Melissa Lucashenko’s last novel, Too Much Lip, which won the 2019 Miles Franklin, memorably opens with a vignette of 1940s Australia. Edenglassie – titled for the one-time name of an area in Meanjin/Brisbane, where the book is set – casts its net a century further back, weaving together the lives of colonial-era and contemporary characters over its full span. The feeling, for a reader, is of inexorable crescendo: Lucashenko has called Edenglassie her “big book”.
The story’s tense, extremely funny present-day half starts in 2024, when elderly Yagara woman Granny Eddie Blanket takes a fall outside the Queensland maritime museum. (It’s Malaysian students who help her up, not white passers-by – a fact not lost on her activist granddaughter Winona.) An opportunistic white journalist on Granny Eddie’s hospital ward sees his chance for a moment in the sun, and soon both media and bureaucrats are lapping up the stories of “Queensland’s Oldest Aboriginal”, thrilled to have found a progressive face for the bicentennial celebration (or “John Oxley’s two centuries of criminal trespass”, per Winona).
