Tag Archives: Melissa Lucashenko

End of Year List 4: Books

Posted on 31 December 2023 | 2 comments

From the Emerging Artist, in her own words (links to the LibraryThing pages or, at her request, to my blog post when there is one):

Non fiction

Claire O’Rourke, Together We Can (Allen & Unwin 2022)
I read this after hearing Claire talk on a Sydney Writers’ Festival panel on how to have hope in relation to climate change. It’s a good read, mixing specific examples of everyday Australians tackling what’s happening with broader theory on how to bring about change. It does fulfil its title, giving a real sense that “together we can”.

Debra Dank, We Come With This Place (Echo Publishing 2022)
We watched this book win four awards and heard Deborah Dank’s speech at NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2023. We immediately went out to buy it. The writing is beautiful, a slow evocation of country and its connection to the author, while filled with story. I think it’s the must read of the year.

Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves, a personal history of Ireland since 1958 (Head of Zeus 2021)
Hearing Fintan on the ABC’s Conversations, I immediately placed an order and waited patiently for four months for it to arrive. I’m glad I did. It’s written in short chapters in chronological order, but often picking up themes from chapter to chapter. It’s funny while documenting the appalling state of Ireland from 1958 through personal history, statistics and other sources. The incredible poverty (no running water in homes or sewage, no education for 80% of the population past primary school) made worse by the stranglehold of the Church and corruption in keeping poverty in place and the changes brought about by the impact of globalised capitalism all come alive in riveting storytelling.

Dean Ashenden, Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Scribe 2022)
A very readable history of post WWII Australian policies in relation to First Nations people where the impact of the policies on Aboriginal people in a specific area – Tennant Creek – are made clear. It tells how the policies of assimilation and later self determination came about and how far-reaching their effects have been. It would have been good for all those voting no to have been made to read this as a requirement for having a say.

Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Penguin 2023)
So much has been written about this book already I don’t need to give a summary. I found it gripping. 

Fiction
I read 62 books this year, from quick comfort ‘junk’ reads to harder literary tomes. I take a photo of each book to prompt memory, and going through them all, it’s clear I have had an excellent selection to choose five favourites from. I’ve ended up deciding by level of enjoyment, not on some literary merit criteria.

Hilde Hinton, A Solitary Walk on the Moon (Hachette AUstralia 2022)
A totally enjoyable read while disquieting in its simplicity. This is a second novel by an Australian author who seems to slipped under the radar. I found it in my local library. 

Annie Ernaux, The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions 2018)
This was also an entrancing read, covering a similar time period to my own life. It conjures up the similarities and immense differences between growing up in middle class France and Australia.

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us (HarperCollins 2018)
Another library chance find. I loved the three strong old women protagonists, the exploration of caste and how this is/isn’t changing in modern India.

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press 2018)
This was gripping rather than straight out enjoyable, with a sense of what was to come on every page. I loved the imagined world of life at the point where the strangers are staying and growing in number, while keeping your own way of life intact.

Richard Russo, Somebody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2023)
Jonathan hasn’t yet been lured into the wonderful world that Richard Russo writes about, but I expect that to change soon. This is the latest in a series that includes Everybody’s Fool and Nobody’s Fool, all set in small town east coast USA. The books follow a number of interconnected characters over a few generations recording the process of change as late capitalism, racism and gender are played out in the town of Bath. He writes with affectionate humour about all of his characters. We see their frailties and appalling behaviour (between white and black, men and women, different generations) but in a number of cases we see how their connections with each other bring a shift in perspective. I love them. 

From me

I read 83 books (counting journals but not children’s books). I finished my slow read of Middlemarch and read St Augustine’s Confessions, a little each morning, but didn’t start another slow read in September because I was doing the Kelly Writers’ House course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), which was great fun and probably taught me a lot.

I read:

  • 21 books of poetry
  • 26 novels
  • 4 comics
  • books in translation from Chinese (2), Spanish (3), French (2), Danish (1 or 3, depending on how you count), Russian (1) and Latin (1), and bilingual books containing Greek (1) and Maori (1)
  • counting editors and comics artists, 44 books by women, 39 by men
  • 12 books by First Nations writers, and
  • 15 books by other writers who don’t belong to the White global minority.

