Kim Mahood: Craft for a Dry Lake. Anchor, 2000. Online musings about Kim Mahood’s memoir Craft for a Dry Lake by Angelika Fremd and Ruark Lewis They say fathers invent daughters, and daughters invent father’s. The father I invented held my life in thrall for years, Kim Mahood writes in the last pages of her memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, which deals primarily with Mahood’s relationship with her father. What held her ‘in thrall’ for much of her life was the passion she and her father shared for the landscape of the Outback as well as art. Where the father chose country over his art, the daughter chose art which portrays the country. Mahood was compelled to write this book because of her father’s tragic death, compelled to retrace his steps through the Outback, using his journals to guide her. As she pursues her father’s memory in outback locales such as Mongrel Downs, the station her family had once owned, the memory of her father recedes. She cannot see its true outline for the shadow cast by her own presence. The father’s shadow continues to fall on her until she is compelled to set herself free. Angelika Fremd What occurs immediately on reading Mahood’s memoir is the question of what it is to read. Here the poetic compositions are slab-like constructions woven into the viewer/reader through animated time phases and time voices. A lot of what Mahood has written is remarkable writing, a virtuoso performance that has a speed that does not lie still. Within these alternating reflections a personal philosophy is also mapped out. This might address those of us who have been spectators to events and developments in that remote place. The writer has taken us into her immediate personal terrain of her interior dialogue and the multifaceted musing of a visual artist and memory mapper. These musings are forgiven their sheer abstract character because they are existentially connected to her country. This is a shared place. The Tanami Desert, a vast semi-arid area that lies north west of the MacDonnell Ranges and Alice Springs. This country is vast in comparison to European landscapes. Ruark Lewis Kim Mahood’s mappings of Outback landscapes and characters in her memoir Craft for a Dry Lake bring a new and original prose palette into being. This is an extraordinary book written by a visual artist. A filigree of images radiates from its pages. Tracings of memories and place are seamlessly woven into the texture of the prose. These tracings have an unfamiliar ring but are at the same time familiar. As Mahood follows in the footsteps of her father in an attempt to lay his ghost to rest present and past intermingle. Her emerging consciousness, the consciousness of the artist observing a landscape and a people she will make manifest, when the images are residues in the mind’s eye, is shown to separate from the consciousness of the solitary, extroverted father who embodies a version of the Outback myth. Angelika Fremd Mahood has written a double biography that portrays the father and the daughter, the family psyche one generation apart. The artist/pastoralist/stock inspector Mahood, emerges from the memory of sketch books and personal myths of excessive drinking and from the hardship and toughness that was the development of their family’s pastoral lease. The Tanami Station lease was a late ‘contract’ taken up relatively recently in the 1960’s. This was just prior to the new political movement that achieved substantial Aboriginal Lands Rights in this territory. Mahood does not draw a significant political comment in this documentation of white surveyance and pastoral exploitation, though in a subtle way her recording of both colonial trespass, and the commercial expansionism that her family initiated is masterly reflected and is coherently explained here. Ruark Lewis Having walked in her father’s steps, freed herself from his psychic intrusions, and lain his ghost to rest, Mahood, at the end of the book, attempts to find a place for herself among the multitude of trajectories and threads she has explored. Of her place she says, As I travel through the country I discover that this is not my country, nor is it my father’s country. But my track, my story travels through it and so does his. They make up part of the pattern of the country. By coming back I reinvoke them. At all the points of intersection I feel the other journeys, ancestral, contemporary, historic, imaginary. They are all under my skin. With this book Kim Mahood has etched her own personal songlines into the Outback landscape. Angelika Fremd

Reviewed by Angelika Fremd and Ruark Lewis, 17 April 2002