In the early stages of drafting her book Edenglassie, Melissa Lucashenko had a “strange kind of spiritual experience”. She was in her bed in an ordinary house in Brisbane, on an ordinary night. “I couldn’t tell you if I was asleep or awake, but I had this odd visitation,” she says “It felt as if something was coming up out of the earth, as though I was receiving a message from the ancestors and I was being instructed in how the book had to bring people together. It left me with the knowledge that it had to be about possibility as much as the past.”
Lucashenko’s book arrives at a tumultuous time in Indigenous history, into a country divided as we head to the voice to parliament referendum. Her demeanour on the subject is matter-of-fact and to the point: “You can’t give blackfellas anything, even when it’s nothing. That’s the lesson of the referendum, if you ask me.”
The author says she will be voting yes, but “the referendum demonstrates exactly why I wrote the book. Australia urgently needs to finish its unfinished business with treaty. And until it does, it will be exactly what Xavier Herbert said – not a nation but a community of thieves.”
In Lucashenko’s seven books, the ancestors are never far away; the past and the present intertwined in a dance in time. In Mullumbimby (2013) there are birds bringing messages, ancient voices on the wind.
There has always been a spiritual dimension, a deep knowledge of vast Aboriginal lore – “I’ve been learning the culture since I was a teenager” – and a supernatural sense of the connectedness of the natural world – “It’s always there, the natural world, the sky country.”
Lucashenko also dwells in difficult terrain, writing her truth, facing what she has described as a kind of “internal excavation”. “It is about carving out space for my own Aboriginal voice … and pushing aside those other thoughts and intrusive internally racist ideas,” she told SBS.
Turning herself inside out takes a toll – and there were added pressures with the timing of writing Edenglassie. Lucashenko “technically” became homeless and wrote while couch-surfing.
“The bloody book … it saw flood and fire and pestilence. The fires of 2019, the bloody pandemic and then of course the terrible floods … The floods in Brisbane made one of my children homeless. And then we handed over our home to her because of the trauma that she went through, almost drowning in the flood. I had to kind of couch-surf … I think it was about three months probably. And so that happened during the bloody course of the book.
“I got to the end of writing this and I just thought, ‘I have no idea how the hell I managed to write that book’. You know it is a big, complicated book and if I knew what it was going to cost to write it, I don’t know that I would have started it. But it’s done.”
Lucashenko won the 2019 Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, with the novel Too Much Lip, catapulting her into upper echelons of literary endeavour. “It was stunning” she says, “my first thought was, ‘well, I can just go away and relax now because I’ve hit the jackpot so to speak, there is nothing left to prove’. As it turns out, I had at least another book in me.”
Too Much Lip is a darkly comic story about a calamitous, haplessly dysfunctional Aboriginal family who find themselves fighting the proposed development of their river. Lucashenko found a way of talking about the issues that come with generational trauma – incarceration, substance abuse, poverty – with satire and irreverence, the comedy balancing the tragedy.
Edenglassie is on a grander scale. A historical novel, it is set in parallel narratives between 2024 and 1854, with two love stories 200 years apart. But all things are connected always. “Yeah, well, I knew the book would be received very differently if it didn’t have love and humour in it. You catch more flies with honey, as the saying goes.” And as she has written, “blackfellas deserve joy and romance on the page too”.
Edenglassie, a blending of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was the name of the penal colony that became Brisbane.
Brisbane in 1884 was a place of stray dogs, mangroves, horse dung, mud, dust and bullocks, tar barrels, brutality; you can almost smell stagnant water and shit coming off the page. “Gallons of grog flowed,” she writes, “all day at Grenier’s, allowing the men there to briefly forget that they lived in a colonial shithole not of their choosing.”
It is set in what is now the premium real estate of Highgate Hill and the concrete that is Southbank. Lucashenko says it wasn’t such a stretch to imagine it as it was, to see a mythic landscape, “all blackfellas live in a dual time. All blackfellas walk around in the modern world imagining what things were like before colonisation. Before hoofed animals, before the killings, before the concrete.”
Three years of rigorous research into the history of Moreton Bay went into the book. “There is very little in the book that isn’t historically accurate,” Lucashenko says. “It was the historical veracity that bothered me the most, knowing that I’d be attacked by conservative historians or reactionary historians.”
She consulted numerous elders and listened to their stories. “This is the era of my grandmother’s grandmother. It is not that far outside of living memory.”
One of her characters is Tom Petrie, who did exist, had grown up with Aboriginal people and spoke the language. “He was not under any illusions that Aboriginal people were kind of aimlessly wandering around without a system of government, without a system of law, without theology and without very deep, enduring ties to country.”
Also featured are the native police who roamed the landscape under the command of white officers, brutally effective in the dispossession of Aboriginal people. “One of the reasons racism is so bad in the Queensland police is that there has never been any kind of break in the history between the native police and the Queensland police force. One grew out of the other and so what you’ve got is our people being policed by the organisational descendants of a body that was sent out to contain and massacre us.”
Now in this moment of truth for Australia, Lucashenko says, “you have got to factor in that I don’t think any referendum has gone up without bipartisan support. If it does fail, and I hope it doesn’t, I think racism will have played a part, so will fearmongering, so will ordinary conservatism.”
She adds: “It’s not actually about ideas, it’s about emotions, Susan. You’ve got to try and work on the emotions. We are not dead, we are not defunct, we didn’t go away and we are not going to go away. We are not going anywhere and we all have to live together.”
• Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko is out now through UQP