Biggest serendipity: Four books spoke powerfully to each other and to me in the wake of the referendum on the Voice: Debra Dank’s We Come with This Place, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story and David Marr’s Killing for Country (no blog post yet). Unlike Voice and Treaty, the third proposal from the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart – Truth – doesn’t have to wait for government action. These books, and so many others with them, are moving that project forward brilliantly and unsettlingly.

The most fun was probably two novels about poetry, which also spoke to each other: Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra and The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.

Most interesting new discovery of someone who has been writing for decades: 2022 Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux. I read Les années and Mémoire de fille, both of which mine her life story in ways that make most memoirs seem dull. Though I read them in translation, it seems right to name them in French.

Most imaginatively huge was Alexis Wright’s novel Praiseworthy, which incidentally is set in some of the same localities as Killing for Country.

Most memorable poetry: Sarah Holland-Batt’s Jaguar, with Ken Bolton’s Starting at Basheer’s (no blog post yet) a close second, the first for its precise, compassionate treatment of the poet’s father’s final illness, the latter because it filled me with joy about the everyday.

Happy New Year to all. May 2024 see the rejection of authoritarianism in elections and an end to mass killings everywhere. And may fossil fuels at last be left in the ground. Failing that, may we all keep our hearts open and our minds engaged.

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Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, page 76

Posted on 19 December 2023 | 10 comments

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press 2023)

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Edenglassie, a portmanteau of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was briefly the name for part of what is now Brisbane, and this book is a historical fiction set there in the 1850s, when First Nations people outnumbered settlers along the Brisbane River, a time of armed resistance to colonisation, and a time of genocidal atrocities including those committed by the notorious Native Police.

My blogging practice of focusing on page 76 (my age) comes up with a passage that at first seems a long way from that subject. For a start it’s set in Brisbane in 2024, the bicentenary of John Oxley’s sail up the Brisbane River, and begins with a genial picture of a weekend market that could be in any western city:

Winona weaved a path through the many bodies at the market. The young and the elderly; the able-bodied and the infirm; the slender hipsters; the defiantly fat, the tattooed, the pierced, the dull suburban middle-class and the fabulously wealthy. All these met in the mecca of the inner south, held there in the tight Kurilpa loop of the river which, having embraced you, was mighty slow to let you go.

The market is complex and inclusive, or at least tolerant. ‘Kurilpa’ tells you, if you have a web browser handy, that the city is Brisbane: the Kurilpa precinct borders on South Bank, and what was once the Tank Street Bridge is now the Kurilpa Bridge. The way the narrator uses the word suggests that it is more than a simple place-name, hinting at an Indigenous perspective: the river has agency, embracing and slow to let go.

As the paragraph continues, a character moves through the scene:

Winona wasn’t much interested in the crowd; she’d been caught instead by a steady pulse, thrumming from afar. She followed the sound of the didgeridoo dragging her to the far edge of the park, eager to see if she knew the fella playing, and discover what other Blak mob were around. Hopefully, Winona thought, she’d find a little oasis of Goories there to replenish her spirit, weakened from the hours she’d spent lately in the soul-sucking hospital.

‘Blak’ and ‘Goorie’ make it clear where we are, though readers from outside Australia may need their pocket browser here too. ‘Blak’ is a self-description currently used by many urban First Nations people as a way of ‘taking on the colonisers’ language and flipping it on its head’ (the quote is from an article on artist Destiny Deacon, at this link). Winona is a young, politically aware Indigenous woman. The narrative cleaves mostly to her point of view, but it’s interesting to notice that here they part ways briefly: the narrator sees and enjoys the crowd, and virtually tells us in so many words that the ancient Kurilpa embraces that various crowd as well; Winona is committed to an ‘us and them’ perspective. The non-Indigenous crowd is like a desert to her.

I won’t quote the rest of the page. Suffice to say that when she finds the didgeridoo player, he’s a white hippy who claims to be Indigenous – a coloniser, a thieving dagai, as Winona sees it – and her violent outrage lasts for several richly comic pages.

Once I got past my initial sense that this page wasn’t from the interesting, historical narrative, I realised that many of the novel’s key themes are suggested in it.

