Take Power Like This Old Man Here Alexis Wright

Why Reading Alexis Wright Feels Like Learning to Walk Again

I remember the first time I actually sat down with what Wright wrote about power and found myself completely lost. Not in a bad way, just in the way you get lost when someone hands you a map drawn in a language you never bothered learning. The piece Take Power Like This Old Man Here Alexis Wright isn't a manifesto you can skim. It's structured more like a dream sequence made of political theory, personal memory, and something that looks like grief on the page but reads as strategy. What makes this particular work different from her novels is the compression. In Carpentaria or The Swan Book, Wright has room to breathe, to let you live inside a landscape. Here, every sentence is doing triple duty. She's talking about the concept of power itself, about what it means for an Indigenous person to hold it, and about the kind of power that refuses to look like colonial power in the first place. That's not an easy balancing act to pull off, and she does it without warning the reader that she's about to.

What Is Take Power Like This Old Man Here Alexis Wright Actually About

At its core the essay wrestles with a question most Western political theory sidesteps entirely: what does sovereignty look like when it comes from Country rather than from the state? Wright doesn't give you a neat definition. She lets the idea unfold through fragments, through imagery of elders, through scenes that feel almost hallucinatory. The title itself is worth sitting with. "Take power like this old man here" is not a call to seize control in the conventional sense. It's about occupying power in a way that already existed before the boundary lines were drawn. I found myself going back to the same passages three or four times, trying to pin down exactly what she meant by the kind of power she was describing. You can't pin it down. That's the point. She's writing against the idea that power must be legible to the colonial gaze in order to count as real. If you read it expecting a step-by-step political framework, you'll finish it frustrated. If you let it do its work, which is to say if you read it slowly and allow yourself to be uncomfortable, it starts to make a different kind of sense. The essay sits somewhere between criticism and creative non-fiction and refuses to pick a lane. Wright has said in interviews that she writes to unsettle, and that's exactly what's happening on every page here.

How to Actually Read It Without Glazing Over

Don't read it straight through on your commute. That would be a waste. Read it in sections, maybe a page or two at a time, and then stop and think about what just happened. Wright's prose moves in pulses, and if you keep pushing forward without pausing, you'll miss the moments where the meaning shifts. I kept a notebook. Most of what I wrote in it didn't end up useful, but the act of writing forced me to slow down enough to actually absorb what was on the page. After a few sessions I started noticing a pattern in how she builds her argument. She will set up a conventional idea of power, let you settle into that assumption, and then quietly pull the rug out from under it by introducing an Indigenous concept that reframes everything. That structure is consistent across the piece, even though she never signals when she's doing it. One specific problem I hit was trying to map every reference to real people and places. There are so many and they're woven in without explanation. I spent an entire afternoon researching one paragraph and ended up nowhere. The workaround was simple: I stopped treating the references as puzzles to solve and started reading them as emotional anchors instead. Wright isn't testing your knowledge of Australian Indigenous geography. She's asking you to feel your way through the text. That shifted everything.

Also, reading the piece alongside her earlier essays, particularly the ones collected in The Big Time, helps a lot. She's repeating herself in a deliberate way, circling back to the same ideas from different angles. When you know the earlier work, the echoes in this essay become much clearer.

What Wright Gets Right That Most Critics Miss

The thing most people don't pick up on is that Wright is actually offering a methodology disguised as literature. The piece is not just commenting on power, it's demonstrating an alternative way of thinking about governance, authority, and belonging. She does this by refusing linear argumentation. Western academia demands you state your thesis upfront and then prove it. Wright gives you the proof first and makes you work backward to understand the thesis. That's not being difficult for its own sake. It's a formal choice that mirrors the content. She's showing you, through form, how Indigenous ways of knowing operate differently from Western ways of knowing. Another nuance that gets overlooked is the gender dynamic in the essay. The "old man" in the title isn't just a random figure. Wright is invoking a specific kind of elder authority, one that carries weight precisely because it doesn't need to announce itself. This is a deliberate counter to the loud, performative masculinity that dominates so much of mainstream political discourse. It's subtle but it's there throughout the entire piece, and it changes how you read every scene involving authority figures. There's also the question of what Wright considers success in this essay. She's not arguing that Indigenous people should replicate colonial structures of power. She's arguing that those structures are inadequate for the task of decolonization and that trying to fit Indigenous sovereignty into them only reproduces the same violence. The alternative she points toward is harder to define, which is probably why it doesn't get enough attention. It doesn't make for a clean policy paper.

The Parts That Don't Work and Who Should Skip It

This isn't a perfect piece. Wright's abstraction can tip into obscurity, and if you're coming in without any context about Indigenous Australian politics or the history of land rights disputes, some sections will feel impenetrable. The essay assumes you're already somewhat familiar with the terrain. That's a real limitation. It also hasn't aged perfectly in every respect, and some of the specific political references feel dated now. The underlying argument is still sound, but the examples have a 1990s sensibility that won't land for every reader. If you're looking for a straightforward activist guide or a practical manual for political organizing, this is the wrong text. Wright isn't writing that. She's writing something closer to a philosophical provocation, and that's a different genre entirely. For what she's attempting, it works. Just go in with the right expectations. The closest alternative if you want something more accessible in the same vein would be Tony Birch's writing on Indigenous sovereignty, or Jackie Huggins' historical work, which makes similar arguments about power and self-determination but grounds them in more conventional historical narrative. Neither does what Wright does, which is use form itself as the argument.

Take Power Like This Old Man Here Alexis Wright remains one of the most important pieces of writing on Indigenous power relations in Australia, not because it gives you answers but because it forces you to ask better questions. The fact that it resists easy consumption is not a bug. It's the whole point.