Trauma and humour make a winning combination in Miles Franklin

It’s not surprising that Melissa Lucashenko says Too Much Lip was her most difficult book to write. After all, it deals with physical and substance abuse, violence, marginalisation, displacement and dispossession, racism and incarceration within the experience of one Indigenous family.

But the Bundjalung writer’s sixth novel is also very funny. "Do you know how hard it is to write a funny book about trauma," she asks.

Melissa Lucashenko says she is now ready to write her 'big book'.Credit: Renee Nowytarger

Too Much Lip has been named winner of this year’s Miles Franklin prize, Australia’s most significant literary award. Lucashenko, only the third Indigenous writer to win after Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, receives $60,000. The judges said she "weaves a (sometimes) fabulous tale with the very real politics of cultural survival to offer a story of hope and redemption for all Australians".

Her book was chosen from a shortlist that also included The Lebs, Michael Mohammed Ahmad; A Sand Archive, Gregory Day; A Stolen Season, Rodney Hall; The Death of Noah Glass, Gail Jones; and Dyschronia, Jennifer Mills.

In Too Much Lip, Kerry, whose girlfriend has been sent down for a five-year stretch in a Brisbane jail, returns to her hometown of Durrongo in northern NSW to say farewell her dying grandfather.

There she finds the family’s sacred ground, the river island where her antecedents are buried, likely to be grabbed by the corrupt mayor to become the site for a new prison, and her family dysfunctional and at loggerheads with each other.

I discovered I was writing far closer to home than I realised.

Melissa Lucashenko

As if matters couldn’t get more complicated, the outspoken Kerry – she with "too much lip" – gets involved with a white man.

Lucashenko said she was able to write Too Much Lip only now that she was in her 50s because she had to have the confidence from a cultural point of view to say what she wanted to.

"With every book you learn what you’re writing as you’re writing it. You understand yourself better at the end of the novel and certainly understand the novel better, and the world better, if you’re lucky."

Melissa Lucashenko's Miles Franklin-winning novel.

From her years teaching karate Lucashenko learned "at an almost molecular level" how to keep going with something. "I’ve often thought that a book that was hard to write was the wrong book and I’ve discovered that I was wrong. Sometimes you do just have to sit there with the Gordian knot that is your brain and work and work in the darkness."

There were some strange moments during the writing of the book. When she was about 40,000 words in one of her brothers started talking about his traumas. "I discovered I was writing far closer to home than I realised. The subconscious knows, as Freud famously realised, so much more than we do."

Lucashenko says she was slightly thrown by winning the Miles for Too Much Lip because she feels that she is now ready to write her "big book". What she has in mind is a novel about first contact between the Indigenous people and colonists in Brisbane. It will begin before the arrival of Europeans and address what happened at colonisation and what could have been done differently.

"Australia is a penal colony in so many ways whether you’re black, white or Asian. The values of a penal colony just suffuse Australian society," she says. "Every child in the Northern Territory behind bars is black. We live with the values of Britain in the 1700s even though we’re in the 21st century and I want to talk about how that is not the historical norm in Australia.

"We had civilised values to live by here for many thousands of years and my work is about colonising and remembering what those values were. It’s my civilising mission. I’m a missionary."

Melissa Lucashenko is a guest at Antidote on September 1. She appears in 'The State We’re In' (with Deborah Lipstadt and Fintan O'Toole) and 'Unlocking Justice' (with Kimberley Motley and Peta Blood). sydneyoperahouse.com