Alexis Wright is arguably the most important writer in Australia. The 64-year-old Waanyi woman's internationally acclaimed novels The Swan Book and Carpentaria are windows into a spiritual worldview that is unique to Indigenous Australia. Her characters are dispossessed while plots swirl and time slips through the cracks of Western linearity. Booksellers once found the rich, carnival-esque Carpentaria 'too difficult' to stock, but eventually it received Australia's highest literary honour: the Miles Franklin Award.

Jerico Mandybur: What inspired you to write The Swan Book?
Alexis Wright: I had this idea that I wanted to write a book about swans, and it was at a time when there were a lot of backwards steps in government with Aboriginal people — under the Howard Government. Did I want to worry about what John Howard was going to do, or did I want to spend the next few years thinking about swans? I chose swans. The idea of swans in the book led me on a journey of research on swan species across the world and poetry about swans from across the world — Banjo Patterson wrote a really great poem about swans. I think we should be writing about big ideas as writers and we should be concerned about things that are happening in our world. For me that's climate change, so I use swans in the book as a story about climate change on a global scale. I wanted the book to not just be relevant in Australia. I wanted it to be a global novel.

Is that why you set it 100 years in the future?
100 years in the future the impact of climate change may be more obvious — we're not thinking about it enough and our Government's not thinking about it. So I just wanted to see what that might look like with what the scientists were telling us, to see how that might affect us as people in Australia and our relationships with people across the world. Global warming could mean far more people who are displaced than there are at the moment. You know — people who become landless, without countries anymore. It might be sometime in the future, there may well be a lot of people who are at sea and looking for a home. I wanted to look at that and how that might develop when people are competing for land, competing for resources, competing for food. And more people in the future may want to come to Australia. We don't know how to deal with the few people at the moment, let alone scores of people who might be looking at us in the future. We're not able to deal with people who are boat people or Aboriginal people in the right way or with any sense of justice. So the novel is based around all of those ideas.

What role does literature play in creating social change?
I think it creates a picture, images. It creates a story that people can understand and relate to. Our whole world is based on stories and I know that very well from my own background as an Aboriginal person. People understand and place a high value on stories; it's always been that way. More and more writers will take up the challenge to write about very contemporary issues like climate change and how we treat each other as people and whether we have a sense of decency or indecency towards other people.

Originally published in Oyster Magazine #105

I think it really does help to create a better understanding amongst people through the experience of reading. We don't all get to experience what it might be like out on a boat struggling for your life or what it might mean to be an Aboriginal person for the last two centuries, living with the consequences of government policies, so in a work of fiction you can read about those things and it helps to create understanding.

I've read you describe the Dreaming as a "collapsing of histories" and as "all times", as in the past, present and future are one and the same. How do you convey that in your work?
I do feel that in the Aboriginal world all times are important — all times become an everyday experience, from recent history, traditional history and beliefs. It's a worldview that encompasses ancient history and recent colonial history into present-day realities. I would say too that it encompasses the future, because all the work that I've ever done as an Aboriginal person amongst my own people is focused on the future as well — wanting to carry all times into the future. I've learnt a lot from writers across the world in trying to understand what I might do to express that. I've learnt from [Mexican novelist] Carlos Fuentes, and he would say that in Mexico all times are important and no time has ever been resolved. And I felt that it is exactly the same here in terms of Aboriginal people. That's what it means to live on this land and to look after it. All times are pretty much embedded in the culture, ancient beliefs, ceremonies and law, and colonial history — what's been resolved there? [Laughs]

Who did you most look up to as a kid growing up in Cloncurry, Queensland?
I looked up to my grandmother. She took me under her wing. From about three I would run away from my poor mother because I loved my grandmother so much. I would take off down to her place, which I think was about a kilometre away. I would just take off and people in Cloncurry must have seen me passing by, knew where I was going and probably kept an eye on me as I was passing their homes. She was a great storyteller and a great nurturing influence. She had a lot of grandchildren, but I decided she was for me and I was for her [laughs]. She took me on long walks along the river and in the bush and to the rubbish tip. A lot of people were living along the river in shacks; she'd stop and have a cup of tea with them and talk and tell stories. Her way of understanding the world and how it operated was very much from a cultural background, so you had to really imagine what she was saying. I think she taught me to imagine and to understand how the world operates in different ways, not just looking at what you can see.

How did it feel to be the first Aboriginal writer to win the Miles Franklin Award outright? It must have come with a great sense of responsibility.
It was 2007 and I accepted the award on the day that John Howard handed down the Northern Territory National Response [a set of measures introduced by the the Government to address allegations of child abuse and neglect in Aboriginal desert communities, also known as 'the intervention'], so I was one of the first people on the Indigenous side that opposed the intervention. I used the occasion to say what a backwards step it was. The following days I was getting text messages and emails from Aboriginal people across the country congratulating me for standing up and opposing what John Howard had just done. The Miles Franklin and other awards that year also set off a chain of events that lasted a number of years afterwards, where people wanted me across the country and the world to talk about Aboriginal issues, talk about Carpentaria. It just went on and on.

And how did you respond to that?
Initially I took up the challenge because I thought it was a good opportunity to be able to talk about Indigenous issues in places like India and China and Ireland and everywhere. I couldn't keep up with it in the end; the book just needs to go and do its own work now. I needed to get back to my own writing and back to feeling and being the person I was before Carpentaria was published. That's what I've tried to do over the past few years: to finish The Swan Book and to keep going with my other work. It's very important to have the experience of being a human being [laughs]. So that's the story of Carpentaria. It's been translated into a number of languages and published in different countries. Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, launched it in China. My translator, Professor Li Yao, tells me it's the book of choice for students in universities in China to study about Australia. That's a good result, I think!

How do you know when a story is finished?
I don't know. That's a hard question! Carpentaria took at least six years — two years thinking about how to write it and six years writing. The Swan Book as well. There's a lot of rewriting that I do, so it's a draft until it gets to a point where that's the end, and I'm not too sure how I get to that point. Everything on every page is as best as I can make it. It takes time. You have a lot of dreams about the book and you think about it all the time — getting to the point where you think the whole thing is fine. And then it's fine!