This article mentions ongoing colonial violence towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel, Edenglassie, takes the reader on a journey through magnificent and heartbreaking dual narratives set five generations apart. The reader steps through time, and weaves back and forth between the early 19th century and 2024, on the precipice of these stories possibly meeting.
Edenglassie is written with an intrinsic understanding of Country as kin. Both Country and Ancestors remind the reader of the lessons Country has guided mob by:
Patience. You are not the centre on which the world turns
Alongside this, we see the continual disturbances of Country and kin caused by colonial violence and unrest – through kidnapped children and massacres.
Review: Edenglassie – Melissa Lucashenko (UQP)
Lucashenko gifts us with characters impossible to not to invest in. They are perfectly whole and lovable, with minor flaws. As an Aboriginal woman, I found them all relatable – I could picture various Community members just like them.
It’s Granny Eddie’s world
The first character we meet is Granny Eddie, who has been hospitalised after a fall. She is as stubborn as she is wise, at the ripe age of 103. Her growl expresses that familiar balance of hard-to-swallow truths that make you realise when you’re wrong, even if you want to argue. Her grandaughter Winona is on the receiving end of it – and knows when to shut her gob “like a real Goorie must do when being growled by her elder”.
Winona – fiery, hot and Blak – is perfectly captured through vivid details. I could visualise her, with her Black Lives Matter hat and Haus of Dizzy earrings, drinking a can of Pepperberry Sobah. Winona laments not seeing her Granny Eddie enough, while also trying to find a job, disrupt the colony and make sure her granny is safe and cared for.
At the hospital, we meet Dr Johnny. Respectful, kind and considerate, he is trying his best to care for Granny Eddie – and finds himself pushing professional boundaries as he falls head over heels for fiery Winona. At first, she resists his attraction: sparks fly in opposing directions. She and Dr Johnny have much to learn from each other as they bond over their care for Granny Eddie.
These deep characterisations are counterbalanced with laugh or you’ll cry characters, like the predatory white anthropologist, ready to record any Blak story he can, while he tells you about the “fullbloods he knew in the territory”. Or the gronk white guy with dreads making money off the Yidaki, who tells Winona: “Yeah, I’m Indigenous, sis […] Indigenous to Australia, I mean”.
Shifting time
Lucashenko transports you, shifting through time. In 1844, we meet Mulanyin, saltwater man, whose inner complexities are explored in depth as he learns the Law and lessons from Country and Ancestors.
With that thought, the boy had the electric realisation that all his life he had been eating the decisions of his Ancestors. Every fish, every mudcrab, every ugari or turtle or vegetable or egg or fruit, they all came to him – to all his people – from generations of nurture. None of it was accidental, or random. And if his Old People hadn’t cherished the biggest fish and the female turtles, if they hadn’t sung up the Country, and protected the fecund of every species since the dawn of time, then he would not have eaten the results from the fire that night. […] The thought consumed him with wonder; it made him feel small, yet at the same time as though he belonged in a universe of meaning; part of a web of ceaseless and sacred connection across thousands of generations.
I am reminded of the poem, The Past, by the late Oodgeroo Noonuccal:
Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past.
Mulanyin’s reflections, relationships and actions are at the heart of this story. He’s balancing the complexities of being off Country while meeting his new obligations. His unwavering love for his beloved Nita, from the first day he laid eyes on her, brings an endearing romance to the story – an incredible, deep love. Nita and Mulanyin are bound together in a moment of care from their first touch: Nita dressing Mulanyin’s wound with fresh oodgeroo branches.
Mulanyin has a central goal – he wants to earn enough money to get a whale ship and set sail with Nita, back to home Country. He imagines fishing and all the bingkin he could catch. Imagines not working for the coloniser.
I found myself hanging on every word, taking in the Yagara language of Magandjin, or Brisbane. (You can learn more about the Yagara name of Brisbane by reading this essay by Gaja Kerry Charlton.)
There’s an extra layer for readers living in Magandjin, who will make connections to local places. They will know about the histories of the book’s locations (for instance, that Woolloongabba was a swamp) and will be able to recognise present-day local details, like Story Bridge, which spans the Brisbane River.
Complex current realities of Indigenous life are seamlessly woven into the book. Mental health challenges are represented early on, through what Winona describes as the Voice. This voice eats at her insecurities – calling her a loser and the “numbawan dumb dawwwwwwg”.
The novel also touches on the Stolen Generations, white control of Blak bodies and the ongoing violence of the colony through vitriolic racism, abuse and murder. We are presented with the origins of contemporary realities, too, through the Frontier Wars and acts of genocide.
And we’re reminded of the ongoing nature of this violence, through injustice towards and racialisation of Blak bodies – exemplified through Mulanyin’s observations of drunk white men prowling to assault Aboriginal women, and white people exerting control through addictive substances such as alcohol, tobacco and opium.
Read more: The day I don’t feel Australian? That would be Australia Day
‘Your body is not your own’
Edenglassie also acknowledges Indigenous global relatives around the world. In the 1800s, Mulanyin is interested to learn about the Goories of all countries, and surprised to learn about Native Americans: their opposition to settlers and their “great flat plains full of game, antelope and buffalo”.
In the present, Winona and Granny Eddie interact and relate with Māori mob, through shared understandings of birthing practices and opposition to white cultural appropriation. Winona recieves an “Ey, good onya sis” from a Māori woman after educating a whitefella, and Granny Eddie is farewelled with lots of waving from a Māori family leaving the hospital with their new family member.
I found myself laughing, crying and fighting off goosebumps as I read. There were moments when I had to put the book down, to sit with what I was reading.
Lucashenko has once again crafted a novel that is gritty, emotive and funny – like her previous novels, the 2019 Miles Franklin winning Too Much Lip and Mullumbimby (2013). In Edenglassie, she continues her art of affirming our Indigenous futures.
We see this through staunch Winona, who dreams big and is headstrong and unwavering.
She imagined endless offices filled with endless Blak bodies, mob all around typing emails and having meetings and doing whatever the fuck else office workers did, (not much in her experience), until each Blak body in turn closed their laptop stood up and walked out the door never to return. Because the whole mob of em had bought back the farm, over and over and over, in their tens of thousands, till they once more owned the continent they had never agreed was lost. Imagine it. Streets and suburbs and country towns, all owned by happy blackfellas.
As you make your way through Edenglassie’s two narratives and timelines, you will find how and why they collide – and the nature of the past informing the present, and vice versa. This structure highlights the impacts and the depth of the ongoing strengths of Indigenous cultures.
This novel is a gift to all who pick it up and journey with the stories it holds. It is clear Lucashenko has done extensive research to position this historical fiction through past and present Magandjin localities.
This is further evidenced by Lucashenko’s extensive acknowledgments and thanks to contributors and knowledge holders in the book’s author notes. Among them are Boe Spearim and his groundbreaking podcast Frontier War Stories: a must-listen for those wanting to learn more about the wars on Australian soil.
Infinite lessons can come from this brilliant novel, for those who are ready to reflect, listen and learn – and to sit in potential discomfort as colonial narratives are unwoven and corrected.