Melissa Lucashenko

But, yeah, we are always, you know, wandering around thinking what,

What game animals would have been farmed here?

What fish could you have caught here?

What songs were sung here?

What do those cliffs at Kangaroo Point, you know, that's where the rainbow serpent slithered through to the bay.

And, you know, you see the abseilers on the cliffs there and climbing up and climbing up that big snake slithering track, things like that.

So, yeah, that's very natural and normal for all Aboriginal people, I think.

And then the other thing, yeah, I had to have a triple vision in the book because I had to look at the colonial era and what was life like then?

What was work like?

You know, what was love like?

What would Nita, as a Christianised Aboriginal girl living in a Scottish family in this small, dusty outpost of empire, what would she have asked herself about Mullinyin?

And so I had her reflecting at one point, you know, had Mullinyin...

ever seen a piano you know had he ever been in a church all these kinds of questions about what was fairly normal to her but what was completely abnormal to him and he's got this um this fear of entering the petrie house

It's pretty unusual for Aboriginal people to be invited into a white person's house anyway and in parts of Queensland still is.

I was talking to my mate from Palm Island this morning and I remember when we were young together and we were at university at Griffith.

And she was telling me that she'd never been inside a white person's house until she went to university, you know.

So having to cast my mind back to 1855 and think, well, what would Mullinyan think about these very straight walls in this straight-edged square box that the Petries lived in as opposed to the soft, round room that is an ompi?

And it's a great joy and privilege of a writer to be able to spend time daydreaming about this kind of thing.

And it's the task of the writer to bring that to an audience in a way that's surprising and revelatory, as you said.

Oh, God.