Melissa Lucashenko

and a stint in Tonga, but I wanted to, I wanted to be back in Goorie country, which is Southeast Queensland and Northern New South Wales, stretching, you know, approximately from Bundaberg down to Grafton.

But, uh, yeah, the river, the river here always has called me and, uh,

you know culturally as well as psychologically you know that's because i was born just down the road here on the bend of the river in the martyr hospital and where you're conceived where you're born and where your parents are from is really important to blackfellas my kids um did a lot of their growing up on bungalow country and

I was forced through divorce to come away and live in Logan City where I could afford to live instead of the very gentrified and completely out of reach coastal parts of Bundjalung country where I had been living.

And these days I still spend a lot of time on Bundjalung country but in the western section where it's more possible to have a life if you're not a cashed up advertising executive.

Yeah, well, there was a few lean years in there.

I bought what was probably the cheapest house in the greater Brisbane area after my divorce with the settlement.

Because I knew that if I had a mortgage, I probably would never write another novel.

So I bought this cheap-ass house.

And I went back and I was doing some work for Sisters Inside again, you know, picking women up from prison and trying to find them housing and getting them their Centrelink payments and just generally making their lives a bit easier in the transition from jail to outside prison.

Doing that and, you know, sort of plugging along, not really.

I was treading water.

I'd published three novels by then.

And I thought, well, this is all very well.

But my ex-husband had one sale of the century when he was very young.

I think he was about 23.

And so young that when he had one and he was living in Darwin and he went to the local, you know, Toyota dealership or something and started looking at cars and they didn't take him seriously because he was so young.

And he says, yeah, I'll pay cash for that one.

Thanks very much.

Exactly.