Winona is the central character in the near future part of the novel, where the main narrative thread is her budding romance with Doctor Johnny, a man of questionable indigeneity (though less questionable than the didge player’s). Her grandmother, whom she has been visiting in hospital, is leveraging her claim to be Queensland’s oldest Aboriginal to secure a major role in Brisbane’s bicentenary celebrations – and an apartment. So there’s romcom tension, trickster play, and a generally comic tone. At the same time, the narrative is firmly embedded in an Indigenous perspective – or perspectives, really, as Grannie Eddie and her ancient friends see things differently from the militant Winona, and Johnny, a child of the stolen generations, brings yet another point of view. Winona’s rage at the hippy didge player is a contrast to her almost flirtatious hostility to Johnny. Her indifference to the complex everyday crowd plays off against Granny Eddie’s generously inclusive concept of Aboriginal sovereignty.

It’s especially interesting to note the way these paragraphs are linked to the historical story. Words that in 2024 feel like cultural reclamation or perhaps remnants of lost language – dagai, Kurilpa – are part of ordinary speech in 1854. Just as the hippy claims an Indigenous identity, a white man back then – Tom Petrie, grandson of a pre-eminent settler in Brisbane, and in the process of taking on a sheep property in his own right – claims the status of an initiated man: it’s not an exact parallel, as Tom’s claim, like that of the real-life Tom Petrie, has the approval of elders. But as he invites his ‘brothers’ to work for him a tremendous unease develops: certainly I spent a good deal of the book dreading that he would betray his close friends, his initiated ‘brothers’. It would be spoiling to tell you if he does.

Like the 21st century story, the historical narrative centres on a romance between two First Nations people with very different relationships to traditional culture. Mulanyin is a traditionally raised young man who is in Kurilpa as a guest of an established family. In the early parts of the book, he goes naked around town – he only starts wearing trousers to protect his fertility when he starts riding horses. Nita has been taken as a servant to the prestigious Petrie family, who are relatively decent in their relationships to the local people. Nita is a Christian, always modestly dressed, and attuned to her employers’ desires and expectations.

The river is a powerful presence in both stories. The apparent throwaway line about how ‘having embraced you, [it] was mighty slow to let you go’ rings a lot of bells. It’s crossed by bridges and features the bicentennial celebrations in 2025; it’s a source of food and site of dramatic events in 1854. It remains the same river.

As I write this, I’ve read about half of David Marr’s Killing for Country, an unsparing account of frontier violence in eastern Australia, focusing in part on the Native Police and quoting extensively from breathtakingly brutal contemporary settler writing. The Native Police are a threatening presence in Edenglassie, and there’s devastating genocidal violence, but it happens offstage. Even a scene where Mulanyin intervenes in the humiliation of another man is reported by a character rather than told to us directly by the narrator. Where David Marr conveys the horror of our history, Melissa Lucashenko does the herculean task of imagining what it was to live with a strong connection to country, tradition and community while the horrors were multiplying all around, and up close.

We discussed this book along with Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place at my Other Book Club – the one that used to be just for swapping books with minimal discussion. Not everyone was as moved by it as I was. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I can’t tell you how the unimpressed readers saw it because I’m so dazzled by its achievements.

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SWF 2021 Saturday

Posted on 3 May 2021 | 2 comments

I had three events on my second day at the festival.

10 o’clock: Your Favourites’ Favourites: Tony Birch & Evelyn Araluen.

‘Your Favourites’ Favourites’ is series of events where an established writer interviews the author of their favourite Australian debut from the last year. This was the only one of the series that we attended. It’s a terrific idea, and this pairing must have delighted whoever thought of it.

Tony Birch is not only an established writer, he’s also a seasoned interviewer of other writers, and a passionate and articulate reader. Evelyn Araluen is not only a debutante poet, she’s also among many other things co-editor of Overland magazine. Tony Birch has not only read her poetry, he has been edited by her. They know each other well, and were radiantly at ease with each other in this session, their deep mutual respect not excluding some friendly teasing. After introducing Evelyn as a formidable presence in Australian literary circles and beyond, Tony asked her, ‘Have I pumped up your tyres enough?’ She said it was a bit embarrassing to be described like that when her parents were in the audience. He said her father had had a quiet word to him before the session.

This friendly banter provided a leaven for a weighty conversation. Tony quoted Evelyn as saying in another context, ‘We are reclaiming this place through poetry,’ and asked ‘How so?’

I recommend listening to the whole conversation when it comes out as a podcast. What I’ve managed here is a rough and partial account.

