Melissa Lucashenko

I spend a lot of time online looking at Sportaloosers and Australian stock horses and dreaming and...

Oh, that phrase was used on me by a bloke I know from North Queensland.

I was telling him about some little adventure I'd had one day.

This was years and years ago.

And he just laughed and said, oh, too much lip this gin, which he meant as a compliment.

The irony is that bloke doesn't actually talk to me anymore because he didn't approve of my opinions on something at some stage.

So we're estranged, but the phrase is living on.

Absolutely.

Yeah, it's storytelling and I guess it's observation because, you know, I've been immersed in the Aboriginal communities of Brisbane and, well, South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales most of my life and it's maybe not intentional storytelling but...

You know, the concept of the found poem, well, you know, I wander around and I think I encounter the found story pretty often.

I mean, one example, there's one of the brothers in Brisbane, Ricky Pascoe, who, you know, comes out of this demographic and I remember sitting with Ricky a long, long time ago in West End and him telling me a story of his life and how he'd turned things around and

The key point for him was when he stole a car and headed over the border to New South Wales with two sex workers, and that was him about to set out on the straight and narrow and turn his life around from being a criminal.

So I think in lots of ways that was one genesis for this book, and that was a yarn that Ricky, I think, was telling me, a completely different yarn, but that's the bit that stuck.

Mm, yeah, a voracious reader.

I could read before I went to school.

My mother had me at 40, and I was the seventh kid, so she was a bit exhausted and depressed, I think, by that stage.

And she used to take me and my younger brother to the local library at Mount Gravatt and let us loose upon the bookshelves at least once a week, sometimes twice.

And between that and the school library and whatever suitable books were lying around various houses, they were often readers' digests.

I remember reading a great many readers' digests when I was a kid before I understood what a digest actually was.

I can, but a lot of them had to do with horses because I was a complete horse fanatic.