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).
Granny Eddie, taking hearty relish in her sudden celebrity, has no qualms about taking the suits for a ride. She liberally embellishes her ancestral tales for an audience that only wants optimism – but they contain important truths. The novel switches between the city’s present and the early days of white invasion; Lucashenko’s opening portrait of Yagara country in 1840 recalls a moment of possibility, when “insults weren’t inevitable”.
Then it jumps to 1855. Visiting Yugambeh man Mulanyin falls deeply in love with Nita, a Ngugi woman “taken in” by the well-respected and (relatively) progressive Petrie family. But their romance is irrevocably shaped by the dynamics of the spreading colony.
One of several turning points for the initially optimistic Mulanyin comes at the novel’s literal and geographical centre, with the public hanging of Dundalli. The hangman, a convicted rapist, botches the revered leader’s execution – a harrowing scene that Lucashenko refuses either to sensationalise or turn away from. Amid the “keening” of the bush, she stays on the convict: “trembling, his back turned to the sullen white crowd for fear they might punish him for showing them exactly who they were”.
Mulanyin (named for the blue heron that also haunts the pages of Lucashenko’s 2013 novel, Mullumbimby) watches, appalled. Through his eyes, Lucashenko is scathing of a “British pluck and progress” that materialises in terror: bullets and pox, poisoned flour, stolen land and stolen children.
“We are all collectively the inheritors and generators of the country’s psyche,” Alexis Wright has written, locating white Australia’s failure to face its history in its ongoing “storytelling war”. Back in 2024, Winona and Granny Eddie grapple with this legacy in different ways. “We can’t be sunk in bitterness,” Eddie tells her granddaughter – done as she may be with “white people and their never-ending provocations”. But Winona, “head full of her own private demons”, sees this as denial. She’s exasperated by conciliatory narratives aimed mainly at soothing colonial anxieties, furious at the outrages that keep piling up. “How come we gotta reconcile anything?” she retorts. “There was more dead on the Queensland frontier than Aussies killed in world war one.”
In 2013, Lucashenko won a Walkley for her essay on life in Logan – a frank look at class and poverty in modern Australia. Winona hails from the same place, and has more pressing problems than white guilt – like sorting out a job and a place to live. She’s also wrangling feelings for Granny Eddie’s hospital supervisor, Dr Johnny, who has recently discovered his own Murri heritage, is anxious for Winona’s approval – and deeply in love with her. While he wants change as much as she does, his by-the-rules approach is tested by her taste for “direct fucking action”. (“What this place needs is a shitload more public art, a basketball court, and a pub with free beer,” he jokes on one would-be date. “What this place needs is a revolution, beginning with Treaty, reparations and a fuck-ton of social housing,” she shoots back.)
Lucashenko revels precisely in the moments people disagree; if you love someone interesting, she suggests, they might leave you stumped. Staunchly self-sufficient Winona is cut from the same cloth as Mullumbimby’s protagonist, Jo Breen, and Too Much Lip’s Kerry Salter. Love pushes these women to grow, and heal (with a good dose of sex). What’s illuminated is that to be in relation to another person – or a family, a culture, a place – is to be accountable.
Edenglassie, maybe most of Lucanshenko’s novels, shines with First Nations languages, rituals and spiritual understanding. Mulanyin and Nita’s “giant cat’s cradle of family obligations and connections” is one and the same with Winona’s and Johnny’s. Characters are always within quite practical touching distance of the spirit world – and it is ancestors who deliver the book’s shocking, climactic revelation. In Lucashenko’s fiction, stories wield corrective power against the “ignorance is bliss” approach that reaches its apex in terra nullius. If, as Chelsea Watego has written, the coloniser has a vested interest in insisting a veil somehow separates us from the past, Lucashenko uses her intergenerational stories to tear it down: here is where you are, this is who was here – who is still here.
“Mourning and melancholia are rituals of settler possession,” Evelyn Araulen wrote recently. Edenglassie, glinting with love, force and narrative glee, lays out a masterclass in the alternative. This novel, fiercely invested in a collective future, challenges any version of history that, to quote Nita, “looks in the other direction at what’s easy to see”. And issues that painful, bemusing reminder: it didn’t have to be like this.
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko is out now through UQP
