1
Q
- Norm has been at sea for forty days and nights with Hope and Bala.
- Norm decides that he needs to take care of Bala because Hope is afraid of the sea and the night
sky. - Norm lands the boat on where Desperance should be but there’s nothing left. The town has
been washed away by the floods. - He walks towards where the town once was with Bala on his shoulders, planning where he will
rebuild his home. - Hope returns to the boat to go and look for Will, helped on her way by the gropers.
A
Chapter 14: Coming back
2
Q
- Will looks down at Desperance and thinks about the fruit bats. The town is flooding as a result of the storm.
- He takes refuge in the pub where he finds Loydie Smith talking to his mermaid.
- He takes refuge in the upper room and waits for the waters to rise. He remembers things from his childhood. He remembers the people who are important for him: Joseph, Norm, Fishman,
Hope, Bala, Elias. - He is swept away by the flood water and is sent to a floating island of rubbish which stars to
fall apart.
A
Chapter 13: The wash
3
Q
- Mozzie fears for Angel’s life and he tells his men to take her to a town in the South.
- Mozzie believes that everything started to go wrong when Elias left the town and the mine arrived. He believes that Bruiser killed Gordie because he knew too much. He tells Will that
Truthful hanged himself. - Two of Mozzie’s men bring Elias’s boat and they put the guards’ bodies in it and anchor it in
the middle of the lagoon. They take the bodies of the Aboriginal boys to a cave with an
underground sea inside it. They place the bodies in canoes and let them go. - They hear helicopters are looking for them.
- Will says he is leaving meanwhile the police arrest the boys who were taking Angel to the South.
She decides to hitchhike but she is picked up by a truck and disappears.
A
Chapter 12: About sending letters
4
Q
- Mozzie fears for Angel’s life and he tells his men to take her to a town in the South.
- Mozzie believes that everything started to go wrong when Elias left the town and the mine arrived. He believes that Bruiser killed Gordie because he knew too much. He tells Will that
Truthful hanged himself. - Two of Mozzie’s men bring Elias’s boat and they put the guards’ bodies in it and anchor it in
the middle of the lagoon. They take the bodies of the Aboriginal boys to a cave with an
underground sea inside it. They place the bodies in canoes and let them go. - They hear helicopters are looking for them.
- Will says he is leaving meanwhile the police arrest the boys who were taking Angel to the South.
She decides to hitchhike but she is picked up by a truck and disappears.
A
Chapter 12: About sending letters
5
Q
- The narrative shifts to Fishman who left on the same day as Norm.
- 2 years previously, Fishman had helped Will escape from Desperance after he has damaged the
pipeline which the mine had built to carry the ore from the mine to the coast. - The mine gave Joseph Midnight a new house but he sent Hope and Bala away in Elias’s boat
because he feared for their safety and knew that Will would look after them. - When Will turns up, he realises that Elias’s body was a trap set up by the mine to catch him. He is driven by Midnight to an island made of rubbish and when the storm turns up he then wakes up tied up in a helicopter with Hope. She is pushed out of the helicopter and he watches her
fall. - Will is taken to the mine where he is spotted by two Fisherman’s men. Fisherman sends a rescue
party who starts a fire, Will wants to kill the guards and is reluctant to leave. The 2 guards are killed as they chase after Will. A massive explosion destroys the mine
A
Chapter 11: The Mine
6
Q
- The narrative returns to Desperance with a description of the arrival of the wet season, a time of year when strange things happen in the town.
- Three young Aboriginal boys are arrested for Gordie’s murder which happened on the night Norm left with Elias’s body.
- The Mayor Bruiser beats the boys up but is stopped by Truthful who threatens him with a gun.
- Kevin is beaten up by a group of young, white-hooded men. He is tortured and dragged along
with their car. Girlie finds him seriously injured and he is taken to hospital. - Truthful has a disturbing dream with grey-skinned Aboriginal people and when he goes back to the cell, he discovers the three boys have hanged themselves. He unties them and tends to their
dead bodies tenderly, bringing them food several times a day. - Bruiser realises what has happened and he wants to cover up the boys’ suicide and blame
Truthful. None of the town people oppose his decision.
A
Chapter 10: The giant in the cloak
7
Q
- Norm is lost in the spirit world when he realises that a small boy is trying to move his boat. At first he thinks he is Will.
- The child tells him his name is Bala and that his father is called Will.
- Norm thinks about Angel again and blames her for the way their children turned out.
- A storm arrives and Norm runs away from the flood water accompanied by the spirit people who
put him in his boat and launch him on the river, flowing towards the sea. - He rescues Bala and he tells him that the bad men took his mother and that she fell from the
sky. - Norm concludes that Elias helped him find his grandson.
A
Chapter 9: Bala, the child of Hope
8
Q
- Norm decides to take Elias’s body to the gropers’ place to lay him to rest. He holds a conversation with Elias’s body as he rows him out to sea.
- Gropers come to meet the boat as they talk about Angel and watch a manta ray.
- He puts Elias in the water and the fish take him away.
- Norm is now alone in his boat, he has a series of troubling dreams, is unable to catch any fish
and is attacked by people from the spirit world. - He lands on a beach covered in dead fish.
- During the night, he is visited by the devil woman Gardajala who tries to seduce him.
A
Chapter 8: Norm’s responsibility
9
Q
epic
A
a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants
A long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in adventures forming an organic whole through their relation to a central heroic figure and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race.
— Harmon & Holman (1999)[12]
An attempt to delineate ten main characteristics of an epic:[12]
Begins in medias res (“in the thick of things”).
The setting is vast, covering many nations, the world or the universe.
Begins with an invocation to a muse (epic invocation).
