Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko: book review

Roaring into town on a stolen Harley-Davidson, whippet-thin in solid black boots, Kerry Salter is cut from different cloth.

Author Melissa Lucashenko Picture: LaVonne Bobongie Photography

Australian indigenous literature is a paradox, even an oxymoron. The growing number of works that have appeared under its banner form a canon of sorts — they win prizes and large audiences of readers, attract critical acclaim and academic interest locally and abroad — but theirs is a canon without ­official sanction or even a desire to be so sanctified. This is because Aboriginal-authored literature exists in contradistinction to those officially authorised stories white Australia has told and continues to tell about itself.

Which is to say: all the energy and anger and sadness and hope that makes first nations’ literature among the most significant and exciting fields of creative practice being undertaken in Australia today emerges from its resistance to the idea of an Australian nation, that geo­political rubric in whose name and under whose laws ageless cultures have been dismantled and generations of people have been decimated and dispossessed.

If this situation offers extraordinary freedoms to indigenous authors, it also creates ­significant complexities. If there are no sacred lists, no fixed standards or established conventions, then how is a writer meant to proceed, whether in accordance with “the rules” or bucking against them to make something new? Each writer of note instead has been obliged to create their imaginative worlds from scratch.

Some, such as Kim Scott, take the late ­modernist prose of contemporary Anglosphere literature and retool it to accommodate Noon­gar concepts and concerns. Others, first among them Alexis Wright, meld European and Aboriginal storytelling traditions to achieve something wilder, more feral in approach.

Others still, such as Tony Birch and his ­University of Queensland Press colleague ­Melissa Lucashenko, often employ traditional social realism of a kind used by mid-century working-class British writers, then infuse it with the language and the passion of their ­respective people’s dire, damaged situation.

This explains why a book such as Too Much Lip can be wedded to bog-standard family drama that seems familiar, even somewhat shopworn, yet seem so urgent and fresh in ­unfolding.

Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

Alan Sillitoe and John Osborne may have had centuries of disenfranchisement and class snobbery to kick against, but they ­belonged to the same bickering, backbiting ­national family. ­Lucashenko’s particular brand of kitchen-sink realism is activated and altered by the knowledge that to be indigenous in Aust­ralia is not just to be members of a different ­nation, it is to be the children of another creator.

Certainly Kerry Salter, heroine of the novel, is cut from entirely different cloth. We first meet her roaring into the backblocks town of Patterson on a stolen Harley-Davidson bike, whippet-thin and sporting a pair of solid black boots. She has skipped down from Queensland, where her girlfriend has just been charged with armed ­robbery and sentenced to five years’ jail, to visit one last time with her grandfather — a former boxer and local community leader — who is on the verge of death.

The visit is a tough one for Kerry; she has been away for years. Her father died almost two decades before and her grandfather, in later life a violent alcoholic, was an ambiguous replacement parent. Kerry’s mother, Pretty Mary (to distinguish her from a cousin known as Tall Mary), has long recovered from alcoholism ­herself, only to become a sincere if idiosyncratic Christian. She cannot easily forgive her wayward and sexually “deviant” daughter, though she is evidently glad for the family support.

Less welcoming is Kerry’s older brother, Ken, a big man gone to seed and grown bitter with it. Ken spends his days drinking his ­mother’s pension and spewing venom at his withdrawn teenage son. Of Kerry’s two other siblings, one, known only as Black Superman, has moved to Sydney, come out and become a worthy professional.

The other, Donna, a wild and reputedly wanton young woman, vanished suddenly one day in 1999. The circumstances ­surrounding her disappearance remain unknown and thus an open family wound.

All that said, the Salter family, Bundjalung people from the far north of NSW, are luckier than some. Across the generations the family managed to escape the local mission and the semi-­indentured servitude of working for the pastoral family who first “opened up” the area around the town. They have their own home and a degree of respect from the local people.

Still, Patterson’s local cop is a descendant of that same pastoral family, while the mayor is the grandson of the man who took out the eye of Kerry’s great-grandfather using a stockwhip. The sense of embattlement, of old scores still outstanding, will inform the narrative throughout.

This is a story with generations of pain ­heaped up against its chronological frame. The trauma of children lost to welfare, of fathers humiliated, of women treated as white men’s chattel, is not some vestigial historical recollection but a vivid living fact. As expected, this ­sadness replicates itself in everything from chronic alcoholism, family violence, sexual abuse, criminality and depression in the current generation of Salter family members. But what is sadder still is that it lives inside even those who have escaped to the cities and the nation’s broad middle class. Even Black Superman, the family’s charismatic and kind golden boy, wakes nights in sheer panic at childhood memories of his grandfather’s misdirected fury.

Kerry is a marvellously drawn character: tough as nails, savvy in her dealings with white and black worlds, but nonetheless fragile and in ongoing pain.

When the resting place of her grandmother and then grandfather is set to be sold off to ­become the site of a new private correctional ­facility — yet another means of making money out of black misery — all organised by the man whose family had diminished her own for so long, she swallows a strong desire to flee and tries to reintegrate with family and township. The result, comic and tragic by turns, grants readers a privileged insight into the dynamics of indigenous life in small town Australia.

The narrative, angry, witty and engaged with issues of the day, is nonetheless a kind of feint. Lucashenko uses it as an opportunity to com­plicate the usual black-white binaries. We sit on Kerry’s shoulder as she decries the whites of the town as bogans and savages, then watch that position unravel as she falls for a returned local boy of Scottish descent. The laziness and casual violence that Ken doles out ­predisposes readers to damning the older brother. Then we learn that he, too, has suffered greatly at his grandfather’s hands.

There is plenty of pleasure to be gained by the twists and turns of the Salter family’s struggle against the men who represent generations of racially motiv­ated aggression towards them. But what remains once narrative drops away is a sense that a ­certain mode of storytelling has been used against those who presume to own it. Too Much Lip begins as a traditionally Anglo story that happens to be concerned with an ­Aboriginal family. It ends as a subversive approp­riation of novelistic realism. Our sympathies have been overthrown and colonised.

In Bundjalong cosmology, mountains ­contain or retain the presence of warriors’ past. Mount Monk, the looming presence above the local town, is regarded at one point by Kerry’s grandfather as representing the white man’s fist, ever ready to be brought down on his ­family. By the novel’s conclusion, it is also possible to suspect that the Salters have gone some way to winning the mountain back for the soldiers of their own, more ancient and subtle kind.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Too Much Lip

By Melissa Lucashenko

UQP, 328pp, $29.95