Author Melissa Lucashenko on playing with black and white binaries

This story is part of the Good Weekend October 7 edition.See all 15 stories.

Melissa Lucashenko, the only person ever to have won both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and TV’s Millionaire Hot Seat, is struggling to concentrate. We’re sitting on the back terrace of the Avid Reader bookstore in Brisbane’s West End, drinking coffee in the late-winter warmth, which even in August is hinting at humidity. We’re shaded by a fig tree, which bursts with bird life. To me, it feels lush and subtropical. Peaceful even. But Lucashenko is distracted by a particular bird that’s dropping fig rubble all over us.

“Sorry, that bloody bird is really annoying me, that’s a pest bird,” she says, breaking off our conversation. “Indian mynas, I hate ’em.”

That the Indian myna is an import – introduced to Australia in the 1860s – seems apt. We’d been deep in discussion about colonial Brisbane, the hanging of the Aboriginal resistance fighter Dundalli, and the gestation of Lucashenko’s new novel, Edenglassie, published last week by University of Queensland Press. It’s a historical epic which depicts the fascinating period in Brisbane’s history when the former penal colony was morphing into a settler town, and Aboriginal people still outnumbered white colonists.

In the book (named after Brisbane’s early moniker), the two groups coexist uneasily at the Queensland ­frontier, their interactions defined by mutual curiosity and suspicion, economic co-dependence and outbreaks of violence. “I’d wanted to write a novel of ­colonial Brisbane for a very long time, since I read Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland,” Lucashenko says, having refocused after the myna interruption. “It is so full of stories and insights into the colonial era that as a novelist I just went, ‘Wow. This is begging to be fictionalised.’ ”

Edenglassie had a long gestation. It was back in the 1990s that Lucashenko devoured Reminiscences, a 1904 classic that records the memories of the great Queensland pioneer Petrie, a Scottish-born explorer, gold prospector, logger and grazier who lived in the Moreton Bay penal colony, subsequently Brisbane, from 1831 to 1910. The book embedded itself in her consciousness and stayed there for the ensuing decades, as she moved to different homes over the east coast and overseas, as she wove through marriage and divorce, and navigated the challenges of having young children, and the challenges of having grown children, and the torture and exhilaration of writing through it all.

“I just had this vague awareness that I should be living in Brisbane to write this book,” she says now, firmly in Brisbane, which is verdant and infested with aforementioned noisy wildlife. “Because it’s very different to write a book when you’re walking the streets every day and looking at the river every week, than trying to do it at a distance.” She’s dressed casually in a T-shirt and trousers, finished off with borrowed thongs (her shoes were stolen from her house this morning). Her eyes are brown, expressive and kind, but she’s wary of too many personal questions.

Later, I look up Reminiscences, which I’ve never read. It was written by Thomas’ daughter Constance Petrie, who states of her father that “no one now living knows more from personal experience of the ways and habits of the Queensland aborigines. [His] experiences amongst these fast-dying-out people are unique, and the reminiscences of his early life in this colony should be recorded.”

These fast-dying-out people: Lucashenko is one of them. The writing of Edenglassie might have been ­inspired by this fascinating historical text but its ­existence also represents a giant f--- you to it.

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When Melissa Lucashenko was awarded the Miles Franklin in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip, the judges called it “a novel of celebratory defiance”. The novelist’s first reaction to news of her win was “Bugger me dead!“, which neatly sums her up as a writer: unpretentious, frank and on easy terms with vernacular. The 56-year-old is a thoroughly contemporary novelist who uses Aboriginal language liberally in her work, and who depicts modern Aboriginal life with urgency and humour. “That was really the impetus for this book, to say, ‘This is what was, and we’ve survived it,’ ” she tells me.

Lucashenko receiving the Miles Franklin award in 2019.Credit: AAP

In the historical part of the novel, set in the 1850s, Lucashenko tells the story of Mulanyin, a heroic young fisherman from saltwater country in the south, who works with Thomas Petrie as a young man. Mulanyin falls in love with Nita, who has lived with the Petries as a servant girl-cum-ward since she was a small girl. He dreams of buying a boat and taking his beloved home to Yugambeh country, but evading the colonial system to live a traditional life is becoming harder and more dangerous. The book uses the impending calamity of colonialism to tragic effect. The reader knows what’s going to happen but the characters don’t – some of them think the British might still go back home.

