“This collection of essays, some previously published, on the enigma of cross-cultural consciousness is a master class on unravelling complex issues in fluently lucid prose … The compassionate intelligence of these essays underpins literature's redemptive arc.”
—Ian McFarlane, The Canberra Times
“Wandering with Intent rises beacon-like from turbulent ground. Characterized by rare grace and care, and often unfurling into beauty, Mahood’s essays are essential: anyone driven to understand how the faultlines between black and white Australia might shape us for the better should read this book immediately.”
—Quentin Sprague, author of The Stranger Artist, winner of the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction
“This is a rich and enjoyable collection of writings that combines Kim Mahood’s reflections on art and literature with her unique life experiences … Recollections of place and experience merge with descriptions of artistic process to conjure up not only visual imagery but also the depth and breadth of an artist’s life.”
—Margaret Snowdon, Readings
“[Wandering With Intent] is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how the Australian frontier is by no means a thing of the past.”
—Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, The Conversation
“Kim Mahood is one of our most interesting thinkers about the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.”
—Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers
“No one writes about walking the swaying tightrope between remote First Nations and non-Indigenous worlds better than Mahood … she has little time for apologetic hair-tearing, finding meaning in enduring personal relationships and environmental connection, deep respect for Country and suspicion of those outsiders, black and white, who claim to know what is best for community people. Every big-hearted city-dweller planning to visit or work in a remote community should be required to read Mahood. She is provocative and profound.”
—Michael Winkler, The Sydney Morning Herald
“There is a deep sense of searching in this collection; of wandering with the intent of trying to understand more deeply a place that Mahood describes as ‘central, necessary, cross-wired into my neural circuits and the geography of my body’… Although Mahood is mapping the country in her attempt to understand it, she is not trying to conquer the country, or to know it in a Western epistemological sense. Rather, she resists certainty and instead emphasises listening in order to understand the many truths and meanings that reside in places. Mahood’s work is an important contribution to a growing body of writing about the inland that is being shaped by women’s perspectives, both black and white, who are ‘less oppressed by the existential void, less impressed by the explorer narratives’ and bring a ‘very different sensibility, and one whose time has come’.”
—Sharryn Palmer, Australian Book Review
“She is clear-sighted, compassionate, readily amused but not easily fooled … Each essay is superbly crafted.”
—Judges’ comments from the 2023 Age Book of the Year award for nonfiction
Praise for Position Doubtful:
“Position Doubtful probes through layers of understanding of the people and land where she was born, across the Tanami Desert to the East Kimberley; it is rich with insights delivered with sensitivity and honesty.”
—Susan Lever, Australian Book Review
“Kim Mahood writes with insight and without condescension of the Indigenous community’s struggle to maintain traditions and cohesion in the face of marginal existence, poverty, health problems and rampant alcoholism. [Position Doubtful], despite containing a great deal of death and desolation, is a ringing affirmation of life in all its messy, muddled, half-resolved possibilities.”
—New Internationalist
“Sometimes lyrical, sometimes grumpy, sometimes elegiac, but always frank, Position Doubtful ranges across the wide meaning of country, extending past landscape into story, family, history, politics, geology, art, memory, and belonging. It is a vivid and memorable book.”
—Lisa Gorton, The Age