Australian national identity, she explained, is a literary construct. As scholar George Seddon said, ‘The English language is a filter over the Australian landscape.’ Evelyn said, ‘Whiteness does not understand itself in this landscape.’ Non Indigenous writers tend to go for the Gothic (Marcus Clarke comes to mind) or the cute (the work of May Gibbs features large in Evelyn’s poetry), both of which erase black presences. Both conservative and progressive white writers generally fail to get further past the erasure than shallow acknowledgement. Tony Birch quoted Anita Heiss: ‘You can’t just speak language. You have to think language.’ That is, Aboriginal people also have work to do to reclaim the place from colonising language.

Tony asked Evelyn what she had meant when she said on the festival’s opening night, ‘I’d like to write happier poems but there isn’t time.’ This prompted her to talk about the climate emergency and the responsibility of poets to address it. So most of her poems are angry and urgent (I think that’s what she said, and from what I’ve heard at readings I’d agree, but add ‘funny’). There is a place for poems, and art in general, that allows us to pause, to rest so we can go on facing our responsibilities, but for Aboriginal poets there is a need to be constantly asserting our existence, survival and resilience.

At Tony’s request, Evelyn read to us. ‘See You Tonight’ evokes an uneventful, peaceful moment of family life. It was written during Melbourne lockdown after eight months of not being able to see any of her own family. No one was surprised when, after the final words, ‘It’s all good. / I will. I will. I will,’ she raised her arms in triumph and said, ‘Got through it without crying!’ (I wiped a tear from my eye even though we hadn’t yet been told the circumstances of the poem’s composition.)

‘This is not a cancel culture book,’ she said.

There were two questions, one from another poet that moved the conversation into academic territory, with words like ‘liminality’ and ‘positionality’, and one from Evelyn’s father – we knew this because as he approached the microphone she shed at least 10 years and almost squealed, ‘Oh, Da-ad!’ He used his platform to draw our attention to all the powerful Black women who are central to First Nations life and activism – and didn’t embarrass his daughter at all.

12:30 pm: Whose Country Is It Anyway?

Nayuka Gorrie is a Gunai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta freelance and comedy television writer. This is one of the events she organised as Guest Curator at the Festival. She was in conversation with Melissa Lucashenko, author of Too Much Lip (my blog post here) among other books, and Nardi Simpson, author or Song of the Crocodile. (At one stage Tara June Winch was advertised as appearing zooming in from France for this session, but that wasn’t to be.) They were there to talk about the craft of writing Country.

As you’d expect, the conversation ranged widely. At the end of it I was keen to get hold of Nardi’s book, because a lot of what she said was tantalisingly hard to grasp. For example, ‘We inherit a never-ending process of belonging. Whose country? It depends on where you’re standing. You can create a relationship to a place that’s important to you, but it could be completely different for someone living 200 metres down the road.’

Melissa quoted Paul Kelly’ ‘Writers pay attention.’ She said there are two kinds of writers – the big, loud, macho writers (who can be women), and the quiet ones who pay attention. Her implication was that quiet attentiveness is the pathway to writing Country well. She talked about ‘extraction’ as key to the ‘western project’, and contrasted it to ‘reciprocity’.

Melissa again: It’s a writer’s responsibility to write the truth of violence without doing violence to the reader. There’s a place for writing that lashes out about injustice and cruelty, but we must write about life as much as death, otherwise we’re invading ourselves.

We did our Covid Check-out from Carriageworks to have lunch at a nearby pub (hamburgers with those horrible brioche buns), then back for our afternoon session.

2:30 pm Faruqi on Faruqi

This was a mother and son act: Senator Mehreen Faruqi and journalist Osman Faruqi. As with Tony Birch and Evelyn Araluen, there was a lot of good-natured teasing. “When I was in labour, I fervently hoped that I would have a girl.’ ‘We are a family of engineers. I so wanted him to be an engineer, and look what he’s become – a journalist!’

Sally Rugg as moderator didn’t have to do very much. She signalled at one point that it was Ok to broaden the conversation out by asking them about their theories of change. I don’t know that either of them directly addressed the question, but they took the hint and what followed was a very interesting conversation about the role of parliament and politicians in bringing about change – both of them agreed that real change came from the community and the political class played catch-up.

Both Faruqis have books coming out later this year. Mehreen’s is a memoir and manifesto, to be called Too Migrant, Too Muslim, Too Loud. Os is writing a book about racism in Australia. He would love to go back to writing music reviews, but has things he needs to get out there about racism. White friends say to him, ‘Why do you make everything about racism. When are you going to move on?’ He says, ‘You’re the ones who made everything about racism. I’ll move on when you do.’ (He probably said it better than that.)

