In the early stages of drafting her book Edenglassie, Melissa Lucashenko had a “strange kind of spiritual experience”. She was in her bed in an ordinary house in Brisbane, on an ordinary night. “I couldn’t tell you if I was asleep or awake, but I had this odd visitation,” she says “It felt as if something was coming up out of the earth, as though I was receiving a message from the ancestors and I was being instructed in how the book had to bring people together. It left me with the knowledge that it had to be about possibility as much as the past.”
Lucashenko’s book arrives at a tumultuous time in Indigenous history, into a country divided as we head to the voice to parliament referendum. Her demeanour on the subject is matter-of-fact and to the point: “You can’t give blackfellas anything, even when it’s nothing. That’s the lesson of the referendum, if you ask me.”
