Books
Nicolas Rothwell and Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson
Yilkari: A desert suite
Whenever I read a book by Nicolas Rothwell I have the unsettling feeling that I’m not living my life as clearly or as deeply as I should. Ditto when I read writers Rothwell reminds me of, such as W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin or Teju Cole. They are conjurers of the enigma, of the elusive, of the indescribable something that remains forever out of reach.
It’s somewhat of a relief, then, to find the Rothwellian narrator of Yilkari: A desert suite grapples with similar uncertainties. This “strange scholar of the northern highways” is our guide through the four linked stories in this collection: “Valentin”, “Dylan”, “Captain” and “Master”. He is not the central character. He is an observer, a European-born Australian who is gently chided when, on seeing a giant perentie, he thinks not of the reptile nor the land but of Leo Tolstoy’s attempt to converse with a lizard.
It’s not that he doesn’t know the country. He has explored the setting of the book – the vast Western Desert in Central Australia – many times. It’s that he’s not of the Country and never will be. Throughout his travels, notes one of his friends, “he always has to follow someone, be on someone’s trail … even Burke and Wills … As if they were still out there somewhere and he could catch them up.”
Rothwell, a two-time winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (nonfiction for Quicksilver in 2017 and fiction for Red Heaven in 2022), has co-authored Yilkari with his wife, Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, a Luritja-Pintupi woman from the Western Desert community of Papunya and a former member of the Northern Territory parliament who is an artist and writer.
How much of the book is in Anderson’s hand? In a note to the reader, the authors describe Yilkari as “the product of two minds”. Sentence by sentence the writing is Rothwell’s. His elegant prose is unmistakeable. The deep, lived connection to Country, and to Indigenous culture, comes from Anderson. She brings to the story an understanding that is beyond Rothwell’s reach, as it was beyond Burke and Wills’s.
This book is a series of conversations: between the narrator and various travelling companions and people they meet along the way. The Indigenous people, such as the titular Captain and Master, tell the hard, loving truths. “Truth’s all we’ve got to push the darkness back,’’ remarks Captain, a man from the Gulf country who was taken from his community as a child and raised in foster homes. The main character, throughout, is the country and its mysteries and secrets. It is a living presence, “full of wonders. Full of terrors” that will “only show itself to us clearly” when we move through it with “loving, trusting eyes”.
Here are two passages that I hope illustrate the elegance of Rothwell’s writing and the centrality of Anderson’s contribution. First, one of not-knowing. The narrator remembers travelling through the desert with his father, who he rarely saw, when he was nine. It is a beautiful story that reflects Rothwell’s own childhood. His father tells him he once thought of writing about the country, to “describe it truly, plunge into it and hear its heartbeat. I longed to do that, I’d have given anything to, but I couldn’t find the words.”
When his son asks why, his father replies, “I don’t think there are words for it. You could struggle all your life to find them and still fail … The words we have don’t reach far enough, they’re not from here, they’re not suited to this world, they can’t capture that coiled, tense feeling you get out here sometimes, the fear that comes so suddenly … I almost think you’d need new words, new ways of writing. Words for what’s invisible and what’s unseen.”
The knowing comes from the narrator’s wife, Narulya, when she tells him she knows why he wants to make a certain trip in the Great Sandy Desert. He asks her how she knows. “I just do. That’s the way it is for us. When we’re out on our own country our senses become sharper. We see through to the heart of life. We see what’s in people. Their hopes and fears. What’s true about them and what’s false. Things people don’t even know about themselves.”
The title, Yilkari, is a remote location in Western Australia, but it is also more than that. In the opening chapter, Valentin, a European composer raised in Siberia, flies to the desert to meet the narrator, who he first met in Berlin as the wall came down.
An Indigenous man they meet, Mr Giles, stretches his arms towards the sky and says, “Yilkari”. Valentin asks the meaning of this “strong, well-made word” and the narrator replies, “Many things.” Valentin asks for more and the narrator continues. “So, then: sky; Heaven; clarity; everlastingness and distance – and that’s just the beginning. Probably other, higher things as well.”
He is right about that. Mr Giles then says something about Yilkari the narrator did not know. Something important. As the narrator tells Valentin, “You could spend your whole life here and only touch the surface.” That’s how I feel about this book. Reading it once is just the beginning. •
Text Publishing, 288pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 26, 2025 as "Yilkari: A desert suite".
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