Miles Franklin Award adds gloss to Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip

Melissa Lucashenko’s novel, based on her life, has won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Award.

Melissa Lucashenko, winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

“Every word!” That was Melissa Lucashenko’s response when asked how much her novel Too Much Lip, which last night won the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, was based on her own life. “There has been a whole gamut of reactions from my ­family.”

Lucashenko, 52, stressed she was joking, but there’s no doubt she drew on her life to create the Salter clan, an extended indigenous family just scraping by in ­remote northern NSW.

The main character, Kerry, revs into town on a Harley. She’s come from her escape in Queensland because her grandfather is dying. One of her brothers — the author has six — drinks too much and may give too much lip, but he and his family have received plenty of that in their turn.

What ensues percolates with family dysfunction, generational trauma, poverty, black-white tensions, love and sex, the importance of country and, importantly, humour. The Salters are a bit messed up, but so are the white residents of fictional Durrongo.

“I wanted to show black and white people who live and die in the underclass,” Lucashenko said.

Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko.

Two outside sources of inspiration were the confronting New Zealand book and film Once Were Warriors and the 1960s American TV comedy The Beverly Hillbillies. “Well, I do like a challenge,” ­Lucashenko said.

The Brisbane-based author, long-listed in 2014 for Mullumbimby, prevailed over a shortlist that included two-time winner Rodney Hall (A Stolen Season) and four-time shortlistee Gail Jones (The Death of Noah Glass). Also in the running were Gregory Day (A Sand Archive), Jennifer Mills (Dyschronia) and Michael Mohammed Ahmad (The Lebs).

Chief judge Richard Neville said Too Much Lip was “driven by personal experience, historical ­injustice, anger and what in indigenous vernacular could be ­described as ‘deadly Blak’ ­humour”. “Lucashenko weaves a sometimes fabulous tale with the real politics of cultural survival to offer a story of hope and redemption for all Australians,” he said.

Lucashenko’s mother was ­indigenous and her father was of Russian descent. She said she wished her mother, who died in 2014 and was the model for the mum, Pretty Mary, in the novel, had been with her last night.

“She only had three or four years of schooling before poverty forced her out of school to work as a servant,” Lucashenko said. “She was a huge reader and a smart woman who thought she was stupid because society told her she was. Given a different life, she could have won the Miles Franklin. She was every bit as smart as I am and just as capable. I often wonder about the number of indigenous women who are never given the chance to live up to their potential, to be the next Ash Barty or Cathy Freeman.”

She said the Miles Franklin award was “going straight to the pool room”. And the $60,000 “means I am not staring down the barrel of poverty”. “I wrote for 20 years and made the equivalent of the dole,” she said. “I am good at living on the smell of an oily rag, but this win is big. I was literally speechless for a few minutes because it just seemed unreal.”