Begins with a statement of the theme.
Includes the use of epithets.
Contains long lists, called an epic catalogue.
Features long and formal speeches.
Shows divine intervention in human affairs.
Features heroes that embody the values of the civilization.
Often features the tragic hero’s descent into the underworld or hell.
The hero generally participates in a cyclical journey or quest, faces adversaries that try to defeat him in his journey and returns home significantly transformed by his journey. The epic hero illustrates traits, performs deeds, and exemplifies certain morals that are valued by the society the epic originates from. Many epic heroes are recurring characters in the legends of their native cultures.
10
Q
- Norm believes some sort of supernatural power helps him restore the fish and he believes his workshop stores other people’s memories.
- Norm thinks about Angel.
- He finds Elias’s body and screams: his three daughters come to see what’s happening. They set
fire to tyres with the intention of burning the body but Norm stops them because Truthful arrives to find out why there is a fire and he ends up sleeping with Girlie.
A
Chapter 7: Something about the Phantom Family
11
Q
- Will is still at the lagoon. He went into hiding after being accused of sabotaging the development of the mining industry.
- He thinks Elias couldn’t have made it on his own and he has been murdered and his body tied up to the boat.
- A helicopter appears and the passenger in it tries to shoot Will with a rifle. Will hides in the lagoon when he is saved by the arrival of a storm.
- Will takes Elias’s body out of the lagoon and carries the body away with him. Will takes shelter in a cave with Aboriginal paintings in it.
- The Irish priest, Father Danny turns up and is stopped by the men from the helicopter who want to know where he is going. The men slash Father Danny’s tyres before leaving. Will comes out of hiding and Father Danny drives him and Elias’s body to Desperance. Will takes Elias’s body to his father’s fish-preserving workshop. Will leaves his body in the workshop for Norm to find and rows out to sea in search of Hope and Bala.
A
Chapter 6: Knowing Fish
12
Q
- The story shifts from Norm to Mozzie Fishman and his zealots who drive around the country in a thirty-three-car procession.
- Mozzie is afraid of the sea but is able to detect water inland.
- He returns to Desperance every year at the start of the wet season.
- Will Phantom is traveling in Mozzie’s car.
- The convoy arrives at a lagoon where they find Elias’s dead body sitting in a boat in the middle
of the lagoon. - The other men leave but Will stays behind.
- Mozzie realises that Norm is waiting for Will to come home and remembers how Will left his
family and moved Eastside when he married Hope. He thinks about that time when Norm was arrested for murdering one of the Eastsiders and how the white judge eventually dismissed the case.
A
Chapter 5: Mozzie Fishman
13
Q
- Elias leaves the town in his boat: Norm reflects on the time he used to spend at sea with Elias.
- The arrival of the mine has changed things in Desperance: the new technology is blamed for
stealing people’s jobs and sending them elsewhere. - Norm’s youngest son Kevin takes a job in the mine and is brain-damaged in an accident on his
first day. - Kevin tries to attack Norm with a knife.
- Later a group of young white men try to run over Kevin but his sisters defend him and get into
a fight using iron bars and a rifle.
A
Chapter 4: Number One House
14
Q
- Cyclone at sea = all the clocks stop working
- The inhabitants go down the water’s edge and see a man with long white hair and a beard
walking out of the sea. - Several embedded stories (a story within a story) follow
- 1) Joseph Midnight claims to belong to a tribe that does not exist and is in league with the
mining company. He is thought to be responsible for the wild pigs overturning the Aboriginal
camps. - 2) the narrator then moves to the Aboriginal inhabitants’ attempts to get their children, to find
out the white secrets which they believe are hidden in their schoolbooks. - 3) state governor’s attempt to change the town’s name to Masterton which is fiercely resisted
by the Desperanians. - 4) the narrator returns to talking about the man from the sea. Truthful, the local policeman, takes
charge. - Captain Nicoli Finn, an old man keeping watch of the coastline decides to call the man Elias
Smith. - Elias is chosen to be the town guard but there are a series of mysterious fires which are blamed on him so he is asked to leave.
A
Chapter 3: Elias Smith comes… and goes
15
Q
- Centered on Norm’s wife: Angel Day.
- Describes how she built her house and how Norm went to sea for five years (in protest for where
she chose to build it or because he didn’t want to help her) - Narrates her trip to the rubbish dump where she finds an old clock and a statue of the Virgin
Mary which results in a fight with the Aboriginal women. - Her son Will starts a fire to stop the fighting. The investigation on the origin of the fire is
unsuccessful. - During the night, the Aboriginal families who are not part of the Phantom family decide to settle
on the other side of the dump giving rise to two Aboriginal communities: the Eastsiders and the
Westsiders. - Norm is considered to be the leader of the Aboriginal community by the white people of Uptown
so the delegation sets off to see him. They end up in a confrontation with Angel Day
A
Chapter 2: Angel Day
16
Q
- Focuses on the land
- Epigraph: existence of an Aboriginal story about the history of Australia. The story opens with a
description of how the ancestral serpent formed the country before withdrawing underground,
where it continues to live. - Normal Phantom is introduced
- Description of how the white inhabitants’ ceremony to rename the river is ruined by a dust
storm.
A
Chapter 1: From Time Immemorial
17
Q
narrative chronology, topography… time and space?
A
Rather than having a linear plot with chapters that are linked chronologically, Carpentaria advances through a series of stories about the different characters and significant events. This episodic structure (=allows the audience to keep watching or reading, even if they have missed an episode) is characteristic of oral traditions in which themes tend to be more important than the plot and the episodes are very often interchangeable. It is also reminiscent of how memory works, with one thought leading to another with the links between them clear only to the person whose thoughts they are.
