Kim Mahood in conversation

Kim Mahood grew up in the 1950s and 60s on Mongrel Downs, a cattle station on the edge of the Tanami Desert. Much has changed in those parts in recent years: the land has been handed back to the traditional owners; the mining companies have arrived; Aboriginal art has flourished. Kim, now a writer and artist, still returns every year. Her new book, Wandering with Intent, is a collection of essays she describes as ‘the writer’s equivalent of hunting and gathering… a product of wandering among the contradictions of the cross-cultural world I have chosen to inhabit…’ It involves what she refers to as ground-truthing: ‘My version of that,’ she writes, ‘begins with the physical attributes of place, and moves onto what has happened there. It puts people into place, which brings into play science, stories, husbandry, history, metaphor, and myth. This form of mapping has been called various things — co-mapping, cross-cultural mapping, counter-mapping, radical cartography. The wordsmith in me likes the flamboyant suggestiveness of radical cartography, but my bullshit detector finds it pretentious. There’s nothing radical about what I do. The only surprising thing about it is that it hasn’t been done before.’ Kim is non-Indigenous herself, but grew up surrounded by First Nations people. A multi-award winning author, she writes with a refreshing honesty about important political, social and cultural issues, bringing a strong sense of irony and humour into difficult places, her bullshit detector always close by.