In the other narrative thread, Lucashenko tells a story set in Brisbane in 2024, in which the centenarian grandmother Eddie trips on a tree root and goes to hospital. This event brings together her feisty granddaughter, Winona, and young doctor Johnny, who has just discovered his Aboriginal ancestry and is playing at being a blackfella, much to Winona’s contempt.

Lucashenko says there’s a “whole demographic of people who have an Aboriginal ancestor, who sometimes think they’re Aboriginal, but actually, regardless of skin colour, they’re white people and they have to go on a very long and different journey if they’re going to become Aboriginal”. Skin colour, she says, “is not ­irrelevant but it’s almost irrelevant”.

Lucashenko’s grandmother, Eleanor.Credit: Courtesy of Melissa Lucashenko

“It’s the lens you see the world through … I see a myna bird there, and to me that’s emblematic of a whole lot of things. It’s sitting in a native fig tree, you know, it should be full of fig birds. It should be full of magpies and butcher birds. It should, actually, be full of cat birds and bloody parrots but we are in the middle of West End, and there hasn’t been cat birds and parrots here for a hundred years … so it’s that kind of understanding.” Also, she adds: “F---ing up the simple ­binaries of black and white is a lot of what I’m about”.

The book’s dual time-stamp structure is an attempt to render in words what Lucashenko has called the “double-vision” of Aboriginal people: the layering of the structures of modernity on the ancient landscape of their ancestors. “There’s a very strong economic and social and psychological drive in non-Aboriginal people to see us as, if not dead, then very diminished,” she says. “Until probably 10 years ago, I would have said the trope of the dying race was, ironically, immortal. But now there’s so much about us in the media all the time, and in the education system to an extent, most Australians have to recognise that Aboriginal people haven’t died out.”

(Census data shows the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has in fact risen – from 548,368 in 2011, to 649,171 in 2016, then up 25 per cent to 812,728 in 2021. This increase is attributed in large part to people feeling more comfortable identifying as Indigenous, and also to the growing popularity of genealogical research.)

That Aboriginal people were not all killed off in the early days of settlement was despite the best efforts of some colonists; one of the historical events that inspired the book was the public hanging of the Indigenous warrior Dundalli, the last person publicly executed in Queensland. Labelled on his death “one of the most guiltiest and most incorrigible of the aboriginal natives of this quarter” by The Brisbane Courier, Dundalli evaded capture for 14 years before being convicted in 1854 of two murders (the charges may have been trumped up). In 1855 he was hanged on gallows erected on Queen Street, but the execution was horribly botched. The executioner misjudged the length of the rope and had to swing on the hanged man’s body to finish off the killing.

Aboriginal resistance leader Dundalli, in a sketch made before his “horribly botched” public hanging in Brisbane, 1855.Credit: State Library of Queensland

“It’s really a historical fulcrum, the grotesque hanging of Dundalli in the middle of town in front of everyone: black, white, soldier, civilian, everyone,” Lucashenko says. “The way it was done, with the hangman having to use his own body weight to kill this resistance leader, to me that was a microcosm of the brutality and the spectacle of colonisation, and that was one thing that I really wanted better known. Just the inherent drama of it, as well as the historical importance.”

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As a novelist, Melissa Lucashenko is preoccupied with survival, and as a person, she knows a lot about it. Born to an Aboriginal mother, Cecile, and a Russian-speaking Ukrainian father – Vladimir Lucashenko, known as Wally Lucas, whose family fled the Russian Revolution via China – she and her six older brothers grew up on the outskirts of Logan, south of Brisbane, in circumstances where the chances of becoming an ­author, let alone a celebrated one, were remote.

“My father was a meatworker and a cane cutter … Mum worked at a fish and chip shop and sold plants at the local markets,” Lucashenko says of her family background. “Mum left school in about grade three or four. She was a domestic from a very young age, as her mother and grandmother were. At one point as a young mother she was working three jobs.

