The Donkey and the Haze: Green Capitalism, Possession and the Authority of Country in Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

Australian governments have long told Aboriginal people that their future lies in self-sufficiency and economic independence, and the climate crisis has given that promise a green vocabulary. This essay reads Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy (2023) as a satire of the promise. Its target is not only the extractive mine of Wright's earlier fiction, which persists in the novel, but an Aboriginal green enterprise: Cause Man Steel's plan, devised without government money, to harness the continent's feral donkeys as transport for a world after fossil fuel. Read with Irene Watson's critique of native title and recognition, the scheme refuses assimilation while speaking the state's language of independence and reaching for a Native Title claim over animals. The novel does not, however, set Country against the market as a pure outside. In its final chapter Country pays for the scheme, settler business rushes to join it, non-owners hurry to make treaties recognizing Aboriginal sovereignty, and the narration lets market demand, Cause's breeding program and the ancestral mob's account of Country's power compete as explanations. The essay's claim, tested against these passages and against the ancestors' choice of Cause, is that Praiseworthy stages Country absorbing the market while refusing to let any possession, by the state, by Cause or by the market, settle what Country means. It names this structure absorptive sovereignty and shows what the concept reveals: that in Wright's satire even recognition arrives as a commodity rush, and that the authority it answers to is Country's own.