Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published in 1997. Her sixth novel, Too Much Lip, won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. Her latest work of fiction, Edenglassie, is published by UQP.
Articles
On ‘The Seven Stages of Grieving’, by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman
GR Online AS I WRITE this essay the cicadas are shrill outside. The air is heavy and even in my cool study I am sweating with the heat. Later today it might rain; tonight it is quite possible that a storm...
On ‘The Seven Stages of Grieving’, by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman
GR Online IS IT POSSIBLE to feel too much? For millennia, stories from around the world have had as their explicit task the expansion of the human heart. Only in the past two decades have some stories been prefaced with the...
Always was, always will be
In ConversationIf Aboriginal people are all dead, you don’t have to negotiate a treaty with us and you certainly don’t have to go around feeling guilty about stolen land and stolen wages and stolen children; the subjects of that injustice don’t exist anymore if you choose to believe that we’re dead or all assimilated, which isn’t the case. It’s a very practical kind of assimilation strategy.
Black Russian
In what sense aren’t we a colony? The best thing I can say about all of that is that the modern nation state of Australia is an adolescent entity, with all the aggression and self-doubts and bluster of an adolescent – and the defensiveness.
Less is less
Fiction A STRANGER RODE into town only it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he’d been clinging to real stubborn for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, never mind...
Time to mention the war
Essay The Queen? The Queen never been fuggin walk around here! Uncle Jimmy Pike, Walmajarri artist[i] IN 2002, BUNDJALUNG songman Archie Roach released ‘Move It On’, a jaunty twelve-bar blues number about his childhood in Victoria. He sang: Well I was born in...
Sinking below sight
ReportageWinner, 2013 Walkley Award for Print/Text Feature Writing Long (Over 4,000 words) Winner, 2014 George Munster Award for Independent Journalism The opposite of poverty isn't wealth. It's justice. Bryan Stevenson – US death row attorney FOUR YEARS AGO I moved with no great...
How green is my valley?
MemoirEverybody talks about the weatherbut nobody does anything about it.– Mark TwainTALK OF A hotter, wetter climate is all the go, but I beg of you, don't talk to me about rain. Since moving on to thirteen slushy hectares...
Who let the dogs out?
EssayWILLY IS A young Palm Island boy, full of life and with more than a fair serve of natural chutzpah. His grandmother, Aunty M, whose house I'm camped in, tells me he's good at maths as well as footy....
Globalisation, Kimberley style
EssayTAKE A TRIP down the old corrugation road with some Bardi people and you'll soon find out something about globalisation, indigenous people and the exact location of your own tailbone. Dubbed Australia's "second-worst road" by locals – who measures...
On the same page, right?
GR OnlineYes, Dear Reader, we're messing with your minds. When Paul Kelly sings, ‘Gather round people, I'll tell you a story,' he may as well be singing, ‘Gather round people, I'll rewire your cortex.' But as well as messing with your minds, we're messing with your – and our – societies.
The silent majority
FictionIT IS A truth universally acknowledged, Jo decided, that a bored teenager with a permanent marker is a pain in the bloody neck. And if it isn't, then it fucken well should be. For here came five-year-old Timbo wandering...
The angry country
ReportageSelected for Best Australian Essays 2010THIS IS WHAT we know about the death of Jai Morcom.On the morning of 28 August 2009, Jai, a fifteen-year-old Year 9 student, was involved in a fight at Mullumbimby High School, in far...
Our bodies
EssayTHINK OF ABORIGINAL bodies. Think of Cathy Freeman, standing and waiting on the track in Sydney, lean, still, and nothing in her face except what's needed to be The Best. Think Kyle Vander-Kuyp. Nova Perris. Evonne Goolagong-Cawley. Patrick Johnson....
Friday night at the Nudgel
FictionJO WRAPPED HER arm around the square green veranda post of the Billinudgel pub and cursed her best friend to hell and back. Being Therese's latest pet project was like being clobbered by an avalanche of goodwill. She had...
Not quite white in the head
EssayEARTHSPEAKING? YOU WILL think of it as a big story, a national story. Native Title. Salinity. Landcare. Turn the rivers backwards or find that inland sea. It's Burke and Wills, it's the Bushtucker Man, it's drought and flooding rains,...
Holiday in Cambodia
EssayTHE INVITATION HAD come, but did I really want to spend Christmas in Phnom Penh? An introvert's introvert, my idea of travel is a swim at an empty beach, a short walk and back in my own comfortable bed...
Beating the bounds
Fiction ‘LIKE THE BROLGA Dancers at the Mullet Run,’ Murree grinned, squatting easily against the base of a gum tree not far below the Botanical Garden. He released a stream of dark tobacco juice onto the grass. A short distance away,...
‘The True Hero Stuff’
GR OnlineI grew up in a Queensland still so saturated with racist ideology that my own identity was hidden from me until as a teenager I started bringing home questions about our family’s tan skin and curly dark hair. Forty years later I was very well aware that non-First Nations writers usually mine a vast well of ignorance and stereotype when they attempt to bring Aboriginal characters or themes into their work.
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