Then we were off to the bookshop, to a number of catch-up conversations with friends we tend to see only at events like this, and to walk home on a beautiful Sydney autumn afternoon

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Tara June Winch’s Yield

Posted on 5 August 2020 | 10 comments

Tara June Winch, The Yield (Hamish Hamilton 2019)

The Yield won the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, making Tara June Winch the fourth First Nations writer to win it, all of them this century. The Miles Franklin is awarded each year to a novel ‘which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases’. It’s not that ‘phases’ of Australian life that include First Nations people have been comprehensively ignored by other winners, but it’s heartening that Kim Scott (twice), Alexis Wright, Melissa Lucashenko and now Tara June Winch have received this recognition. To echo Tara June Winch in an interview with Stephanie Convery in the Guardian (at this link), ‘It’s just about bloody time, you know?’

Ellen van Neerven, in a review in the Australian Book Review, describes The Yield as a ‘returning novel’. Like Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip it begins with a woman returning to her childhood home on the occasion of a death and re-engaging with her family’s internal politics and its history of dealing with colonisation. In this case a thirty-year-old Wiradjuri woman, August Gondiwindi, comes home after years London to the fictional New South Wales town of Massacre Plains on learning of the death of her grandfather, Poppy Albert. The painful business of picking up the threads of family life in a time of grief, facing the unfinished business that led her to leave in the first place, is made even more gruelling by the discovery that her family home is about to be destroyed by a mining company.

What makes this book stand out is that the way this story is interlaced with two other stories, each told in the first person. Reverend Ferdinand Greenleaf writes a long letter to the British Society of Ethnography on 2nd August 1915, and ‘Poppy’ Albert Gondiwindi writes an annotated partial dictionary of the Wiradjuri language. The former, an Author’s Note informs us, is derived from the writings of an actual missionary who founded and ran a mission; the latter draws on the work of Dr Stan Grant Snr and linguist John Rudder, particularly The New Wiradjuri Dictionary.

As the novel progresses, with a chapter for each of these narratives, the three timelines play off against each other. The well-meaning missionary’s account of colonial violence against Wiradjuri people, and his resistance to it, is seen from a different perspective when the present day characters muse about whether he was actually a good man, or whether he was, for all his good intentions, part of the oppressive system. Though Albert tells us in the brief opening chapter what he is trying to do in compiling his dictionary, we only understand his intentions properly when we’re well into August’s timeline, and her hunt for the document becomes a key part of her story.

Contrary to what you might expect, Albert Gondawindi’s dictionary chapters are where the book really takes hold. It’s much more than a list of words and meanings. Through it, Albert (and Tara June) sets out to communicate his cultural perspective on many things, to tell parts of his personal story, and parts of the history of his place. In among the definitions, he tells the terrible story behind the disappearance of August’s much-loved sister, and he tells dark secrets of his own life. He shines through as a brilliant character, and his prose is clear and strong – with none of the awkwardness of Greenleaf’s second-language English (Greenleaf/Grünblatt hailed from what was then Prussia), or the occasional strained lyricism of August’s narrator. He has the novel’s first and last words. Here’s the opening:

I was born on Ngurambang – can you hear it? – Ngu-ram-bang. If you say it right it hits the back of your mouth and you should taste blood in your words. Every person around should learn the word for country in the old language, the first language – because that is the way to all time, to time travel!

‘Can you hear it?’ the novel pretty much ends, ‘Say it!’

The book tells harrowing tales of colonial paternalism, genocidal violence, lateral violence, ruthless capitalism, cultural theft, betrayal: and running through it, every third chapter, is an extraordinary proclamation of survival – a language survives, and with it a world – and a challenge: ‘Can you hear it? Say it.’

The Yield is the fifteenth book I’ve read for the 2020 Australian Women Writer’s Challenge.

Full disclosure: Opening the book to a map with the word Nurambang written across it in big letters struck a strong chord in me, as the short film I wrote with my son Alex Ryan, which he directed, came to be called Ngurrumbang. You can watch it on Vimeo here.

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Journal Blitz 4

Posted on 19 October 2019 | 2 comments

I subscribe to literary journals partly for pleasure and partly as an act of civic responsibility, and lately (only lately?) I’ve neglected to keep up with reading them. This is my fourth blog post in five months reporting on a catch-up read, starting this time with a journal I don’t actually subscribe to.