“Dad went to high school but I’m not sure how far he got. As a child, he was in an orphanage in Brisbane at one point with his brothers, after his father was violent, and his mother needed to escape.”

Lucashenko did not know she was of Aboriginal ­descent until she was 15 years old, when someone she knew “picked it” and said to her, “You’re Aboriginal … go home and ask your parents.” About that time, a photo appeared on her mother’s dresser of “this very black woman”, Lucashenko says. “I said, ‘Who is that photo of that Aboriginal woman?’ ” she recounts. “My mother said, ‘Oh, that’s my grandmother. That’s why we’ve all got olive skin and dark hair.’” Lucashenko was shocked at the revelation, and felt “momentary ­disquiet” (something she attributes to internalised ­racism) but says it “instantly made sense”.

Lucashenko’s mother, Cecile. When Melissa was 15, someone told her she was Aboriginal and to “ask your parents”.Credit: Courtesy of Melissa Lucashenko

“For the 40 years since then, I’ve been learning the culture and I’ve had different teachers from different mobs and I’ve taught other people what I know.”

She later learnt that her grandmother Eleanor ­had defeated an attempt by authorities to remove her as a child in about 1907 or 1908, in Wolvi in Queensland’s Gympie region, and that her great-grandmother Christina Copson had worked as a domestic servant from the age of eight: “She was a slave, she had no rights.” The family came under the extra scrutiny of authorities after Copson shot and injured a man who tried to rape her. She was arrested and jailed for a week. In court, she told the judge she’d acted in self-defence, and he found her not guilty. Her perpetrator was jailed for six months instead. The would-be rapist was an Aboriginal man. “No way she would have gotten away with shooting a white ­assailant,” Lucashenko says.

“My mother … was determined that her daughter would have the chances she didn’t.”

On leaving school in 1983 at the end of year 12, Lucashenko worked as a barmaid, a delivery truck driver and a support worker for women out of prison. She used to be obsessed with karate and has a black belt in it. In 1990, she graduated from Griffith University with an honours degree in public policy, having been the first in her immediate family to go to university. “My mother had no education and was determined that her daughter would have the chances she didn’t,” Lucashenko says. “There was no skipping school in my household. I was always in the library if I wasn’t on the back of a horse ... I was taken up to the headmaster’s office in grade one and made to read aloud and they all oohed and ahhed.”

She published her first book, Steam Pigs, in 1997. It won the Dobbie Literary Award for women’s fiction and she was away, publishing three more books over the next 15 or so years. [In 2018 she told The Sydney Morning Herald that “Australia is a profoundly racist country and that is why I write more than anything else”]. She married – her husband Bill worked as a foreign aid specialist for AusAID – and had a son and a daughter. They moved around for her husband’s job, living in Canberra and on overseas postings, including in Tonga. Eventually the family settled on Lucashenko’s ancestral land, Bundjalung, in the northern coastal area of NSW, ­buying a property and raising horses. But that idyll ended in 2007, when Lucashenko and her husband divorced. She couldn’t afford to stay on the land and worried about becoming a “bag lady”. Around that time, her 16-year-old daughter was hospitalised with mental health difficulties and the two of them moved back to Logan City, poor again.

As she said in an address at the 2013 Melbourne Writers’ Festival: “I knew what life was like in a suburb where the majority of people were ordinary, decent Australians, but a significant minority were prepared to sell their children’s Ritalin in order to fund a heroin habit. Like some kind of weirdly reverse Charles Ryder coming upon Brideshead, I’d been there before. I knew all about it.”

Lucashenko believes a plain truth can simplify your life dramatically, and for her, that simplification came during this period of hardship. “If you’ve got food and you’ve got clean water and you’ve got a safe bed to be in at night, that’s a very good basis to begin from, and that’s what’s really important,” she says now.

Lucashenko astride a Harley-Davidson, which features in her book Too Much Lip.Credit: Courtesy of Melissa Lucashenko

It was around this time, “in a moment of crazed ­optimism”, that she filled out an online application for the Channel Nine game show Millionaire Hot Seat. She won $50,000 and some peace of mind. Then, in 2013, she came to more mainstream attention with her sixth novel, Mullumbimby, about moving to the northern NSW town and becoming embroiled in a native title tussle. It won the Deloitte Fiction Book Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing.

