A public lecture presented by Kim Mahood and chaired by Professor Helen Ennis, Director, SOA Centre for Art History and Art Theory as part of the SLLL Reading Across Borders Series

Through the vehicle of her decades-long relationship to a remote tract of desert in north-west Australia, and the metaphor of the map, Kim Mahood explores the different ways in which white and Aboriginal Australians conceptualise, represent and live in country that is at once mythic and ordinary. Position Doubtful is the story of a love affair between a person and a place, and how a landscape shapes the psyches of the people who live in it.

The book will be published by Scribe in 2016.

Kim Mahood is a writer and artist based in Wamboin near Canberra. She grew up in Central Australia, and since the 1990s has returned regularly to work with the Aboriginal people of the region on cultural and environmental mapping, Indigenous Ranger programs, and major exhibitions including the Canning Stock Route Art Project and We Don’t Need a Map.

In 2014 she was the H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University, and is currently a visiting fellow in the School of Art.