The Blak Women’s Brow Collective (Editors), Blak Brow (#40 of The Lifted Brow 2018)

Though I’ve heard plenty about the Melbourne-based The Listed Brow, this is the first issue of I’ve read – it came to me by way of the Book(-Swapping) Club.

When the editors of The Lifted Brow approached Paola Balla, whose bio describes her in part as a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman based at the Moondani Balluk Indigenous Centre at Victoria University, she ‘saw the opportunity to work collectively and went for it’ (the quote is from the journal’s editorial). Edited by a collective of Blak women – Blak, a note on the inside cover explains, was coined by artist Destiny Deacon in 1990, and names the lived experience and identity of urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples – Blak Brow has a strong collective feel, and is rich with voices speaking of the lived experience of Blakness.

There are strong individual voices: ‘Fight or Flight’, a wicked short story by Melissa Lukashenko; ‘Fern Your Own Gully’, a poem by Evelyn Araluen that savages the May Gibbsian version of the bush; ‘Because of You I Can’, a pair of short essays by poet Ellen Van Neerven and her mother Maria Van Neerven-Currie; ‘The Crucial Voices of Aboriginal Women’, an account by Celeste Liddle of the struggle to be more than a token Aboriginal presence on panel presentations.

But those are exceptions: while all of the voices here are strong and clear, most of them carry a sense of representing a constituency. The powerful first speech of Lidia Thorpe, first Aboriginal woman to be elected to a lower house seat in the Parliament of Victoria, is given in full. She captures the tone of most of the writing in Blak Brow when she says: ‘I have been inundated with messages from Aboriginal people across the country. I speak today on behalf of them.’ Even intense accounts of personal experience – ‘Binak’ and ‘A Room with a View’ – are followed by brief essays explaining that they are ‘composites’, the first ‘bringing together the real experiences of young women’ who have come under youth justice supervision in Victoria; the second, written by Vicki Roach, ‘a composite of [her] own and many other women’s lived experiences of finding housing when released from gaol’.

It’s a very rich collection of poems, song lyrics, fiction, art, journalism, scholarly writing, speeches to parliament and to a Federation of Community Legal Centres symposium, memoir, reports on art projects and academic ventures, and more. Some of it, as in the WAR response to attacks on their members, is very raw. As a middle-class white man in my early seventies, I was challenged, informed, delighted, and then challenged some more.

John Kinsela (guest Editor), Australian Poetry Journal 9.1: resist (2019)

This is a brilliant collection of poetry. John Kinsela, guest editor, says in his unusually long introduction:

We have a collective responsibility to live justly, and to work for mutual justice … , understanding each other, and respecting difference. Again, poetry is one of the most effective and linguistically affecting ways of achieving this. The poem as thing in itself is … a form of ‘agora’ in so many ways. Even very disparate issues of justice can find common ground.

The poems cover a huge range of ‘issues’ in a magnificent diversity of voices and poetic forms, and a strong sense emerges of ‘common ground’. As I read, I started out turning down the corners of pages I wanted to revisit and/or mention here, but soon gave up because there were too many – this blog post would have ended up as little more than a list. I’ll restrict myself to just a couple poems – passing over some wonderful poems in silence! (Oh well, almost in silence. Let me mention Evelyn Araluen’s ‘Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives’, which like her ‘Fern Your Own Gully’ in Blak Brow, makes very funny and very unsettling use of language from May Gibbs’s children’s books; Eileen Chong’s ‘Rot’, on violence against women; Sarah Day’s ‘Nation’, on bullying; Dan Disney’s ‘let us rejoice’ an eerie mash-up of speeches by Scott Morrison and (I think) Hitler; Lisa Gorton’s ‘EKPHRASIS I. THE NYMPH OF FONTAINEBLEAU’, which juxtaposes an art critic’s comments on a painting with narrative about the exploitation that accompanied its creation; Jennifer Maiden’s ‘Umbrage in Vault Seven’, a current adventure of George and Clare; Jaya Savige’s ‘Spork’, on racism within a family. The list could go on.) I’m pretty sure that anyone interested in poetry or social/political issues will find something here that strikes a deep chord.

A little more detail on two moments in the collection.

The first is Toby Fitch’s ‘The Last Few Budgets in a Nutshell’. At a quick look this just looks weird. It begins:

Torquing about debt is always exshiting but
weaken nut and muscle knot becomb a carbone
cuppy of the Labna Putty.

