Wandering with Intent

- Blurb -

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. ' 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 nonfictionPraise 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. ' -Susan Lever, Australian Book ReviewPraise 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