Melissa Lucashenko

So yeah, the irony, the great irony of Australia is that

the British came here and claimed to bring civilization.

And I can't remember which of the Greek or Roman writers said it, but there's a famous quote that said they made a wilderness and called it peace.

And from a Guri point of view, that's what happened.

You know, there was a paradise here, at least on the East Coast.

It was a paradise with abundant water, abundant food, abundant fish,

art, culture, sovereignty, governance, theology, and the British sailed in and proceeded to lay waste to it and call it civilisation, which is basically why I write.

However, my task as an author is to bring love and joy and hope to the stories of what can arise out of that.

I think it was probably through reading the reminiscences of Tom Petrie, the memoir that his daughter compiled when Tom was an old, old man and, you know, seen as a venerable citizen and someone, you know, one of the last remaining white people with memories of that colonial era.

And, yeah, that's a fascinating book and it was just begging to be fictionalised.

It took me 20 years to do it because Petrie...

although he was reflecting as a very old man.

And it was a first-hand experience of Brisbane in the 1840s, the 1850s, right through to the turn of the century, probably.

I think he died in the very early 1900s, about the time my grandmother was born, north of Brisbane.

So, yeah, just hearing it from the horse's mouth and hearing it from someone who actually understood Yuggera culture and language very fluently.

He had a very ordinary human connection because he was a young child in Brisbane.

He had been born overseas and arrived here, I think, as a seven or eight year old.

But from the age of seven or eight, he was running around with the Aboriginal kids, you know, playing with them, fishing with them, yarning with them, going for eggs in the bush, no doubt, and, you

So he grew up very much bicultural and, you know, the Petrie family had to go and send for him quite often because he'd be staying in the camp when he should have been back home at Petrie by it and he just preferred to be sitting around the fire, you know, with his Aboriginal mates.

So he was an initiated man.