The penny drops, and you realise that a politician’s speech (perhaps a particular one, perhaps a composite) has been tortured. There’s probably a word for this process: key words are replaced by words that sound something like them so that ‘Talking’ becomes ‘Torqueing’, ‘we cannot’ becomes ‘weaken nut’ and so on. For the reader then, there’s a double perception: we read the words on the page and hear the original. To do this and make it something more than just a bit of nonsensical clever-dickery is a challenge, and Toby Fitch pulls it off: those first lines give a whiff of the biting satire that he creates. This poem has stayed with me because its technique so beautifully captures and even generates the feeling one has when listening to political spin, and also perhaps a little because it makes me feel smart!

My second moment is call-and-response pair of poems by Kaitlen Wellington (‘It’s about time’) and Alison Whittaker (‘In response to Kaitlen Wellington’s “It’s About Time”‘) respectively. It took just a slight deviation from alphabetical order to have these poems appear consecutively (Rae White’s ‘Rainbow confetti pixels’ graciously allowed Alison Whittaker’s poem to nudge ahead of it in the queue).

‘It’s about time’ is very straightforward – the speaker goes ‘walkin old tracks’, reconnecting with traditional Indigenous knowledge, ‘lookin for some sarsparalla’:

Walkin, walkin
sticks, stones
dreamin track her, there
watch ya step.
We surrounded by the richest green,
earth's soil moist,
dry leaves scatter our path,
we are locked in our country's
secure embrace

It’s not just a bush walk, at least not what a seventy-something whitefella like thinks of as a bush walk. ‘A sea eagle is ‘lettin us know, / “It’s about time youse come walkabout here”‘. The final stanza begins:

We know what to do now:
unite, fight and teach.
Let our mob know
ain't no takin our culture away no more.

It’s a good poem. I was seduced by its idiosyncratic spelling, especially of ‘sarsparalla’, because that’s how we pronounced it in my North Queensland childhood – though we were talking about a softdrink, not a bush medicine. I could feel its seriousness, and then moved on … to Alison Whittaker’s response.

She begins with a question, ‘What does it mean to resist in this colony?’ and goes on to describe the cycle of necessary work – ‘in the courts of the public or in institutional tribunals’ – and necessary self-care. ‘I become a consistently self-optimising tool. In some ways, indistinguishable in discipline and form from that which I am resisting.’ Kaitlen Wellington’s poem brought the insight that there must be more than that cycle. She concludes: ‘What’s the point of making a nicer colony, when you can breathe sovereignty?’

This poem and this response to it offer something profound, not just for people who are the targets and survivors of colonisation and genocide, but to anyone up against any oppressive force. If you get a chance to browse this journal, do flip through to page 99 and read to the end of page 101. But don’t stop there.

Jacinda Woodhead (editor), Overland 234 (Autumn 2019)

This issue of Overland is bookended by two excellent articles from the Wrights.

Alexis Wright, in Telling the untold stories, begins with the problem facing writers in today’s increasingly chaotic world:

The question for the writer of stories is how to fight your way through imposed boundaries of indifference, ignorance, or political interests, and to perhaps learn how to do this by not getting directly into the ring and wrestling the pig ‘because a. it is only going to get dirty, and b. you will get dirty as well’.

and she relates this to the survival of aboriginal stories through the catastrophe of colonisation. It’s a magnificent essay, an excerpt from her Stephen Murray-Smith talk given in December 2018 (available in full online here).

Fiona Wright (probably only a very distant relation) writes about Tinder in State your intentions. Sometimes intensely personal, sometimes confidently snarky, this is a beautifully executed mosaic picture of what it is to be young and happily(?) single today.

Of the regular columnists, Tony Birch’s On thinking is the stand-out. Writing partly as a tribute to Deborah Bird Rose (my review of one of her books here), who died at the end of 2018, he quotes her:

Any conversation we humans may wish to start up concerning the living world, our place in it and our responsibility toward it must bear the knowledge of the terrible harms we have done and continue to do.

and pits that against Tony Abbott’s famous remark, ‘Climate change is crap.’

There are four pieces of short fiction – In Cassilis by Louis Klee, Buried time by Mykaela Saunder, ‘Into the valley’ by Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi, and ‘The melancholy new patriot’ by Corey Wakeling – introduced by Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, who at the time of publication hadn’t yet been announced as due to become joint editors of Overland late this year. There are just three poems, the place-getters in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, by Julie Jedda Janson,  Joel Scott and Ross Belton.

