Traces of Territory: Alexis Wright's Grog War (1997)

Abstract

Traces of Territory:Alexis Wright's Grog War (1997) Geoff Rodoreda (bio) I have heard white people say cynically, "We couldn't clean them up with poison and guns, but you watch, we'll do it with the grog." —Rev. Jim Downing This quotation, which appears as an epigraph on the title page of part 1 of Alexis Wright's 1997 book Grog War, immediately frames the problems associated with alcohol in Aboriginal communities as belonging to the legacies of colonialism. Grog is not a passive killer. Poison and guns were killers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries; nowadays, alcohol is being used to destroy Aboriginal people, families, and whole communities. Grog is contextualized here, at the beginning of Wright's narrative, as an active force in the continuing destruction of communities, a legacy of colonial control and oppression. And if grog is a legacy of colonialism, then both the colonizer and the colonized are compelled to address its destructive force in postcolonial times. A whole community response is needed to address this historical, structural, and social problem. There is no attempt here either to reinforce victimhood or to elude responsibility in relation to the misuse of alcohol. On the contrary, Grog War tells the story of an Aboriginal community's preparedness to face up to the problems of alcohol abuse, to take initiative in working toward solutions, and to encourage a shared sense of responsibility for managing misuse in one Northern Territory town. Grog War, published in the same year as Wright's first novel, Plains of Promise, is principally a work of nonfiction, although two fictional vignettes are woven into the narrative in order to tell the story of a family "whose lives are affected by grog" but who "preferred not to be identified in the book" (Wright, Grog ix). In essence, Grog War documents the Tennant Creek–based, Aboriginal-owned Julalikari Council's struggle through the 1980s and 1990s to deal with problems associated with the use and abuse of alcohol in the town of Tennant Creek. Its specific focus, however, is the Julalikari Council's battle to restrict alcohol sales in the town, against the wishes of the white-dominated Tennant Creek council, hoteliers, and other power brokers. The story climaxes in a courtroom-drama-like victory for the Julalikari Council in a hearing before the Northern Territory Liquor Commission: the commission agrees to impose tougher restrictions on the sale of alcohol in Tennant Creek as part of a package of measures aimed at reducing the effects of alcohol abuse. For Michele Grossman, Grog War is a "groundbreaking materialist study of the ways in which the politics of the drink itself are embedded in and sustained by the uneven structures [End Page 67] of power and polity in local Australian contexts" (82). However, Wright embeds this contemporary story of struggle—the "grog war" of the book's title—within the historical story of the colonization of Warumungu land in and around Tennant Creek. Drawing on historical research, government documentation, newspaper reportage, and interviews with community members, Wright tells Tennant Creek's story from an Aboriginal perspective. Although Grog War is about one Aboriginal community organization's resourcefulness and perseverance to overcome racism and white indifference in one remote town, it can also be read as an allegory for Indigenous campaigning across Australia in an ongoing struggle for community improvements at a local level.1 Grog War defies easy classification as a work of literature. It is neither, in its entirety, scholarly-analytical nor journalistic nonfiction; it is neither a novel nor "testimonial fiction" or life writing, which was the key storytelling genre of Aboriginal writers at this time (Heiss and Minter, "Aboriginal" 7). Instead, the book conglomerates all of the above writing modes and their associated stylistics to reveal "the great range" of Wright's writing (Tregenza 78). Although Wright is named as the author, the Julalikari Council is identified as retaining copyright over the text. In an interview, Wright explains that she wrote what the Julalikari Council wanted her to write and followed a set of protocols because she was not writing on or about her own traditional country (see Vernay 120). While...