She went on to write Too Much Lip – about a woman who arrives back in her hometown on a Harley-Davidson to see her dying granddad, only to get sucked back into her chaotic family – in an upstairs room at this Brisbane bookshop. In 2019 it won the Miles Franklin, the most prestigious literary award in the country, with the judges calling it “a fearless, searing and unvarnished portrait of generational trauma cut through with acerbic humour”. It was shortlisted for that year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing and for the Stella Prize, which celebrates the work of female and non-binary Australian authors.

I ask if her success, and the financial benefits of it, such as they are – the Miles Franklin pays a $60,000 winner’s cheque – make her feel safe. She pauses for a long time, and the ­silence would be awkward were it not for the birds. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt safe,” she says quietly. “And that sounds melodramatic but … I started doing karate when I was 13 and I did karate for 10 years, and I think that’s the only thing in my life that’s made me feel safer.” Because you can defend yourself physically? I ask. “Up to a point,” she responds.

“I don’t think women, or Aboriginal people in general, get to feel safe very much. I certainly don’t.”

I ask if that was something she needed to be able to do when she was younger. She pauses again before answering. “I think every woman needs to be able to do it,” she says. “It constantly blows me away, the idea of people walking around who don’t know how to punch and block and fight – the kind of vulnerability that bestows on people.” She returns to the question. “But safe? No. I have the privilege of fair skin but I don’t think women, or Aboriginal people in general, get to feel safe very much. I certainly don’t.”

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In 2019, novelist and fellow Miles Franklin winner Tara June Winch told The Guardian that she could see a “new maturity” in Australian readers now that books like Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu had found a strong market among non-­Aboriginal readers. “Australians want to know the truth of their history. There is a renaissance of truth telling in Australia right now,” Winch said.

Lucashenko took up karate at 13, gaining a black belt.Credit: Courtesy of Melissa Lucashenko

Lucashenko is an integral part of that renaissance, along with authors like Winch, Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Anita Heiss, Evelyn Araluen and Tony Birch. “I think she’s one of the most important and innovative authors of our time and that’s in the Australian literary context, not just First Nations literature,” says Dr Jeanine Leane, a Wiradjuri writer and academic who teaches creative writing at Melbourne University. “But in First Nations literature she is a very important writer. She can write about injustice and racism but her writing is a testimony to our resilience.”

Former Sydney Writers’ Festival artistic director Michael Williams knows Lucashenko from the writers’ festival world and because she contributes to The Monthly, the magazine he edits (Lucashenko is also an essayist; in 2013 she won a Walkley for a long feature on poverty in Logan). “I have just read the new book and it’s the best thing she’s done,” Williams tells me. “She’s one of our greatest novelists. One of the things she does so well is voice. The voice is so integral to the energy of it. Her characters feel ­really lived in and deeply authentic. She knows exactly who she is and what she is doing.”

After our interview under the unruly birds, Lucashenko and I walk around the corner to a Thai restaurant for lunch. The food is fresh and delicious and now that the formalities are over, Lucashenko relaxes a little. She tells me about an anti-development activism project she’s involved in at Toondah Harbour at southern Moreton Bay. They’re trying to protect the habitat of the eastern curlew, a critically endangered wading bird. “You can have an international agreement to protect these birds and then some grubby process in Queensland can f--- the whole thing,” she says.

She asks if I want to go for a drive around Brisbane, to see some of the places she describes in the book. In the car she chats about her favourite authors, from Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture was a big influence on Edenglassie) to Iris Murdoch, Tony Birch and Toni Morrison. We drive to Kangaroo Point on the Brisbane River, next to high sandstone cliffs popular with abseilers. Lucashenko shows me a flat rock on the river next to a fig tree with sprawling roots. “This is where Aboriginal people would have fished,” she tells me.

It’s peaceful, balmy and beautiful. There’s a whiff of the ancient, from the cliffs and the winding, placid river, and the remaining subtropical cover on the city side of the river, still full of birds.

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