes with a consideration of several multi-voiced and/or multi-genred bioregionally informed works that suggests fruitful directions for more ecocentric literary approaches. (abstract taken from The Littoral Zone)
Awards
- 2001 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Non-Fiction
Last amended 29 Jun 2015 15:57:51
Settings:
- Tanami Desert, Central Northern Territory, Northern Territory,
- Alice Springs, Southern Northern Territory, Northern Territory,
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