As well as these, there are articles on Cambodia (That bird is for us by Adam Curley, which takes an episode of something called Survivor as his starting point), Kashmir (Combat breathing by Tim Robertson), burning-off as a gross and destructive distortion of Aboriginal firestick farming practices (The fire cult by Katherine Wilson), current prejudice against Chinese people (Not all yellow and white by Gabriel Ng), and an essay on swimming pools and the beach that makes an excellent companion piece to the ABC doco series The Pool (Aqua Profonda by Gavin Scott).

The cover and moody internal artwork for this issue are by photographer Hoda Afshar.

I was going to include a review of Southerly 78.2, which I’m still reading, but if you’ve read this far I think you deserve a rest, so I’ll save that for the next catch-up blitz.

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Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip

Posted on 29 April 2019 | 10 comments

Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip (UQP 2018)

Among many splendid things at the National Folk Festival in Canberra at Easter this year was the Mission Songs Project concert featuring Jessie Lloyd, Emma Donovan and Deline Briscoe. Jessie Lloyd has been researching and reviving Aboriginal songs from the mission era (roughly 1901 to 1967) from all over Australia. At the end of a terrific concert Ms Lloyd urged us – mainly non-Indigenous – audience members, to connect, learn and engage with the songs. She wants these songs dealing with the hardships, sorrows and sometimes joys of mission life – to become part of the Australian songbook alongside ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Botany Bay’. She invited us to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and cultures as integral parts of mainstream Australian history and culture. (A choir songbook is available for sale at the Mission Songs Project website.)

Too Much Lip holds out a similar invitation, though with less sweet music.

It’s the story of the Salters, an Aboriginal family in northern New South Wales, a story that includes violence, petty crime, child sexual abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, neglect, dark secrets, seething resentments, alienation and general chaos. It’s what many would call a dysfunctional family, but that’s not a term that seems quite to fit. The central character, Kerry, thinks of it as a ‘grassroots family’ – as if their huge ordeals and conflicts don’t mark them out as special so much as make them representative.

I don’t want to say too much about this book. It’s very funny in places. Kerry arrives back home after a long absence – she’s been part of the Lesbian community in Brisbane and has just been dumped by her girlfriend after a failed armed robbery. Her pitiless sarcasm about white people (dugai) and men, not just white men, sets the tone for the opening sequence, and while she doesn’t exactly soften, there’s some delicious counterpoint when she falls for a … white man. This is just one of the brilliant, comic but believable transformations in the book. Sweet Mary, Kerry’s mother, is a reformed alcoholic; her older brother Ken is a pontificating drunken layabout who bullies his teenaged son; her younger brother, known only as Black SUperman, is a Gay man who lives in Sydney; Steve, the object of Kerry’s lust, is trying to set up a gym in town; Martina, a real estate agent from Sydney, has been seconded to the local office to help the mayor push through a deal that will result in a prison being built on a piece of land that has deep significance for the Salters. And there are a number of children, including the splendidly named Dr No (guess how old he is). In the course of the novel, each of these characters, including the children, reveals something completely unexpected abut themselves, or undergoes a radical transformation. To say that another way: we are invited to make judgements about every one of the characters, and by the end of the book we have revised our judgements radically.

I confess I started reading Too Much Lip with a sense of duty: as a dugai, I really ought to read writing by Aboriginal authors. Well, that’s what got me to page 1, and kept me going through Kerry’s reference to white people as normalwhitesavages, till about page 20, but after that I was there for the joys, sorrows and terrors of the ride.

There are talking birds and a talking shark, a ghost, terrible stories of white-on-black violence and of black-on-black violence (with an afterword asserting that all the incidents have occurred in the author’s extended family or, in a few cases, are drawn from the historical record or Aboriginal oral history). There’s a brilliant extended sequence where the family has a barbecue, and all the threads of the narrative twist together and apart dramatically – I’d say it was chaotic, but the reader is never confused about what is happening and what it means in the lives of each character.

It’s a brilliant book. The last pages sent me back to reread the beginning. Some of the jokes still make me laugh a week after reading them. It puts heart and body into abstract terms like intergenerational trauma, lateral violence, white supremacy. It doesn’t need my recommendation, but I recommend it anyhow.

Too Much Lip was a birthday present. It’s the eighteenth book I’ve read for the 2019 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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